The Baby Killers

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 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. Villians and heroes (categories that overlap significantly) battle in a story of debauchery, degradation, radical experimentation, mad metaphysics... and a farting Frenchman.