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Deepgate Codex
Damnation for Beginners
In his 2006 novel, Scar Night, Alan Campbell introduced readers to an intricate, richly imagined fantasy world, the world of the Deepgate Codex. In subsequent novels and novellas (Iron Angel, Lye Street), Campbell broadened and deepened his ongoing portrait of that astonishing milieu. With Damnation for Beginners, he gives us the most compelling--and surprising--installment to date.
The story begins in the beleaguered city of Cog. The protagonist, Jack Aviso, is himself a cog, a functionary in the soulless, profit-obsessed enterprise known as the Henry Sill Banking Corporation. When a routinely corrupt business transaction shatters both his marriage and his well-ordered life, Jack finds himself--quite literally--in Hell, where he embarks on a perilous, unprecedented journey of revenge.
Moving from the urban desolation of Cog City to the surreal landscape of a marvelously described Hell--a region unlike anything ever encountered in contemporary fiction--Damnation for Beginners is an utterly unique creation, one that combines the baroque pleasures of a powerful imagination with a cogent critique of an all too familiar society dominated by rampant, runaway greed. The result is a strange, wonderful, and terrifying tale, the work of a master storyteller with a wholly original point of view.
The story begins in the beleaguered city of Cog. The protagonist, Jack Aviso, is himself a cog, a functionary in the soulless, profit-obsessed enterprise known as the Henry Sill Banking Corporation. When a routinely corrupt business transaction shatters both his marriage and his well-ordered life, Jack finds himself--quite literally--in Hell, where he embarks on a perilous, unprecedented journey of revenge.
Moving from the urban desolation of Cog City to the surreal landscape of a marvelously described Hell--a region unlike anything ever encountered in contemporary fiction--Damnation for Beginners is an utterly unique creation, one that combines the baroque pleasures of a powerful imagination with a cogent critique of an all too familiar society dominated by rampant, runaway greed. The result is a strange, wonderful, and terrifying tale, the work of a master storyteller with a wholly original point of view.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published May 31, 2012
About the author
Alan Campbell
7 books58 followersAlan wrote the Deepgate Codex and the Gravedigger Chronicles. He's still alive.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 30, 2012
3.5 stars
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.
Alan Campbell has been on my TBR list for years, but I still haven’t managed to get around to reading his DEEPGATE CODEX. That is going to change soon, though, because I just finished his novella Damnation for Beginners which takes place in the city of Cog in the DEEPGATE CODEX world.
This short book is about Jack and Carol Aviso, who work as bank tellers for the greedy Henry Sill Banking Corporation. Jack and Carol know better than to keep their money with Henry Sill because nearly every day the customer account policies change and the customers continue to become further indebted to the company. Jack’s and Carol’s jobs are to explain the convoluted policies to the thousands of customers who line up daily to complain. The offices of the tellers are located in cabins in a huge cog embedded in a cliff. The cog rotates constantly, mining for ore that’s inside the mountain. Customers get in at the top of the cliff and, if they aren’t satisfied by the time their cabin gets to the bottom of the mountain, a trapdoor opens and out they go.
It’s no use to complain to any authorities about the Henry Sill Banking Company because the company owns the courts. Henry and Carol have avoided disaster by not becoming bank customers, but when Carol resolves a complaint to the satisfaction of one of her customers, the bank targets the Avisos. Jack vows to find Henry Sill and get revenge. This is bad timing because Mr. Sill is on an extended business trip... in Hell. Jack decides to follow him down there and make him pay. Fortunately, he has some help from a little book called Damnation for Beginners.
Alan Campbell has created a fascinating world both above and below ground in Damnation for Beginners. I loved the imagery and I wish we had had more time to explore the city of Cog and, though it seems strange to say this, I’d like to spend some more time in Hell. Campbell’s imaginative world-building and bizarre plot are the best features of Damnation for Beginners, but I also enjoyed the characterization of Jack Aviso. Jack seems weak-willed and wimpy and has a bit of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder — he avoids touching anything that other people have touched and he doesn’t like to be breathed on. So it’s amusing to see him snap and pursue vengeance even to the point of invading Hell.
Damnation for Beginners is only 128 pages long and as I neared the end I wasn’t ready for the story to be over. The ending is left to our imagination, which will please some readers and frustrate others. I usually don’t mind an open-ended conclusion, but I admit in this case that I wanted more resolution than I got.
