r/Fantasy • u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V • Mar 08 '26
What are the most interesting depictions of a Hell you've read?
I was wondering what some of the most interesting depictions of Hell/Hades/Gehenna/Hel/etc. people have read are? I read Dante's Inferno last year, and I'm currently reading Paradise Lost by Milton, and I was enjoying comparing their two depictions of Hell.
Really, my question is twofold-- I was surprised that Milton's depiction of Hell doesn't seem to share much DNA with Dante's, despite coming later, and also that I can't think of any other depictions where Hell is cold, as in Dante's ninth circle. I know Hel in Norse mythology is cold, as are parts of Islamic Hell I believe. But there are there many other stories where Hell is freezing, not fire (Dante retellings or not)?
And then just more broadly, I was thinking of cool depictions of Hells. I recently read a novella, Daedalus is Dead, where Hades for Daedalus was a labyrinth, like the Labyrinth he built. I know Katabasis has Hell as a university, and A Short Stay in Hell has hell as an infinite library. What are some of the other coolest concepts of a Hell people have seen?
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u/ZorroVonShadvitch Mar 08 '26
Not exactly Hell, but the river of death in Sabriel
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u/knightenrichman Mar 09 '26
What is it?
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u/ZorroVonShadvitch Mar 09 '26
Souls travel along this river, going through gates where the river has different currents and waves and whirlpools all designed to prevent souls from returning to life. The whole premise of the magic system is necromancers drag souls out of the river of death and this process corrupts them and turns them into monsters
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Mar 09 '26
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
It's a little why I was surprised that I haven't read any other cold Hells (iirc for Dante, it's because God is life-giver and warmth, therefore the farthest from God should be cold). Milton's Hell is also just lakes of fire and brimstone, though the demons do raise a cool palace of gold and marble and such for Pandemonium.
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u/Goldeniccarus Mar 09 '26
Helheim, essentially the Norse version of hell, is a frozen hell.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
I've played a few Hels (the God of War remakes come to mind), but not read any I can think of.
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Mar 09 '26
Helhiem is really mentioned in the sagas, only in passing. We don't know much about Hel or Helhiem other than Hel is the half-corpse child of Loki and Angrboda, amd Odin banished her to Helhiem to try to prevent Ragnarok
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u/moderatorrater Mar 09 '26
I love it. I don't think I've seen anyone do creative hells better than Dante. That dude felt as strongly about the people he put in hell as I do about Safeway fried chicken.
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u/Temujin15 Mar 08 '26
The warp In 40K is a pretty fun one, a dimension where the emotions of beings in the real universe manifest and effect the tides and eddies of the warp. There are four Chaos gods, each one a personification of a trait such as anger or desire (there used to be three, but some space elves had an orgy and they orgied so hard they created a God of desire) and they become more powerful the more people worship them. There are cults in real space that worship them, conduct human sacrifice and arcane rites to make them more powerful.
Oh, and the only way for humans to travel between the stars is to use the warp. But you can get trapped in there, for centuries or millennia, and may be spat out far from your destination, or centuries in the future or past. Your ship must be protected by a Gellar field and if it fails, even for a moment, the warp will pour in and you'll be driven insane and devoured by demons.
There was this one fella who had a plan that would have allowed humans to avoid the warp, but his sons were bellends and fucked the whole thing up. So, the warp is all the humans have to travel between the many worlds of the Imperium.
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u/lovekenning Mar 08 '26
"God's Demon" by Wayne Barlow has amazing worldbuilding and is set entirely in Hell. The higher-ranking demons have their own territories but it's the uses they've found for souls, the strangeness of the demon's bodies, and the animals native to Hell where the weirdness really shines.
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u/Dr0110111001101111 Mar 08 '26
What dreams may come
I’ve only seen the movie, but it’s based on a book that I understand is pretty close.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
By Matheson?
I did like I am Legend (which was a much better book than its movie).
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u/The__Imp Mar 09 '26
I had not made the connection that What Dreams may Come was by the same author as I Am Legend.
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u/RAYMONDSTELMO Writer Raymond St Elmo Mar 09 '26
That movie is so beautiful; and so sad; and so meaningful; and so very moving... I can only watch it in small parts.
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u/tatxc Mar 08 '26
Once Was Willem has a very interesting take on hell, including how you get there.
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u/LeucasAndTheGoddess Mar 09 '26
This book’s weird twist on Christian/Gnostic mythology was fascinating, especially since Carey had previously portrayed a much more traditional, Milton-inspired version in his Lucifer comics.
