I bought the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction largely to get the story "Hell of a Fix," by Matthew Hughes. I've liked everything else I've read from Hughes, notably his satirical far-future SF adventures, such as Template, The Gist Hunter and Majestrum, set in the Jack Vance-inspired "Archonate." This begins a new series, and while it stands alone as a self-contained piece, it's also the opening of a novel, which itself will be the opening of a three-book series. So it makes a good way to sample what's coming, I'd think.

WHAT IT IS
A 16,000 word "novelette" about Chesney Arnstruther, a mild-mannered actuary for a mid-sized insurance company. Chesney isn't by any means a go-getter—he's an introvert, a man of only minor ambitions and modest dreams, with no lovers and no close friends (and few casual ones) but a job that suits his tastes, and a life that, if it's not satisfying, is at least comfortable enough that he's not spurred to change it, except in minor ways. It's while working on one of those minor ways that he accidentally summons a demon, and then refuses to sign over his soul on the ground that there was no intent and therefore no contract. This causes a labor dispute in Hell, with troublesome repercussions for the regular world. Chesney, caught in the middle, needs to broker a solution, involving a televangelist, Chesney's domineering mother, his "better angel" and Satan, among others.

WHAT I LIKED ABOUT IT
Hughes calls this an urban fantasy, which is certainly true—it takes place in a modern urban setting and has loads of fantasy to it —but it's also of a genre I think of as "screwball fantasy," exemplified by the comic fantasy writing of Thorne Smith, Robert Bloch, Fritz Lieber, Charles Myers and others. Where most urban fantasy seems to be set in a world where there's occult danger all around us, and only the heroes who walk the shadows betwixt the world of daylight and dark mysticism can save us, screwball fantasy often has utterly absurd things happen, which are then treated in a straight-faced manner by relatively ordinary people who have to use logic against absurdity and somehow corral it, rather than simply beating the crap out of it with superpowers and manly derring-do. The characters tend to be simply (but deftly) drawn, caricatures that have enough charm to liven up the story, without being so nuanced and realistic that they bring what is essentially an airy confection crashing to the ground.

And I love screwball fantasy, so it's great to have a new story in the genre (and the prospect of a whole series), particularly one this well-written. It moves along at a rapid clip, clever and amusing, and does a great job dealing with the absurd and fantastic. The characters simply take the absurd as normal, and that makes it all the funnier. With some cosmetic changes, it could pretty easily have been published during the heyday of screwball fantasy—for all that there are modern touches like televangelists in the story, the setting it takes place in feels as timeless as the setting of Little Lulu comics. Chesney himself is an ideal screwball hero, an unassuming nebbish who finds himself over his head but rallies to the occasion. All the other characters are engaging—even Satan and the greedy evangelist have just enough rueful humanity to them to give them a likable charm in their particular roles.

It's also worth note that while most urban fantasy today avoids angels and demons in favor of vampires, wizards, fairies and werewolves (and those that do use Heaven and Hell seem to reduce them to the status of just more Powerful Supernatural Beings You'd Better Be Wary Of, not unlike the werewolves or a faerie queen), Hughes jumps right in to a classical view of Christianity, albeit one that seems modeled on mid-twentieth-century corporate structure, where the tempting and salvation and such are all essentially cosmic office duties. It's refreshing for not being overused, and a lot of fun.

I won't share how the story ends, since you should read it, but I will say that it ends well, in a way that brings the events to a workable close, and opens things up in another direction that makes it easy to see that there's plenty more to do in the novel to come.

It's a good story, well-conceived and well-written, and I'm eager for what comes next.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE ABOUT IT
Chesney is a comics fan, and while I'd ordinarily like that, being a comics reader myself, there was stuff I just didn't like about it here.

Some of it is minor nit-pickery—Chesney is apparently specifically a superhero reader, but the story uses the terms "graphic novels" and "comix" in a way that most superhero fans probably wouldn't, but that's pretty minor.

But what mainly bugged me is that Chesney, like many screwball fantasy heroes, is the kind of stuck-in-a-functional-rut nobody who kind of needs a kick in the pants to get him up and out and doing, and much like Cosmo Topper being haunted by the Kerbys, it's the intrusion of the fantasy that's going to do it. So in that context, the fact that he likes comics comes across as shorthand for "he's an immature man-child." No romantic experience, still tied to his mother, and oh yeah, he likes them superhero funnybooks. Clearly, he hasn't grown up yet. It comes of as an easy way to infantilize him, which seems to build on an unstated assumption that what he reads is immature junk.

Chesney's favorite superhero—a super-UPS man called The Driver—seems to fall into the same pattern. While various characters in the story are figures of satire, The Driver's just a parody, a dumb take on a superhero for no apparent reason other than to show Chesney as a boy-man.

To be fair, Chesney's interest in superheroes does figure into the plot of the story in ways that affect the ending, so it's possible there's more to come, and I could well change my mind about The Driver when I read the full novel. And I may be oversensitive on the subject, of course. In the end, it's a minor piece of the story that, even though I don't care for it, doesn't change my opinion of the story as a whole. I liked Robert McCloskey's Homer Price, too, even though his let's-knock-comic-books character, the Super-Duper, was a pill.

[I will note that The Driver's secret ID, Ben Turner, has already been used, by DC Comics's martial-arts hero, the Bronze Tiger. But I'm nitpicking again]

SUMMING UP
It took more space to talk about what I didn't like than what I liked, but that's not a proper proportion—the good stuff is 95% of the story or more, and the bit I didn't like is a minor element. Overall, the story is a delight, a light and frothy cocktail of a story that's like nothing else I've seen coming out today—the obvious modern comparison is Pratchett, but this feels much more like Bloch's humorous fantasy of the pulp era than like anything in Discworld—and I heartily recommend it.

I'd recommend the whole magazine, but I haven't read much of it yet. I've only read one other piece, a moody high-fantasy adventure by Alex Irvine that was well-constructed and skilfully written, but didn't make me eager for more the way "Hell of a Fix" did.