Samuel Johnson

About the Samuel Johnson series

Samuel Johnson is an ordinary boy in an ordinary English town who accidentally helps tear a hole between our world and Hell while investigating his neighbor's suspicious basement activities, setting off a comic-horror trilogy that runs in a very different register from Connolly's Charlie Parker novels. Working with his dachshund Boswell and a succession of thoroughly incompetent demons -- Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities, chief among them -- Samuel has to stop a genuine demonic invasion using little more than curiosity, decency and a willingness to talk his way past monsters who are, mostly, not very good at their jobs. Connolly plays the horror completely straight while making almost everything around it very funny, including regular footnotes that undercut the story's own tension for a joke.

The trilogy escalates from a small-town portal opening in The Gates through Hell's own internal politics and a botched invasion attempt in The Infernals (published in the UK as Hell's Bells) to a final confrontation in The Creeps, while keeping its footing as accessible middle-grade and younger-YA fantasy throughout -- readers who know Connolly only from Charlie Parker's grim supernatural crime will find this a genuinely different, gentler, and consistently funnier side of his writing, though no less inventive about demons and the mechanics of Hell.