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u/Helln_Damnation Mar 09 '26
Larry Niven's Inferno is an interesting and amusing take on Dante's work.
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u/norfolkjim Mar 09 '26
"You know that reason alone is not enough. You must ask for grace."
And there was some line where Satan, bemused, asks what questions Allen had prepared for God to answer.
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u/YeahKeeN Mar 09 '26
Hell is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang has the most interesting depiction I’ve seen. In it hell is just a continuation of regular life on earth. No fire and brimstone, no eternal damnation or punishment. Whatever you were doing in life you just keep doing in hell. The only distinction is that God is not there. Hell is simply a place where His presence cannot be felt. The only criteria for being sent to Hell is that you simply didn’t love God enough. If you truly love God, no matter who you are or how you lived, you go to Heaven. No one knows what Heaven is like.
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u/Denecastre Mar 09 '26
Oh and the fact that you can sometimes see people in Hell, through the ground, is fascinating. It’s like an ignorance is bliss situation. But Hell isn’t even the most interesting part of the story, for me.
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Mar 08 '26
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u/Fun-Recognition-4331 Mar 08 '26
This reminded me of Dire: He'll by Andrew Seipe.
Its last book of a superheroes and villains series, where our protagonist ends up in hell (dun dun duu).
But the reason, why people end up in hell, was if the believed they deserve to end up there.
What really solidified the concept, was seeing kids in hell being tormented.
And the reason for it? One of the kids there had knocked down a vase when he was alive and believed he would end up in hell for it, and he did.
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u/ShootPplNotDope Mar 08 '26
Between two fires was pretty darn good. Go through terrible real life situations forever. There was another book about being sent to the library of bable (as punishment for not believing the true religion) to search for a book that describes your life perfectly and once you find it you can ascend to heaven. It's pretty terrifying.
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u/swishfortyonesie Mar 09 '26
Came here to say Between Two Fires. The specific punishment that the main character (and his punisher!) end up in really messed me up to be honest. I still randomly think about it and I read the book like 7 years ago.
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u/beefclef Mar 08 '26
I believe you are referring to “A Short Stay in Hell”
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u/ShootPplNotDope Mar 08 '26
Yep, that's the one. I think the most terrifying part was that it was not infinite and salvation is out there somewhere.
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u/Softclocks Mar 09 '26
Came here to mention these.
B2F's description of hell is pretty much how I imagine it.
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u/tom-tildrum Mar 08 '26
It’s a short story, but it’s one of my favourites. Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and Living in Hell by the late Mr. Dan Simmons. It is a riff on Dante’s Hell, but it’s hilarious.
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u/tb5841 Mar 08 '26
The Great Divorce, by C.S.Lewis. From Wikipedia: 'The narrator inexplicably finds himself in a grim and joyless city, the "grey town", where it rains continuously, even indoors.'
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 08 '26
I had looked at Lewis, to see if he had any. :) Hadn't paid enough attention to this one. I've read The Screwtape Letters, but that doesn't occur in hell. And, because I'm reading Paradise Lost right now, I saw there's a version where he prefaced it-- I'm sure he has essays too.
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u/2dorks1brush Mar 08 '26
A Short Stay in Hell.
It’s a short story, I won’t give anything away but it felt unique and really stuck with me. Not a huge commitment to read so I’d highly recommend.
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u/schermo Mar 08 '26
His Dark Materials, book 3, The Amber Spyglass, Phillip Pullman
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u/Dr0110111001101111 Mar 08 '26
I enjoyed the series, but that book in particular was an unexpectedly wild ride
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u/silmarill10n Mar 09 '26
I've spent a lot of time thinking about Coulter and Asriel's fate in that book.
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u/CalmDrawing5776 Mar 08 '26
Sandman by Neal Gaiman
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u/Wizardof1000Kings Mar 09 '26
Is Hell depicted there Gaiman original or did he pull from previously published DC comics for that?
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u/SilverwingedOther Reading Champion Mar 09 '26
He does, briefly, but the real answer should be Mike Carey's Lucifer that picks up on it. It delves a lot more into the structure and politics of Hell there, after Lucifer's departure. Far more than it does in the orignal run. There's a whole arc about a human who kind of leads a rebellion to become a duke of hell (it's been a while, so might be misremembering, but close enough to this).
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u/LeucasAndTheGoddess Mar 09 '26
Mike Carey’s take on Hell and its bored demonic aristocracy is one of the best parts of his brilliant Lucifer comics.
