One of the things about the great abyss of dolor and despair is that there's a Hell to fit every taste. The carnal get buffeted about by endless wind, the murderous are slammed in the furnace, celebrities have pieces of their personalities detached and reattached at random until they have no idea who they really are. It's so consumer-friendly. There's a Hell for the religious to populate with barely acknowledged desires. There's a Hell for sybarites to wallow in their willful fantasies. Best of all, there's a million Hells for vengeful moralists with which to blister the targets of their bile. Here we find the blackened fingernails of a society dragged across the blackboard by a Homer or a Burroughs, by a Bosch or an EC Comics--and their hellspawned brethren in Hollywood (hi George!)--or by the snarling brood of malice-makers brought together in Dante's Disciples. For James Lovegrove, Hell is having once glimpsed the shores of Heaven. For Ian McDonald, Hell is a package tour and better to slave in Hell that live in Islington. Doug Murray romps through Charon joining the Teamsters, Michael Bishop gets down and dirty in the swamp with a sect of schismatic snake handlers. New to me, though apparently published all over the place as a horror writer, Nancy Holder assembles a vicious piece of cyberpunkery. Of course Hell is a computer virus. Now it's all too easy to do the usual. Invent a novel punishment, and make it fit a crime. Parade a guilty unfortunate then take him outside the city walls to the slaughter. Let's, for example, show Hitler a hard time (Brian Lumley). Or (Robert J Sawyer) lay the blame for world starvation on one hapless astronaut. (Excuse me? I'm with Burroughs on this one. The space program was the last great hope, and it's time we got back with it. Pardon me.) Thankfully, this collection dips into this shallow inkwell quite infrequently. Darrel Schweitzer and Gary Gygax both disinter tales from the crypt, but most everyone else (poets of course excepted) is a bit more inventive, although there's still a fair amount of celluloid grave-robbing. In A Wreath for Marley, Max Allen Collins tricks out Scrooge in a hard-boiled routine straight out of a Humphrey Bogart movie. You know, the one which starts out with a dead partner. A very nifty conceit. More oddly, both Ian Watson (The Great Escape) and Jody Lynn Nye (Bridge Over the River Styx) swipe WWII prison camp riffs. It does occur to me that we live in strangely sparse times. Even our most rapscallious and mean-spirited preacher, Pat Buchanan, cannot bring himself to work the fire and brimstone. Instead, it seems his entire moral universe has shrunk down to a position of "I hate you people, I hate what you do, and I wish you'd do it somewhere where I just don't have to look at it." Yes, Hell is a good night out in San Francisco. And this is where we come to my fave story in the whole shebang, Return to Gehenna, from Storm Constantine (no stranger to henna herself). An office worker, bored to buggery by the daily grind, slips into a strange bar where they serve Ogerond, Betwixtit, Tegamerra or maybe just a drop of the Black. This is a sumptuous and obscenely decadent story that dropped me straight into the world of Huysmans (but written with more panache). If turning yourself over to Pinhead has ever appealed to you as a lifestyle choice, this is the one for you. Overall, this is a very nice collection (and I should mention that Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe and Brian Aldiss all have fine stories here as well). However--and as I write this, the world is imagining Jesus descending into Hell for three days, and that's a story that begs to be told--it seems to me that the idea of Hell is wearing thin. The Church of England recently discouraged belief in the idea and it's hard to see an ethic beyond "who dies with the most toys, wins." Dante's Disciples is a fine cadenza on the Devil's best tune, but I think it's time to try another tack. Storm the Gates of Heaven! -- Paul McEnery |
Text and Illustrations © 1996 the individual creators.