The Penguin Book of Hell

Starred review from September 15, 2018
Hell, the place of ultimate punishment, is arguably the West's greatest imaginative creation, editor Bruce says. Classical Greece and Rome depicted the afterlife as primarily a regime of crushing ennui, with punishment reserved for fallen gods and overreaching monarchs and some monsters around to prevent unauthorized entrances and exits. With its robust conception of sin, and taking a hint from Socrates in Plato's Phaedo, Christianity increased the kinds of punishment and conjured hordes of demons to wallop its equal-opportunity inferno's vast clientele, and Purgatory was invented to accommodate the less-than-utterly damned. The Enlightenment and its attendant humanitarianism undermined credence in Hell, but then twentieth-century wars and the Holocaust seemed to revive it, but as Hell on Earth. The readings in this anthology document that history of Hell, from Hesiod's Theogony to the mixtapes used to torture inmates of Guant�namo and other U.S. detention centers. Bruce fluently translates most of the Latin originals, adapts Longfellow's version for several selections from Dante's Inferno, and succinctly introduces and abstracts particular historical periods and each selection. Besides well- and fairly-well-known sources (Homer, Virgil, Bede, Aquinas, etc.), Bruce extracts fascinating less-known items, such as the gruesome twelfth-century Vision of Tundale and Victorian priest John Furniss' merciless depiction of children in Hell. Consider this the grown-up's My First Book on its subject.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)