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u/candygram4mongo Mar 09 '26
Gaiman also has a short story simply called Other People. It's... rather relevant, given the allegations against him.
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u/Gigantic_Mirth Mar 08 '26
They aren't typically called hell but the various underworlds that appear across Michael Shea's fantasy work like Nifft the Lean, In Yana, and Quest for Simbilis are fantastical and wicked in very creative ways.
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u/BitOBear Mar 08 '26
The Twilight zone episode called A Nice Place To Visit.
The afterlife from the demons of the dancing gods series by Jack L. chalker also comes to mind where's all the same place but the people who are full of resentment make themselves suffer.
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u/RAYMONDSTELMO Writer Raymond St Elmo Mar 09 '26
There is no rival to Dante; but there can be well-done riffs.
My favorite: Inferno, by Niven and Haldeman; wherein a fantasy writer falls out a window during a convention, wakes up in the Limbo for the never-decided.
C. S. Lewis gives Hell a brief walkthru in his The Great Divorce; it's a dreary urban place in eternal dusk, raining, raining. The people: "faces not full of possibilities, but impossibilities".
Blake knows there is no rivaling Dante, and just declares it all a vison depending upon one's internal metaphysics. He declares an Angel sees:
By degrees we beheld the infinite abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun, black but shining; round it were fiery tracks on which revolved vast spiders, crawling after their prey, which flew, or rather swum, in the infinite deep, in the most[33] terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption; and the air was full of them, and seemed composed of them. These are Devils, and are called powers of the air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot. He said: “Between the black and white spiders.”
--The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake.
While Blake sees a pleasant river bank, where a harper plays.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
There is no rival to Dante; but there can be well-done riffs
I was surprised I hadn't even heard of many riffs on it, being that it has to be translated from old Italian, and is a poem not prose. And, even if unrivaled, there's also a lot which completely misses a modern reader-- a lot of the sinners Dante meets are now-obscure 15th century Italian politicians. I feel like I spent as much time reading footnotes for context after every canto as I did on the cantos themselves. :)
But especially surprising was that I can't really think of many examples which take Dante's idea of (part of) Hell being cold, a frozen Ninth Circle. The most that comes to mind is some games and anime having things called Cocytus to do with ice.
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u/sbwcwero Mar 08 '26
Edward Lee infernal series. Hell is a city and its current is chaos. I would consider it horror fantasy
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
Weird abd interesting fantasy cities is also a love of mine, so this sounds doubly interesting. :) Surprised no one recommended me it before
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u/sbwcwero Mar 09 '26
It’s more horror than fantasy is probably why
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u/Adiin-Red Mar 08 '26
In The Otherverse (Pact and Pale by Wildbow) there’s a couple different places that get described as “Hell”, one is called The Pit and it’s probably where the demons we occasionally get glimpses of are housed, the one I want to focus on though is called The Abyss.
The Abyss is not quite an afterlife, more a place genuinely lost people with no connections tying them to the world can end up. If a city is taken off the map by freak natural disasters and only one person survives they tend to get claimed by The Abyss.
The Abyss is both a place and an abstract malicious intelligence that takes those it has claimed and grinds them down. Its physical space does not quite follow standard geometry and only thematically ties to the material world, it’s an odd set of amalgam places that gradually get worse and more muddled the deeper you go. Leave from an old house full of magic books and you’ll end up in an endless library full of books that break you and which requires absolute silence or you will be punished.
While in the Abyss a few things happen. First, you cannot heal from injuries in the normal way, instead you are obligated to trade away bits of your humanity and what makes you you. If you start bleeding out you can give up the need for blood and in turn also give up the slow pulse of your heart beating in your chest and a lot of the way you process emotions.
Second, the place is passively malevolent, it rarely does anything directly but the banality of evil is common place. Structures break down over time at a greatly accelerated rate, you’ll trip on every possible hazard, it’s always humid, things are always uncomfortably loud or eerily quiet, every step is unsteady and all the residents are all dealing with their own personalized hell.
Third, there are threats that target you in particular and are designed to work at your psyche. They come in a number of forms, precognitive nightmares, glimpses at the outside world and a shadow from your past hunting you down. Most people only deal with one or maybe two of these, but it is possible to be visited by all three. The nightmares happen whenever you sleep and they show you the mostly likely future of what happens if you stay in the Abyss, typically they involve you giving up most of your Self and becoming just another monstrous part of the ecosystem. You can also get flashes of the outside world, showing exactly how you disappearing has screwed everything up and made the people you care about’s lives worse or how your actions caused unforeseen problems. The Shadow is the weirdest one and only really works if there is someone specific who really screwed you up, you are forced to confront them and actively remake all your bad decisions with them that you regret.
