"Within our tale gentle reader you will see writ before you a palimpsest of low living and high misdemeanor and the curious redresses that are visited as a result thereof . . ." In The Baby Killers Jay Lake restages mankind's Fall from Grace as an alternate-history steampunk fable. Written in a style of rambunctious Victoriana-that-never-was this novella is set in Philadelphia in 1907 when that city serves as the seat of the British Dominion of the Americas and as a Pandora's Box of sin and vice. The Governor-General has a taste for violating innocents while the good Dr. Scholes uses them to fashion his mechanized agents of Justice. The Gollinoster a feminine incarnation of angry retribution wanders beneath the city streets - and an undying creature of ancient destruction is rushing to meet her. Villains and heroes (categories that overlap significantly) battle in a story of debauchery degradation radical experimentation mad metaphysics . . . and a farting Frenchman. Both popular culture and actual history are mined here to create a tale in which the use of idealized technology meets our darkest desires . . . and the result is positively electric.
