Grim Expectations Is a Savage Steampunk Satire

Grim Expectations, the final novel in K.W. Jeter’s seminal steampunk trilogy, now arrives to lay some things to rest. Released to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Jeter’s Infernal Devices , the first George Dower novel and the one with which he coined the term “steampunk,” Grim Expectations is at once a satire of the genre and its famously fidgety aesthetics, and a reconstitution of its tropes toward a new purpose. Jeter’s tale of machine cults and horrifying manipulations of the dead manages to find horror and uneasy humor in the mechanics of steampunk itself, using the wonder of technology that typically populates such works to create horrifying tableaus. The result is an unnerving but engaging book that serves as both an effective end to George Dower’s unusual saga, and an unsettling assessment of an entire literary movement.
After years of being hounded over his father’s creations, George Dower would finally like some rest. He lives off the coast of Cornwall, away from the damnable technology that made him infamous and his father a legend—until his wife passes away, bequeathing her husband a ticking box emblazoned with his father’s signature. Upon laying her to rest, the box stops ticking, revealing a set of letters between his wife and an unknown party, the last one reading cryptically, “I’ve found him.” Dower isn’t about to follow the obvious thread into adventure—he’s had more than he could possibly take already—and tries to ignore the messages. But with gun-toting assassins, a sinister funerary company, American inventors, and even worse horrors on his trail, needs must, and he travels to London, if only to get all these horrid people to leave him alone for good.

In returning to this series after years away (Fiendish Schemes was published in 2013), Jeter’s aim seems to be to satirize the genre he famously helped codify, and so does—ruthlessly. The opening scene moves from a discussion of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”  into an extended dead baby joke that ends in arson due to clockwork cherubs, and the grim humor only builds from there. The denizens of this industrial dystopia seem to think using corpses as amusement park animatronics is a good idea, and express bewilderment when Dower doesn’t want his wife stuck on a floating mausoleum powered by corpse gas. They willingly sacrifice things like climate and natural beauty so they can have more steam power (I mean, who could possibly be that short-sighted?). There’s even a dig at transhumanism when an unethical industrialist suggests that rather than simply improving working conditions, they might “evolve” workers to better fit the conditions they’re working in. As Dower stumbles from horror to horror, a wonderful air of menace builds alongside the complacency and even religious fervor that surrounds his protagonist. It’s a nice bit of irony, that Dower is terrified of the clockwork advancements but seems to regard the tentacled monstrosities who bring Cornwall its mail with curiosity and interest.

In Dower, Jeter finds the perfect antihero for his chamber of horrors, cowardly and traumatized by the march of progress his father set forward using him as a proxy. His adventures taught him just enough to be savvy and avoid the dangling plot threads quite literally laid at his doorstep. His narration is unfailingly polite, disguising the madness until Jeter unleashes it upon readers in full flower. While Dower few redeeming qualities—he literally just wants to be left alone, and resorts to pretty underhanded measures to achieve it—there is a reason for it, as he blames himself and his family for making the world this way. It’s a plight played wonderfully for both tragedy and comedy, as events arrange themselves to pull him kicking and screaming into the mystery despite his reluctance, and the various factions involved believe his avoidance of responsibility is some kind of masterstroke effort to avoid capture.
While it isn’t the most lighthearted read, Grim Expectations is certainly engaging. Its warped humor, digs at steampunk literature, and sheer tonnage of weirdness conveyed through Dower’s polite Victorian speech combine to create an unnerving tale that is also, at turns, incisive and deliciously twisted. It’s a horror novel in which the monster is, in fact, the whole world, and the inevitable march of steam-powered progress, issuing both a brutal epitaph to the genre Jeter helped bring to prominence, and a challenge for others to push it into stranger waters. From one of the masters of the form, we should expect nothing less.
Grim Expectations is available now.