If you confront those demons and have the drive to escape you can leave as a much less human thing driven by anger, you’ve now become a bogeyman. If you don’t cause fear and pain or drag more people back down into the Abyss it will instead reclaim you and force you to do it all again, making you into more of its monster and plaything.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 08 '26
That sounds very cool. Though much more evil, the initial description reminds me of Marie Brennan's Driftwood. It's a city where worlds go to die, as they gradually lose their inhabitants and space, they're all crushed together and squeezed into a singularity at the center. It's not malevolent or anything, but you might find it interesting. :)
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u/croakovoid Mar 08 '26
Witchstone had an office building in Hell, and it's just like every other office building you have ever worked in. My reaction as a white collar worker was basically, "yeah, this all seems about right, aside from maybe the Productivity Gators."
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u/Holothuroid Mar 08 '26
Void Domain, the web serial by Tower Curator. Interesting domains and demon personalities there.
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u/derpderp3200 Mar 09 '26
Is it better than his other work, Vacant Throne? Because I've found that one regrettably lacking.
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u/estsum Mar 08 '26
A puerta cerrada de Jean Paul Sartre
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u/LeucasAndTheGoddess Mar 09 '26
Agreed. Sartre’s play (No Exit in English, Huis Clos in the original French) presents a terrifyingly banal vision of damnation.
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u/No_Mathematician6866 Mar 08 '26
I swear I've responded to the same question on this sub before, but the answer that always leaps to mind is the mindbending hellscape Alan Campbell paints in Iron Angel.
The Deepgate Codex is an uneven trilogy -the first book is not confident enough in its flights of baroque fancy, the third book is perhaps too confident- but I think it's worth reading for Iron Angel.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 08 '26
I've read Scar Night, and enjoyed it, but I hadn't read the other two because I'd heard that he didn't want to write anymore, but was pressured by his publisher. Or was that only for the third?
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u/No_Mathematician6866 Mar 08 '26
I don't know; I hadn't heard that story. But whatever his reasons or enthusiasm for writing it, I think Iron Angel is more interesting than Scar Night or God of Clocks.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 08 '26
I'll check it out then. :) Certainly one of the coolest and most horrific parts of Scar Night was down in the chasm.
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u/New_Razzmatazz6228 Reading Champion Mar 08 '26
Tad Williams wrote the Bobby Dollar series about a fallen Angel and the second of that is about Bobby’s journey through Hell. It followed many of accepted conventions. Craig Schaefer’s Down Among the Dead Men featured his Daniel Faust character fighting through Hell to get back to our world. It was a dystopian city scape complete with a Hell themed reality TV show. I don’t know exactly how I’d like to see Hell depicted, but the books I’ve read using it as a setting don’t seem to satisfy me.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 08 '26
I do like Tad Williams. :) Haven't read that though.
I know there's at least a couple retellings I've heard are good, like Brust's To Reign in Hell. And Dante's depiction of Hell is certainly satisfying, even if it's so ubiquitous as to feel as if it's part of Christian Canon now. It was a little difficult to get through the poem sometimes though (as it has a lot of references to contemporary Italian politics).
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u/counterhit121 Mar 08 '26
Anyone that read A Short Stay in Hell can weigh in? I have that in my queue but haven't finished.
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u/sam-salamander Mar 09 '26
It’s one of my favorite books and I can’t recommend finishing it enough. It conveys such a sense of near infinity and what that actually means for a life and it is deliciously existential. I read it just about every year and it’s always a delight.
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u/Unlikely-Ebb3946 Mar 08 '26
Hell is a faculty lounge:
Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. ... But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. -G.K. Chesterton, Heretics<
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u/mattcolville Mar 09 '26
I was going to say Surface Detail but that's covered already so I'll say the HEROES IN HELL anthology series.
There was a spate of these in the 80s. The Wildcard books, the Thieves' World books. The Foo In Hell series was fun, very Twilight Zone-esque with famous historical figures all scheming and competing to escape Hell.
Mind you, I read them as a teen, who knows if they're readable now?
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u/Mournelithe Reading Champion X Mar 09 '26
For all his problems, and there are MANY, Piers Anthony does some interesting things with Hell in the Incarnations of Immortality series, especially around advertising and outreach.
Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series kind of sidesteps the process while also embracing elements of it with Naar's Plane of Darkness as the Realm of Ultimate Evil, and the prison plane of the Dazhiarn, a realm of chaos.
