Hell

July 13, 2009
Prolific Pulitzer–winner Butler features a colorful cast of underworld dwellers in his latest novel, and, as in Severance
and Intercourse
, captures stream-of-consciousness in delicious, unleashed rhythm. On the downside, Butler pushes his love for thematic concept to new levels of explicit puppetry (read: gimmick). Hatcher McCord, an anchorman on the Evening News from Hell, reports on hellishly banal traumas while real-life persons suffer hilarious punishment: Adolf Hitler is repeatedly executed, only to be reassembled gruesomely, his face like a stitched football. All are ruled by a smarmy, Armani-clad Satan who smells noxiously of Old Spice aftershave, is only reachable by voice mail and blames everything on his “father issues.” But when McCord discovers that Satan can't read his mind, McCord becomes a vehicle for free will. Newly empowered, he attempts sexual and emotional relations with the love of his afterlife, a headless Anne Boleyn who gives great (if terrifying) oral sex. Butler's lust for the tabloid romp and his stream of the never-ending punch line both irritates and illuminates. The reader's taste will have to be the final arbiters of worth.

Starred review from August 15, 2009
Set in the not-too-distant future, this short novel finds protagonist Hatcher McCord in Hellwhich tends to resemble Earth, with the addition of midday sulfur storms. A network news anchor in life, he's in the same role in the afterlife, hosting the "Evening News from Hell". He's involved with Anne Boleyn, who still longs for the man who done her wrong, and encounters a variety of famous personages, from Virgil and Humphrey Bogart to various U.S. presidents (Richard Nixon is the Devil's chauffeur). Along the way, he hears that a new harrowing of Hell may be imminent and sets about trying to be included by making amends with those he wronged in life (primarily his three ex-wives). In the end, however, Hatcher learns that you can quite literally "make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." VERDICT One can imagine that Pulitzer Prize winner Butler ("A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain") had a grand time writing this endlessly witty and inventive novel. Readers will find it wildly comic and thought-provoking. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 5/15/09.]Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2009
TV anchorman Hatcher McCord is trying to get a grip on life in Hell, a cacophonous, gridlocked metropolis teeming with gnashing and burning humans, among them Judas, George W. Bush, assorted jihadists, the Bee Gees, William Randolph Hearst, J. Edgar Hoover, Jerry Seinfeld, Humphrey Bogart, and Dantes Beatrice speaking Lauren Bacalls lines. Hatcher is living with Anne Boleyn, who is often disconcertingly headless and pining for Henry VIII. Satan has Hatcher hosting the evening news, but his script is blank while the teleprompter is filled with profanities. Hatcher tries to control his thoughts, believing that Satan customizes hell to match each denizens worst fears, but after launching his daring why do you think youre here? interview series, he realizes that things may not be quite as hideously hopeless as they seem. Butler has been honing his profound empathy and wild imagination in electrifying collections of short fiction. He now unchains himself in this furiously detailed, harrowing, and gruesomely funny satire, taking on everything from genocide to advertising, journalistic ethics to marital bickering. The result is a scorching and cathartic novel of delusion, pain, crimes great and small, just deserts, and the capacity for change.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)