The Doom of the Great City

by William Delisle Hay, Lee Jackson (Editor)

The Doom of the Great City (1880) is one of the first tales of modern urban apocalypse (arguably the very first). 1880s London, "foul and rotten to the very core, and steeped in sin of every imaginable variety," is ravaged by a killer fog, leaving tens of thousands dead, whilst our hero wanders through the ruins searching for his family. The book begins as polemic against the vices of London life, told retrospectively from "Australasia, 1942," but then - crucially - we have the journey "into the very heart and home of Horror itself," the spectacle of a dead city, an astonishing piece of writing. Although this is a novella (fifty pages in the original) Delisle Hay writes with remarkable verve and talent - a true forgotten classic of the science fiction/horror genre, inspiring H.G.Wells and many others.

Genres: Classics, Science Fiction, Fiction

52 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1880

About the author

William Delisle Hay was an English writer, born in 1853, who lived for some time in New Zealand. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and published books on New Zealand and on fungi. He also wrote several works of proto-science fiction.

Reviews

[Riley Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alright even though this author is clearly a curmudgeon I’m giving this five stars because I’ve seen A LOT of apocalypse movies (fave genre) and this still had me riveted. It must have been very upsetting at the time, maybe explains why he got ignored and is so obscure.

I just felt the carnage and distress so clearly. And a lot of what he says about London (minus the SIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNN) definitely still applies.

[Harry Rutherford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Victorian horror/SF. Not much in the way of plot or character, just 50 pages of lurid sensationalism. Which I enjoyed.

[Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the mark of a good story is one that leaves you wanting more, and that's certainly the case with William Delisle Hay's THE DOOM OF THE GREAT CITY, a short slice of Victorian apocalyptic fiction that acts as a neat progenitor for the 20th and 21st century wave of post-apocalyptic fiction that remains a perennial favourite with both audiences and readers. This 51-page novella sees Victorian London enveloped in a poisonous fog, which transfixes the lungs and brings death on a massive scale. The first half is all realism and careful scene-setting with a heady dose of disapproving moralism thrown in, while the second half is where Delisle Hay's descriptive skills take over, delivering a truly horrifying tableau of a metropolis of death. It's overwrought, as is the best Victorian sensation fiction, but unputdownable with it. I could have read another few hundred pages of this stuff.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1880, The Doom of the Great City is apparently one of the first - if not the first - urban apocalypse stories. Despite the genre's continuing popularity, this novella is pretty well forgotten and currently only available in this Kindle edition (which has a lot of grammatical typos). It's barely fifty pages long and nearly half taken up by a screed against the sin and decadence of Victorian London, so I can see why it's not high up on too many people's reading lists. But the final act had some great macabre imagery of a city of corpses, including a wonderfully grotesque scene inside a theater. Again, it's quite short, so worth checking out as a novelty of speculative fiction even if it's hardly a masterpiece.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

This does not seem relevant now as it was when it was first written. If you want to lose yourself in a real post-apocalyptic land, don't waste your time here. Steer clear and go for I Am Legend instead.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somwhat disturbing.

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Description: Set in the then far future of 1942, the Londoners of William Delisle Hay’s 19th-century novella were not suffering on account of Luftwaffe bombing raids but instead choking to death in a deadly smog.

Not sure I'd call this a straight novel, it reads more as a full-on rant by a moralising git big on sermonising. We do know that London had pea-soupers mingled into The Great Stink which hugely impacted on health.

Overall then, I'm sure Dickens and Collins secured more sales by their penmanship than William Delisle Hay could ever dream of. Glad it was only 50 pages; glad I came across this; mighty glad to move on from it.

Read for free via public domain

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A whole month of Halloween 2015 reads:

#1: 3* Nobody True by James Herbert: fraudio
#2: The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard: fraudio
#3: Brain Child by John Saul: fraudio
#4: 3* Domain (Rats #3) by James Herbert: fraudio
#5: The Mourning Vessels by Peter Luther: paperback
#6: 2* The Doom of the Great City: ebook short-story