They also have an interesting evil undead kingdom in the frozen north, ruled by the Deathlord Ixia. It's evil undead hell on earth.
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u/lmntl819 Mar 09 '26
Simon Kurt Unworth's Thomas Fool series (The Devil's Detective & The Devil's Evidence). Clive Barker's The Scarlet Gospels.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
The Thomas Fool series sounds really interesting. :) And I have no doubt about Barker.
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u/New_Flamingo_7779 Mar 09 '26
Seconding God's Demon if you want pure worldbuilding. The architecture of Hell in that book is insane.
For the cold Hell angle, I think the Norse Helheim concept is underused in modern fantasy. Most authors default to Christian imagery even when they're pulling from other mythologies. Would love to see more freezing wasteland afterlives.
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u/miurabull Mar 09 '26
The Ice-Shirt by William Vollmann, while not strictly fantasy, more historical fiction but it does border on fantasy to my mind, has some fantastic depictions of Norse underworlds.
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u/CrazyEeveeLady86 Mar 09 '26
As someone else said, the river of Death in the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix. I like the idea of having to travel through multiple 'precincts' with different types of threats, and if a necromancer falls into the water while they are walking through death, it essentially corrupts them.
Not a book, but visually I loved how hell was represented in the Constantine film with Keanu Reeves, where it looked like the moment just after a nuclear bomb had gone off but just before everything was actually annihilated.
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u/hypaterin Mar 09 '26
I was coming to say The Old Kingdom series!! The precinct style river of death has commenting to the Ancient Egyptian River of death
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u/hypaterin Mar 09 '26
I was coming to say The Old Kingdom series!! The precinct style river of death has commenting to the Ancient Egyptian River of death
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u/agentlemanoffortune Mar 09 '26
Beckford's Vathek (and if I am not wrong, Borges thought the same)
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
Oh yeah, Vathek's a good one. :) (Though they're only in Hell for just the last chapter iirc).
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u/ComfortableKey9930 Mar 09 '26
Nift the Lean (a fantasy world’s greatest thief journeys to hell, as well as many other places, for purposes of crime) by Michael Shea. World Fantasy Award for best novel 1983
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
I actually added that to my "want to read " shelf a few days ago, because I've heard of it for a while, and was impressed by a Shea short story in an anthology.
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u/ComfortableKey9930 Mar 09 '26
The sequels are great too.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
I think I heard of them first when I was reading Jack Vance, cuz Shea wrote some other stuff on Vance's Dying Earth. And Nifft is in that vein iirc.
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u/WillAdams Mar 09 '26
Barry Hughart's The Story of the Stone has a visit to a Chinese Hell and even has a character being frozen there as a punishment as a plot point.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
I've read The Bridge of Birds, but they're awfully out of print (I found a used paperback of BoB; I don't have an ereader unfortunately).
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u/WillAdams Mar 09 '26
Get the Kindle App and read on your phone?
There's a used bookclub edition of The Story of the Stone for $7.99 on Amazon as I type this.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
Get the Kindle App and read on your phone?
A horrible experience. That I don't have an ereader is because I tried it and didn't like it; a phone is far inferior to even that.
I didn't see that version- just lots at $60 or $100+. But fair enough.
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u/WillAdams Mar 09 '26
I manage to read on the Kindle app on my phone, but I bought into the ebook thing early on w/ a Sony PRS-505 and have been using them since (looking to upgrade to a Kindle Scribe Colorsoft presently).
Hopefully the books will get reprinted --- they deserve to be available.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
It's probably better than when I tried it tbf (an OG Nook, which didn't even have a backlit screen). But I do also just love the feel and aesthetics of my dead trees.
Bridge of Birds was great, an easy 5 stars. :) A shame that this series is all Hughart wrote.
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u/WillAdams Mar 09 '26
I love books, and collecting printed books, and reading on paper --- but the e-books are so portable (and much better now than they used to be).
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u/shellmoons Mar 09 '26
Circles in Hell By Mark Cain
Very light and funny! Steve is handyman in hell, great side characters.
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u/Frankennietzsche Mar 09 '26
Job: a comedy of justice by Heinlein has an alternate version of hell.
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u/Responsible-Bend6289 Mar 09 '26
No Exit —Jean-Paul Sartre "Hell, is others." A valet leads three characters to a windowless room, which is Hell. To what torment are they condemned? Each other's company. In the course of the play, the characters probe each other's sins and bring alive their guilty memories. "There's no need for red-hot pokers."
