★★★★☆ The Great Malevolence has a personnel problem

The Gates

John Connolly

Around the time of the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago, evil came into existence along with everything else. John Connolly's The Gates begins with an account of the Big Bang. In fact, chapter I, entitled "In Which the Universe Forms, Which Seems Like a Very Good Place to Start", is a brief description of the Big Bang. It is evident that Connolly has taken pains to be scientifically accurate here and at other relevant points. In fact, in his acknowledgements he writes

Dr. Colm Stephens, administrator of the School of Physics at Trinity College, Dublin, very generously agreed to read this manuscript, and offered advice and clarification. In the interests of fiction I was forced to ignore some of it, and for that I apologize deeply.

In fact, I have read purported nonfiction books by card-carrying physicists that were less scientifically accurate. That said, let's admit that the creation of Evil in the Big Bang is not something physicists say, but just a thing Connolly made up for fun.

The Evil created at the Big Bang took on a form, called the Great Malevolence, but got stuck outside the regular universe in a place that we might as well call Hell, along with a bunch of lesser evils that we can call demons. The GM has spent 13 billion years, give or take a billion for two, peering into the world that would eventually host humans, looking for a way to escape Hell and take over the world of humans, whom it hates, hates, hates...

The central character of The Gates is a boy named Samuel Johnson. (Many of the characters in The Gates are named after historical figures. Samuel Johnson was, of course, a famous 18th-century polymath. Any question that the name is meant as a reference to this particular Samuel Johnson is settled by the name of his dog, Boswell. We also have a Hilbert, a Planck, a Robert Oppenheimer, and probably a bunch more that I didn't catch.)

Events in Samuel's neighborhood result in a portal to Hell opening at 666 Crowley Rd. (There's that name-dropping again!) The GM tries to send his demons into Samuel's town, in order to establish a beachhead for his conquest of the universe. Samuel opposes the GM, of course.

Samuel is greatly aided by the GM's personnel problem. The GM, it turns out, is a sort of supernatural Donald Trump -- a giant festering boil of incompetence who hires "only the best people". They are just as competent and selfless as the GM himself.

It's tremendous fun -- and oddly hopeful -- and I certainly intend to read the remaining Samuel Johnson books.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

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