Hell

HELL IS REAL.

That's what the billboard says, anyway. If you travel southbound on I-65 in Indiana, just south of Merrillville you'll drive past the sign. I used to see it all the time. Then again, you really can't miss it.

Hell has been on my mind for several months now. As Halloween approaches, I'm thinking about Hell from the perspective of a writer. You see, horror fiction, like many other genres of writing, seems to go in cycles. Right now, you can't swing a dead bat without hitting an old and tired zombie trope. In the 1990s it seemed like vampires were everywhere. What many forget though is that 1970s horror fiction belonged to Hell. Hell and it's most famous resident, Satan. The centerpiece example of this is quite likely William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. So much has been said about that book and the ensuing monumental film that I'm going to devote my attention to other texts.

How long have we been writing about Hell?

Long before the Bible was ever composed, Gilgamesh journeyed to the underworld of the dead, a Hell of its own sort. Odysseus crossed the River Styx in The Odyssey and Aeneas, shocker, did the same thereafter. The Hell of those traditions comes off as a dark place of death but with not much going on in it. That's bad enough, but then Bible comes along with, among other descriptions of Hell, the "lake of fire" from the Book of Revelations. It's from this source that Western tradition comes to view Hell as a place of burning and flame and great suffering.

John Milton seized upon this image for his epic poem, Paradise Lost. In it, Satan leads an army of rebel angels against God...and loses badly. The insurrectionists are cast out into the newly created pit of Hell, where Satan and his fallen angels build Pandemonium amid the lake of fire. "Far better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven," Satan promises his followers. Hell's gate is guarded by Sin, Satan's daughter. In Book 10 a bridge is built from Hell to Earth by Sin and Death after the Fall of Man, which has been caused by Satan, while the fallen angels are turned into snakes.

Long before Milton, however, Dante wrote The Divine Comedy. It's first of three acts, The Inferno, is probably the most famous and widely-read of the text, suggesting that readers are far more interested in Hell than either Purgatory or Paradise, but that's a whole 'nother matter. Inferno also is something of a departure from the standard, "everything is burning" depiction of Hell. In Inferno, Dante offers a sophisticated and judicious arrangement of eternal suffering. Hell is systematically divided in thematic tortures for crimes of the same nature in its Nine Circles, for example people who were violent against others are trapped in the Seventh Circle of Hell in a boiling river of blood with centaurs firing arrows to keep them in their place.

Then there's Ulysses by James Joyce. While Joyce's depiction of Dublin is in no way connected to Hell, I have recently spoken with a scholar of English Literature who insists that the very experience of reading this book should be listed in any description of Hell. As I am still intimidated by this book and have yet to fully dive into it, I cannot endorse that interpretation of the text. However, the professor does not appear to be a lone wolf in the wilderness on the matter, either. Joyce's long-regarded masterpiece is complicated, twisty, and at times nonsensical.

Joking aside, all of the above has accumulated into a sort of "communal perception" of what Hell must be like, should it exist. As for my own image of Hell, well it's a complicated amalgamation of my Catholic upbringing and album covers from my youth, To wit:

Naturally, it seems that writers are far more taken with Hell's ruler than with Hell as a physical landscape and more has been written on the former than the latter. Why not? Can you find a more powerful, more menacing antagonist for your hapless characters than Satan? Dennis Wheatley didn't think so. Wheatley was prolific writer of fiction dealing with black magic and the occult. His book The Devil Rides Out features English gentry discovering that one of their own is a Satan worshiper. This results in a black mass on the Salisbury Plain and later a country house besieged by demonic forces. There was also To the Devil a Daughter, wherein a writer (we're always the good guys) fights to save the soul of a young girl kidnapped by a Satanic cult headed by a former priest. Both of these books were made into films in the 1970s by Hammer Studios and both starred the inimitable Christopher Lee.

As I said, the 1970s were a time of renewed fear of, and honestly fascination with, Hell, psychomancy, and demonic forces. Aside from the crown jewel, The Exorcist, The Omen is probably the greatest example of this fascination. It stars Gregory Peck as the American ambassador to England who gradually puts together the fact that his son is not really his son, but the Antichrist.The aforementioned Hammer Studios even got their version of Dracula in on the scene. In The Satanic Rites of Dracula. a Satanic cult seeks not to summon the dark lord of the underworld, but Dracula instead. Comic book writers were quick to cash in on this trend as well.

The character on the cover of that collection is Daimon Hellstrom, The Son of Satan. The moniker pretty much says it all. He hates his father and works against him, leading to one of the premiere explorations of "daddy issues" in the comic book medium.

Of course many of the more interesting explorations of Hell are those that are said to have actually happened. These include numerous accounts of paranormal activity, such as demonic possession. One of the more famous cases is likewise firmly cemented in the pop culture of the 1970s. The Amityville Horror case spawned both a book and a movie of the same name. The case is pretty much the quintessential, "get out of the house" haunted hose story, only there are pig demons involved plus a gateway to hell in the basement. Though based on a true story, this narrative has been widely discredited by many investigators. When "paranormal investigators" Ed and Lorraine Warren are involved, you can pretty much bet the whole thing is a hoax.

Then there's this old chestnut: geologists working in Siberia drilled too far and punched a hole right into Hell. Temperatures read in the range of 2,000 degrees and microphones recorded the screams of the tormented and the damned. I've heard these recordings and they are most unsettling. Good thing it's all a hoax. Although I do like this tidbit from Snopes:  "The legend of the “well to Hell” is one that particularly appeals to some Christian groups as offering confirmation that Hell (and therefore God) exists. Popular endings to the story have it that scientists (the symbols of atheism) ran screaming from the site in terror when confronted with such proof, or that since the discovery of Hell conversions to Christianity began occurring at an unprecedented rate."

Let us not forget the Jersey Devil, a "crytpid" said to lurk the wooded marshlands of New Jersey. There have been several sightings but no convincing evidence as to the veracity of this creature.  Paranormal lore states that the thing was actually born of woman in the 18th Century, a poor woman who while having her 13th child, cursed it in her pain and gave it to Satan. At least the deformed kid has a hockey team named after him.

If you want to read truly good nonfiction on the subject of Hell, check out American Exorcism by Michael Cuneo. It's a fascinating read and it will leave you thinking that demonic possession either is a complete falsehood or that it happens all the time.

So is the billboard right? Is Hell real? If our literary imaginations have any bearing on our perception of "real" then I would have to say yes. In fact, Hell may be purely a descriptor for a state of being.

After all, I've been in Hell for months now.

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