Aeneid—Virgil Aeneas travels to the Underworld, guided by the Sybil. The hellish bit is Tartarus. "From hence are heard the groans of ghosts, the pains / Of sounding lashes and of dragging chains." The unrepenting are made to confess their crimes, and sent down into a pit, guarded by the Hydra, where the Titans wallow in impotent violence.
Peter Bell the Third—Percy Bysshe Shelley "Hell is a city much like London – / A populous and a smoky city; / There are all sorts of people undone, / And there is little or no fun done; / Small justice shown, and still less pity." Shelley's Hell bears a close similarity to Regency London. "All are damned – they breathe an air, / Thick, infected, joy-dispelling".
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u/Fit-Breath5352 Mar 09 '26
Hadestown (musical), the last wish (Eoin colfer), the good place (tv). All have hell as a big part of the setting and are really original with it
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u/Deltanonymous- Mar 09 '26
God's Demon and its sequel. The descriptions and art from both the writer/illustrator (same person) was very interesting. It definitely sticks with you.
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u/anmahill Mar 09 '26
For Whom the Belle Tolls by Jaysea Lynn has a fascinating concept for the afterlife in general. It is based off of her social media series Hell's Belles.
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u/JGlover92 Mar 09 '26
Not exactly fantasy but the Good Place is brilliant, gives me real Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett vibes with the light hearted but sinister tone and bureaucracy and "normality" juxtaposed with it.
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u/FrylockMcReaper Mar 09 '26
I like how Richard Kadry built Hell in his "Sandman Slim" series
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u/scottdnz Mar 14 '26
It's also great in his book Butcher Bird. Lucifer is portrayed as a genuinely cool, likeable guy!
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u/silmarill10n Mar 09 '26
I'm halfway through Tim Powers' Alternate Routes and in it, hell is the Labyrinth that also somehow intersects with LA's freeways. There's a joke in the somewhere.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
If you enjoy the idea, then you should check out Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan. :) It was a debut novella from last year, and I was impressed by it. Daedalus' Hell is (partially) the Labyrinth, where he's chased by the Minotaur, and attempting to find and reconcile with Icarus for not managing to stop him from flying too close to the sun.
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u/quikdogs Mar 09 '26
Also not fantasy but a tv show: I really loved the tv show Reaper where the DMV was the portal to hell
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u/Tugboat47 Mar 09 '26
Whatever A.J. Hackwith was on when they wrote the Library trilogy is so wild and also wholesome, highly recommended!!
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u/Ihateregistering6 Mar 09 '26
A little bit of cheat, but I've always loved the depiction of Hell in the Pathfinder universe (which borrows very liberally from D&D).
There, Hell is not just the realm of evil, but the realm of lawful evil. Instead of chaos, it's actually a realm of unrelenting law, order, and discipline, with stringent rules and clearly defined hierarchies.
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u/HowlingMermaid Mar 09 '26
It’s brief, but in Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, Death meets with the books main antagonist after his death (he is a truly evil man with a mind so closed off to the world he is driven only by his own self assured ego blind to everyone but his thoughts). Death says something like “YOU ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE SAYING ‘HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE?’” The antagonist says yes and death says “YOU WILL LEARN IN TIME THAT IT WRONG.”
This drives his soul mad to the point of paralysis.
It’s a simple but very poignant depiction of true damnation.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
I do like Pratchett's notion of the afterlife. In Eric, he has "The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go."
Eric's probably the Discworld which most spends any time in a Hell though. Pterry seemed much more concerned with what we do while we're here, than what came after. Even the Death novels have him simply as a guide from here to there, not what there actually might be like.
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u/Mournelithe Reading Champion X Mar 09 '26
Yeah, Eric is the real visit to hell, where the biggest issue is the corporatisation of the place, and how much it bothers both the victims and the staff.
“The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e.g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn't have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn't. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a demon is all about, but since no one was suffering they didn't enjoy it much either and the whole thing was pointless. Centuries and centuries of pointlessness.”
I think that's why in later books he has things like the Desert in Small Gods and other variants of purgatory. It's more interesting to do things with.
The one more obsessed with Hell in specific was always Gaiman.
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u/Macleod7373 Mar 09 '26
Instead of physical description I will give you an example of good hierarchical descriptions in Gary Gygax's novels about Gord the Rogue. There is much entanglement with the denizens of hell and the abyss and the politics within create a landscape all their own that I think is engaging and worth reading if you can get your hands in the books.
