I picked this up at a bookstore on vacation in San Fran and it was purely because the title made me laugh. The lady at the counter said that this author knows how to craft intricate, ridiculous worlds and that’s exactly what you’ll get her. It does go to some dark places though.

Our story here follows the misdeeds of Gwendoline Gooch as she cooks up another scheme to get rich. This time around, she’s kidnapping Hobs (creatures that spawn when a building is complete, secretly becoming caretaker to the property) to force them to work in, essentially, an apartment building. Taking a Hob from its home causes it to degrade and fall apart relatively quickly. This furthers Gooch’s aims, however, as the people who own the homes are in need of housing and turn to her complex as their only option. It’s a geniously evil endeavor, one that the Devil himself becomes interested in. Because of the effect on people’s homes, the grand magus sends Professor Green to figure out the cause and put a stop to it. This is the basis of the plot, however, the world itself is what will pull you into it.

Because the world is its own character, here’s a few interesting tidbits about the setting. It’s always raining in the city because of an ancient spell gone wrong; trains are a dangerous form of passage as they may not take you where you want to go and they love to run over people; books may have a famulus living within that only serve to get on your nerve; and so much more. It’s a living, breathing world that makes some kind of crazy sense out of the nonsensicality of it.

Unsurprisingly, the Devil and Gooch are the main characters of the story here. We get shifting perspectives between these two characters for the most part, and each of them are evil in their own right. To help balance this, we also get Professor Green’s viewpoint at times. The Devil himself becomes enamored with Gooch’s brand of evil as she is inventing the idea of being a landlord, which is arguably one of the greatest evils out there. She has a very dominant personality and at first just seems like one of those fun, evil characters you want to see destroy the world. After a certain point, for me this was in relation to a child that she retrieved from school like she was withdrawing something from a safety deposit box, I started to despise Gooch and wanted to see her fail. It’s one of those stories that only gets darker as you read it. Green’s perspective was the only real reprieve from the darkness, however, his plot intertwines with the Devil and Gooch to the point that he feels like the hero of the story. He’s timid and somewhat lazy about work, but I couldn’t help but root for him to take her down as soon as possible. It’s a feeling I haven’t felt before when reading a story. Due to the sheer amount of terrible occurrences, I was rooting for the unlikely hero. The Devil’s interactions with both of them vary and learning how he came to be in this narrative was a really interesting bit of lore for me. He’s somewhat a sympathetic character, which I didn’t see coming. Darkshire subverted my expectations, which is pretty hard to do nowadays.

I expected to have a good time rooting for the bad guy in this story, but it was mostly just a dark fantasy with specks of light dotted throughout. I really came to hate Gooch, sympathize with the Devil and root for Green by the end. The greater lore about the world is the most memorable part for me as the Devil’s backstory was a standout. This is probably because I’m trying to forget some of the terrible things Gooch did and focus on the good. It’s a dark story that only lets off the gas a couple times and I’d recommend it to those that want to read something unpredictable, though the lack of hope may make the bleakness of the setting less digestible to some.