David Burton's Hell is a vast region of uncertain geography: souls undergo their punishments in one of its many discrete areas, and the only way to navigate the shifting paths between them is with a device called a Find, which Hell Cops carry. The different areas of Hell are populated by all sorts of nasties lying in wait for the unwary; and Getter spends a good deal of the book either fighting or escaping from some kind of monster. Burton has gone to town imagining all his monsters, and he comes up with some good ideas for the different areas of Hell - such as one section which is a giant tree; or the school that Brittany has been sent to, where the souls of bullies are tormented.
True, perhaps Burton's supporting cast - characters such as Sneaker, another Hell Cop, whom Getter takes a shine to; the Scotsman Gregory, whom he befriends; and the various demons that he falls foul of - are not drawn as sharply as one would like (they often seem to be there to drive the on plot more than anything). But the story fairly zips along, and it's great to see an author let his imagination run wild.
However, this is a book which could still be improved quite considerably. For one thing, Hell Cop's plot feels less like that of a novel, and more like that of an average computer game or role-playing adventure; too much of it seems to be taken up with running from one encounter to the next, which can become wearying. One reason for this, I fear, is built in to the very nature of the setting: by and large, Burton's Hell is not a place where people are living lives, as such; its locales are there to be travelled through; so perhaps any story set there would take on the same shape as this. Still, Burton is only introducing us to this setting here; if he writes more stories set in this Hell, he might explore the world more deeply.
It struck me that there is a strong moral dimension to the work of a Hell Cop, which Burton never really touches upon in this novel. Getter admits himself that he's not one for introspection (though he does open up a little), which is a shame, especially in a first-person narrative, and particularly so in the world of this story. Several times, Getter reminds himself not to interfere with or judge the meting out of punishments to the souls he observes, however much he'd like to. Yet, he does rescue Gregory from his predicament (for reasons he does explain eventually), and he does judge some souls as undeserving of their punishments. Even the very fact of being a Hell Cop can be seen as a sort of judgement. It would be pleasing to see more exploration of this.
The full mechanism of how misplaced souls are identified and retrieved is not fully explained in Hell Cop. It seems that the process is not infallible (there are hints that Brittany might have done something to deserve her place in Hell after all), and there is no mention of what happens to souls who are sent to Heaven by mistake. Both these areas would provide fertile ground for further stories, but it would have been nice to see something of them in this one.
I don't want to suggest that Hell Cop is a particularly bad book, because it isn't. But it is hard not to wish for it to be a little more ambitious. What we have here is an entertaining adventure story (though the typos are quite distracting), but nothing more than that. There is clearly potential here for a great story to be told in this world, and David Burton is surely capable of telling it; whether or not he will rise to the challenge of doing so remains to be seen.
This review first appeared in The Alien Online.
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