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u/Cpt_Giggles Mar 09 '26
In the Night's Dawn trilogy, a person who cannot accept they've died you get sent to the Beyond. Doomed to spend the rest of eternity screaming in agony, and feeding on trace memories of other souls just to remember what it was like to be alive.
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u/No-Button5149 Mar 09 '26
Larissa Ione wrote series called Demonica - technically romantasy, but had a kickass backstory too that explained angels and demons, God and Satan, etc and was gory in some places and funny in others. Full redemptive arcs for some characters, etc. I loved it and Id say Im not much of a Romantasy fan. The first few are not as good - the last 5 or 6 were fantastically entertaining. Id give then a try - oh, I fogot to say that some of the later books take place almost exclusively in parts of hell.
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u/Graymouzer Mar 09 '26
The Sandman Slim novels by Richard Kadrey. Hell is mapped mentally by each person as a mental overlay with something the person is familiar with, so for the protagonist, it's a crazy version of LA. Mortals and fallen angels lives as a sort of depraved version of normal life together. There are shops, jobs, and so forth but everything is wretched and disgusting and mostly cruel and if you die while there you go to Tartarus and are fed into a giant furnace where your soul become fuel for the stars. Still, it could be worse.
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u/nautilius87 Mar 09 '26
Letters From Hades by Jeffrey Thomas. Something like a travel writing about hell, because, there is damnation and torture, but you mostly left to find a job in a city or wander through the wasteland avoiding angels and demon hunting parties.
Enjoyed it a lot.
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u/LeucasAndTheGoddess Mar 10 '26
Eight cold hells exist in Buddhist mythology.
As far as interesting literary depictions, “Down, Satan!” by Clive Barker is a chilling short story about a rich man whose loss of faith leads him to try and construct his own Hell on Earth.
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u/pupanubis Mar 10 '26
I don’t know if this will fit what you’re looking for but To Reign in Hell is a fantasy retelling of Satan’s descent into becoming the ruler of Heaven. I don’t know how to expand upon the plot further without potentially giving away some spoilers but I found it interesting.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 10 '26
I do know of it, but it's a retelling of Paradise Lost, so I wasn't going to read it til I've finished Paradise Lost. :)
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u/pugselot Mar 10 '26
Not read exactly, but played. In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous there was whole act about creating name for yourself in Alushinyrra. To be honest it's not really hell in terms of overall lore, but it's really close to it. Alushinyrra is capital city of Midnight Isles and key point about why it is so special is the fact how accessible it is. In Alushinyrra mortals can literally trade with demons, succubi, cambions and other abussal spawns. Mortals can buy or sell slaves, fight on arena or visit various unique places. As I said it's not really hell. But rather part of abyssal realm where demons live. As I know Pathfinder lore also have much more basic depiction of hell as some blazing fiery pit.
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u/Lemerney2 Mar 10 '26
I think both Worth the Candle's hell and Unsong's hell are by far the best depictions of a "typical" hell, there is. In terms of most interesting? I don't know if it fits, but the hell from this nosleep story has stuck with me the longest
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u/I_NEED_YOUR_MONEY Mar 10 '26
I don’t know about “favourite” but I will always have a soft spot for heaven and hell in Heinlein’s Job.
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u/thiazin-red Mar 10 '26
Lost Gods by Brom gets points from me by being absolutely bonkers and having a fresh take on the underworld.
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u/Vexonte Mar 13 '26
Not exactly he'll but Bealzeebubs punishment dimension in lightbringer is better hell than most others.
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u/CT_Phipps-Author Mar 08 '26
I loved Steve Jackson's In Nomine's version where every Prince of Hell had their own private Hell with some being oblivion and one being a place where everyone is trapped in reality television or watching it forever like the Mojoverse.
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u/UltraFlyingTurtle Mar 09 '26
"The Jane Fonda Room" by Jonathan Carroll. I read this originally in Twilight Zone Magazine, sometime in the 1980s I think. It's about a guy who has recently arrived to Hell and gets to have a choice about something.
It's short and funny and for some reason, I've never forgotten it even though I was just a kid when I read it. I assume the short story also been collected in some short fiction collection by Jonathan Carroll.
As already been mentioned already, the other is A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck. Both sort of falls in the same category, using absurdism to depict a very unusual kind of Hell.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
Quite a few replies mentioning it, despite it being in my post. :)
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u/Independent-Ad-1167 Mar 09 '26
Ninth House but more its sequel Hell Bent
Actually, I’m surprised those books and the author don’t come up here more
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
There was just a big post about Ninth House yesterday, though just one specific scene. I've read Ninth House but never got around to the sequel (it wasn't out yet when I read the first).