I’m looking forward to reading more of Alan Campbell’s work. He has just the kind of weird imagination that I love.
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.
Alan Campbell has been on my TBR list for years, but I still haven’t managed to get around to reading his DEEPGATE CODEX. That is going to change soon, though, because I just finished his novella Damnation for Beginners which takes place in the city of Cog in the DEEPGATE CODEX world.
This short book is about Jack and Carol Aviso, who work as bank tellers for the greedy Henry Sill Banking Corporation. Jack and Carol know better than to keep their money with Henry Sill because nearly every day the customer account policies change and the customers continue to become further indebted to the company. Jack’s and Carol’s jobs are to explain the convoluted policies to the thousands of customers who line up daily to complain. The offices of the tellers are located in cabins in a huge cog embedded in a cliff. The cog rotates constantly, mining for ore that’s inside the mountain. Customers get in at the top of the cliff and, if they aren’t satisfied by the time their cabin gets to the bottom of the mountain, a trapdoor opens and out they go.
It’s no use to complain to any authorities about the Henry Sill Banking Company because the company owns the courts. Henry and Carol have avoided disaster by not becoming bank customers, but when Carol resolves a complaint to the satisfaction of one of her customers, the bank targets the Avisos. Jack vows to find Henry Sill and get revenge. This is bad timing because Mr. Sill is on an extended business trip... in Hell. Jack decides to follow him down there and make him pay. Fortunately, he has some help from a little book called Damnation for Beginners.
Alan Campbell has created a fascinating world both above and below ground in Damnation for Beginners. I loved the imagery and I wish we had had more time to explore the city of Cog and, though it seems strange to say this, I’d like to spend some more time in Hell. Campbell’s imaginative world-building and bizarre plot are the best features of Damnation for Beginners, but I also enjoyed the characterization of Jack Aviso. Jack seems weak-willed and wimpy and has a bit of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder — he avoids touching anything that other people have touched and he doesn’t like to be breathed on. So it’s amusing to see him snap and pursue vengeance even to the point of invading Hell.
Damnation for Beginners is only 128 pages long and as I neared the end I wasn’t ready for the story to be over. The ending is left to our imagination, which will please some readers and frustrate others. I usually don’t mind an open-ended conclusion, but I admit in this case that I wanted more resolution than I got.
I’m looking forward to reading more of Alan Campbell’s work. He has just the kind of weird imagination that I love.
February 4, 2013
Next up is the novella Damnation for Beginners, by Alan Campbell. It's set in his Deepgate Codex universe, about which I know nothing, since this slim volume is my first experience with him.
It's... interesting. Being a novella, the plot is pretty simplistic-- a minor bureaucratic functionary in a large corrupt organization runs afoul of the system, has his life destroyed through no fault of his own, and seeks revenge. So far, pretty typical. But this being a fantasy universe, his revenge takes a somewhat unusual form-- he gets himself damned to Hell, where he seeks out the ultimate source of his troubles. On the upside, everything is coherent, tightly paced, and internally consistent. On the downside, it's a little hard to empathize with anyone, even the protagonist. After all, most of the living characters are part of the corrupt megabusiness, and most of the dead are in Hell, for presumably fairly justified reasons. Also, the resolution is a little... off, somehow. The actual revenge plot gets sort of sidetracked by some of the revelations, and so when the book ends, there's a sense of "Ok, the character is still in Hell but has come to some sort of acceptance, which is good," but then you remember that there was a bunch of other stuff that never really got addressed. I have to wonder if the reader is expected to already be familiar with the setting, which might add to the sense of engagement that I was missing.
Summation: just barely good enough to make me willing to find more books in the sequence, but not good enough to make me do it in any sort of hurry.
