A review of Happy Hour in Hell

There seems to be no element of genre fiction that Tad Williams doesn't want to try his hand at. Having already covered epic fantasy with the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy and sci-fi with the excellent Otherland tetralogy (what a great word), Williams has turned his hand to urban fantasy with the Bobby Dollar books. Dollar, or the angel Doloriel as he's also known, is an Earthbound celestial litigator, here to help the recently departed argue their way into Heaven and out of a one-way ticket to endless suffering in Hell. Or at least, that's how things started out in the previous novel, The Dirty Streets of Heaven, though Dollar has quickly become tangled up in politics, conspiracies, murder, blackmail, betrayal, rebellion and few other weighty matters. Having started with a simple enough case in book one, Williams has taken his angel advocate and turned him into a character from the 1930s - a wise-cracking, blues-loving, leap-before-looking kind of a guy that's caught up in circumstances beyond his control - think Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps or Hitchcock's other famous thrillers The Man Who Knew Too Much or North by Northwest. In Dollar's case though, he knows just enough to avoid being a total chump and has just enough modernity polishing off his edges to avoid being too much of a caricature.

By the end of book one (SPOILERS if you haven't read it), Dollar was firmly at the centre of a number of mysteries that can basically be summed up by asking what on Earth is everyone in Heaven and Hell really up to? Added to that, he's suspended from soul-defending duties and kicking around at home pining for his demon girlfriend, Caz, who was snatched back by her high-muckity-muck demon lord ex Eligor. Book two, Happy Hour in Hell, kicks off well, introducing a vicious and fascinating new bad guy for Dollar to face off against and a wealth of new questions around the central mystery of what various shady characters from Heaven and Hell are plotting. As the title suggests, however, the main action of the book is Dollar's decision to head to Hell to try to rescue Caz from Eligor's demonic clutches and that's where the novel skids off the beaten track somewhat.

The first book rattled along at a nice pace that played well with the whole noir thriller feel as Dollar ricocheted from one disaster to another, escaping sticky situations by the skin of his teeth and generally taking the reader on a fun-filled ride. But Williams likes the idea of Hell far too much and spends too long in describing it in all its torturous detail. Rather than having situations and new information fly at him from all directions, Dollar plods through Hell spending an awful lot of time talking about the scenery. It's not that Williams' vision of Hell isn't fascinating and fun, because it is, or that there isn't the occasional clue that's bound to come in useful in the next stage of the adventure, because there is, but the whole section is too long. This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the well-drawn supporting cast from the first novel are left behind and the ones we meet down below aren't given the same amount of time to flourish. Fantastic characters like Riprash and Gob come along, but don’t get to hang out for quite long enough.

The main motivator for the whole mission - Dollar's love for Caz - feels a bit off as well. The first book showed us a dynamic, demonic woman, who had been sentenced to her eternal torment somewhat unjustly but was still running around as an active minion of Hell doing some evil stuff. There was lots to be unpacked there. In the second, perhaps because she mostly exists in flashbacks in Dollar's memory, she loses some of her dimension. He focuses ad nauseum on how beautiful she is - fair enough, he's in love - but the only thing he really seems to think about her is how he wants to save her, how she's ever so vulnerable and tender and how many times they had sex. It's a bit reductive and makes the idea of Dollar falling in love so fiercely in such a short space of time harder to swallow when the object of his affections seems more like a sexy plot motivation than an actual character.

Where Happy Hour in Hell best succeeds is in keeping the reader intrigued in the central mystery and throwing just enough oil on that fire to spark a few theories and a burning desire to find out more. Although clues don’t come along as hard and fast as in book one, there’s plenty to chew over and a sense that Dollar is skating over depths he can’t even begin to fathom. The fact that Hell’s minions and Heaven’s agents are as devious as each other isn’t a new idea, but it is nicely handled and even more interesting is their bewilderment at their place in the greater puzzle of life. Just like humans, neither the demons nor the angels have any clue what God is up to, whether they’re doing the right thing, what the meaning of life is or any of that jazz. This is particularly effective in Hell, where it gives a haunting futility to the suffering of even the most guilty of its tormented, while simultaneously making you feel sorry for the tormentors, who are often no more comfortable in their enforced evil personas than the angels are trying to be good all the time. It’s a setup ripe with possibility for the final book in the trilogy, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day, when the hapless Dollar is likely to be at the messily violent centre of some of these questions being answered.

While Happy Hour in Hell is a different book to its predecessor, anyone who wanted a fully surround-sound 3D tour of Hell will be pleased and for everyone else, the mystery and our wisecracking hero are both still sharp enough to keep the pages turning. The hope is that the third novel will lean more towards the tone and pace of the first and finish this trilogy off in style, putting a firm tick in Williams’ urban fantasy column.