James Hynes

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has combined highbrow literary influences with wonderful popular ones like Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a way that is both very funny and genuinely weird. In his brand-new novel, Kings of Infinite Space, Hynes has broadened the object of his satire: it's in the workaday world of a government bureaucracy, in this case the Texas Department of General Services (TxDOGS, for short), an office . . . housed in a wide, low-ceilinged, underlit room in the shape of a hollow square. In the center of the square was a courtyard where a sun-blasted redwood deck surrounded an old live oak, which was fighting a losing battle with oak wilt. The offices along the outer walls, with views of the parking lot and the river, were taken by senior managers. Middle managers had offices along the inner wall with a view of the dying oak tree, and everybody else occupied the honeycomb of cubicles in between, where nearly every vertical surface was grown over as if by moss with stubbly gray fabric.



Paul Trilby, Hynes's protagonist, is an ex-academic who began his fall in an earlier Hynes novel. Now he has reached bottom, barely able to afford no-brand hot dogs on his salary as a temp typist at TxDOGS. He reads H. G. Wells novels on his morning breaks and falls asleep in the bathroom. And, in a wonderful Hynesian move, he is haunted by the ghost of his ex-wife's cat, a beast he murdered.