Kings of Infinite Space

Equal parts hilarious office send-up and gothic horror tale, Kings of Infinite Space tells the story of Paul Trilby. Trilby suffers from significant self-esteem issues brought on by his past behavior as an adulterer, failed academician and cat murderer. He drives a raggedy old rustbucket of a car and is haunted by the specter of Charlotte; the cat he drowned in Hynes' earlier work "Queen of the Jungle" (included in the 1997 collection of stories Publish or Perish). He lives life in a skanky apartment in the Austinesque town of Lamar, where Charlotte only allows him to watch cat friendly TV programming.

Kings is set in the imaginary Texas Department of General Services office or TXDoGS for short. As an ex-government worker I shared an allegiance with Paul Trilby from the beginning. In fact, anyone who has ever worked in a cubicle setting and particularly for a government institution will recognize the characters. The self-important blowhard, the milquetoast scripture spouting yes man, the sex crazed ladies man, the overbearing queen bee who treats everyone horribly but never suffers for it, the nosy security guard and the oblivious office manager. Add to the mix pale spectral men with eerily sharp teeth who descend and ascend into the office through ceiling tiles, after dark and you have more than ample possibility for horror and hilarity. As darkness descends, innocuous cubicles and file cabinets are transformed into eerie gothic landscapes. Cubicles by their very nature create a feeling of other worldliness. From every possible direction you hear the sounds of progress yet when you look around it is possible to not see a single person carrying on this progress.

Down on his luck Paul Trilby takes a job at TxDoGS as a temp typist with aspirations to at least garner the title Tech Writer. All around him he sees employees who never seem to do any work but each morning the work they are not doing appears on the clerks' desk. As Paul finds himself seduced into the circle of the do nothings, he ignores the warnings of the office clerk to steer clear. Soon Paul is ensnared in a supernatural web of government workers and zombie office workers and no that is not redundant. One part allegory and one part satire, Hynes crafts a story that is at once an ode to the drudgery of office work and a humorous tale about what everyone always thought went on in government offices.

With a healthy nod toward H.G. Wells' Island of Doctor Moreau and scenes that would do Dante proud, Hynes tells a story that defies a nifty niche in any one pigeon hole.