It's... interesting. Being a novella, the plot is pretty simplistic-- a minor bureaucratic functionary in a large corrupt organization runs afoul of the system, has his life destroyed through no fault of his own, and seeks revenge. So far, pretty typical. But this being a fantasy universe, his revenge takes a somewhat unusual form-- he gets himself damned to Hell, where he seeks out the ultimate source of his troubles. On the upside, everything is coherent, tightly paced, and internally consistent. On the downside, it's a little hard to empathize with anyone, even the protagonist. After all, most of the living characters are part of the corrupt megabusiness, and most of the dead are in Hell, for presumably fairly justified reasons. Also, the resolution is a little... off, somehow. The actual revenge plot gets sort of sidetracked by some of the revelations, and so when the book ends, there's a sense of "Ok, the character is still in Hell but has come to some sort of acceptance, which is good," but then you remember that there was a bunch of other stuff that never really got addressed. I have to wonder if the reader is expected to already be familiar with the setting, which might add to the sense of engagement that I was missing.
Summation: just barely good enough to make me willing to find more books in the sequence, but not good enough to make me do it in any sort of hurry.
December 2, 2015
A novella set in the world of The Deepgate Codex, Damnation for Beginners is a tale of corruption and revenge. When Jack Aviso and his wife, minor functionaries in the Henry Sill Banking Corporation, fall victim to their own employer's endless greed, their marriage and their lives are shattered. Jack's normally ordered existence becomes one where chaos rules and so he sets himself in motion towards the ultimate revenge on the bank and Henry Sill even if it takes him into the depths of Hell itself...which of course, it does!
The author's wonderfully baroque creations of Cog City and Hell, with descriptions to match, weave a strange and terrifying story where one man who was once a mere cog in the machine, fights back against the ultimate corruption. Given today's world of corporate greed and corrupt financial institutions and banks, it's easy to see parallels with our own existence. How easy it would be to fall foul of the likes of a modern Jacob Marley or Ebenezer Scrooge and find oneself in penury.
You don't need to have read The Deepgate Codex novels in order to enjoy this story but it may help to set the scene.
The author's wonderfully baroque creations of Cog City and Hell, with descriptions to match, weave a strange and terrifying story where one man who was once a mere cog in the machine, fights back against the ultimate corruption. Given today's world of corporate greed and corrupt financial institutions and banks, it's easy to see parallels with our own existence. How easy it would be to fall foul of the likes of a modern Jacob Marley or Ebenezer Scrooge and find oneself in penury.
You don't need to have read The Deepgate Codex novels in order to enjoy this story but it may help to set the scene.
August 6, 2019
This was a really interesting dark story about a man going from a deliciously creative hellish world to literal hell in pursuit of revenge. The fact that hell was a mental battlefield was something I hadn’t really encountered before, and I left this short story eager to read more in this world.
July 12, 2021
An interesting dive into the afterlife of Campbell's Deepgate Codex, as one man seeks revenge on the banker who ruined his life.
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never-read
November 5, 2022[ read the first book in the series, 'Scar Night' and didn't enjoy, so will not continue with the series ]
June 14, 2012
A story about a man who willingly goes to Hell to take revenge for his wife. But alas he has a book to help him along the way. Damnation for Beginners...And so he sets out to conquer his enemy. Mix in a little black humor, ample typos and editing mistakes, some new concepts of Hell, a repeat of the Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar provided to us by Mr Gaiman, and you get a story that is not half bad. Quite good in fact for my liking. At 122 pages it's best to read through in one sitting, or one day at the most so as not to forget anything.
December 26, 2012
An interesting story about a man who literally goes to hell to take revenge for his wife. I liked the hideous schemes of the evil bank and also how hell looked like. On the other hand the end was too open for my taste. Would it be possible to return or is the protagonist stuck forever in this place? And if yes, was it worth it?
June 19, 2012
This is really heavy-handed and not very good whether as fantasy or an attempt at satire. Wait for the novella to be collected or anthologised. It's definitely not worth the money as a Subterranean hardback.
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August 25, 2012
Kind of weird but interesting enough for me to look up other books that he has written.
April 13, 2014
Quirky little fantasy novel- the kind of fantasy I like. Fascinating conception of hell, but I wish the writing could have been more descriptive; it was rather dry considering the subject.
January 2, 2015
Nice little story that takes place in the Deepgate Codex universe. I could use more of these.
March 10, 2016
Another example of this author's potential for greatness but gross lack of follow through.
September 3, 2012
Weird. It was definitely a quick read since I started and finished it in one hour.
February 28, 2013
Reads like a graphic novel and it is a little predictable. Quick little book.
January 23, 2019
Reads like a graphic novel and it is a little predictable. Quick little book.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews