So I happened upon this book like so many before it… by happy accident as it sat on the new arrivals shelf at the local library… its cover art appealed to the graphic designer in me as I pondered the identity behind the vectorized illustration of beelzebub. Would his life forever be affected by the decision to pose for such an image?
But I digress. With this book, Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler crafts a modern-day remake for all the lovers out there of Dante’s Inferno that’s a very satisfying read all the way through its surprising end, which caused me to scratch my head for a moment, but then it all made perfect sense.
Hatcher McCord is an evening newscaster who has found himself in Hell and is struggling to explain his bad fortune. He’s far from the only one to suffer this fate – in fact, he’s surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters, including William Shakespeare, Humphrey Bogart, Richard M. Nixon, Jezebel, Judas Iscariot, Pope Boniface VIII, J. Edgar Hoover, and a panopoly of present-day figures who will soon be in Hell. The question may be not who is in Hell but who isn’t…
McCord is living in the afterlife with Anne Boleyn, but their happiness is constantly derailed by her obsession with Henry VIII (and the removal of her head at rather inopportune moments). Butler’s Hell isn’t as much a boiling lake of fire – although, there is that too – as it is a Sisyphean trial tailored to each inhabitant, whether it’s the average Joes who are struck by moving cars, die, and are reconstituted many times a day to do it all again, or the legendary newspaperman William Randolph Hearst, doomed to obscurity as a blogger mocked by his fellows because he can’t figure out CAPS-LOCK.
One day, Hatcher McCord meets Dante’s Beatrice, who believes there is a way out of Hell. Soon thereafter, by a twist of diabolical fate and his interviewer’s savvy, he learns a deep, dark secret of the underworld. From there Butler is off on a madcap romp about good, evil, free will, and the possibility of escape.
Butler’s depiction of Hell is original, intelligent, and fiercely comic, a book Dante himself might have celebrated. Pick it up if you’re looking for a book that will make you laugh, but not at the expense of giving you something to think about. Very good indeed.