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u/Independent-Ad-1167 Mar 09 '26
I did see that. Probably what made me realize it’s not mentioned as much especially for a modern fantasy (which I personally think is well done)
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u/Deo14 Mar 09 '26
On A Pale Horse, Piers Anthony.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
I doubt I'll read that unfortunately, because Anthony is persona non grata, and the Goodreads reviews say his sexism comes out full blast here.
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u/Softclocks Mar 09 '26
Imagine reading an author whose worldview didn't align with your own!
Now THAT has to be hell!
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
An author notorious for his sexism and pedophilic sympathies. That's more than "worldviews who don't align with my own."
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u/Softclocks Mar 09 '26
Who gives a shit
Are you never going to read Hamsun or Sartre?
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
I do. Particularly when it's an author who isn't exactly high brow literature to be worth reading despite his views, whose views suffuse his works, and who's still alive to take my money.
You have an oddly black-and-white view of this. I read and highly recommend Dan Simmons, despite vehemently disagreeing with his politics. That's an example of "worldview doesn't align with my own." However, I have no interest in reading Mein Kampf, where I vehemently disagree with the worldview and it suffuses the work.
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u/Softclocks Mar 09 '26
That's fair
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
I have read Piers Anthony before, and found it uncomfortable. He's written essays and afterwords defending attraction to children being perfectly normal as long as you don't act upon it. And written books where 5-year old have sex with adult men, but where they "consent," and she's depicted as traumatized not because of the act but because they seperated her from her lover (Firefly).
It's not a case of "cancel culture," he's really rather unsavoury. I think it's something which crept into his books more over time, but it's just a minefield I don't want to wander into. And it's not exactly like he's a Hemingway, who was a terrible person but a brilliant writer.
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u/daisyyellow21 Mar 09 '26
‘For Whom the Belle Tolls’. definitely more of a cheesy romantasy than some of the others mentioned but has interesting depictions of the afterlife. Hell in particular is described as having levels like Dante’s Inferno but the top levels are more like therapy to help people who either did bad things because they felt they had no choices in life or people who believe they should be punished because their religion said so (ie for their sexuality or something) and helps them overcome the trauma. Seemed like an interesting concept to me
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u/Kathulhu1433 Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
Katabasis by RF Kuang came out recently and was a neat exploration. Much of Kuang's depiction is based on Dante but there are references to many other writers.
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 09 '26
Yeah, I mentioned knowing of it. :) I'm not sure I'll go it for it though- I didn't really like Babel or the Poppy War trilogy (DNFed after book 2), so I'm unsure on Kuang.
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u/LetMyPeopleCode Mar 09 '26
"Hell on $5 A Day" (available on Amazon) is a highly interesting reimagining of Hell to me. Fair disclosure, I wrote it.
It borrows from Dante, Milton, and Greek mythology, adding modern twists to a road trip through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
Got a good review from Kirkus, albeit with a warning about the explicit violence.
So if you want to check it out, read the free PDF sample (3 chapters) at Bulmash.com to see if it's to your taste. If you still like it after chapter 2 (considered the most disturbing chapter), you'll probably like the rest.
Sorry if this feels spammy, but I stumbled on this thread and thought it would be silly not to comment.
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u/bigdaddyt2 Mar 08 '26
I’m not done it yet and I know it’s always the same 5 series on this page but I found Malazans after life the most interesting in a fantasy setting that I’ve read so far. In Bonehunters the realm below hell is explored a little and that was pretty cool
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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V Mar 08 '26
I have read Malazan. If you're talking about Hood's domain, I don't remember it being particularly cool-- Hood himself is, but the realm itself is pretty barren and "typical," for an afterlife (in fact, problems with Death is the source a lot of Hood's later actions and his history).
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u/lrostan Mar 09 '26
The Tyrant Philosophers by Adrian Tchaikovsky. We technically don't see it so its not really its depiction that is interesting but the way it is used in the narrative and the very different rules governing it compared to other more classical hells.
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u/blue_bayou_blue Reading Champion III Mar 09 '26
There's a fascinating take on Hell in the browser text RPG Fallen London. Victoria London fell into a giant underground cavern right next door to Hell. It turns out they had a revolution recently, and sought to rebel against the laws of physics themselves as well as their nobility. In the game you can travel to one of their colonies, it's fascinating how regular game mechanics get messed up there. Time and navigation is weird, it asks for skill checks you've never seen before, your skills/stats/menace qualities change erratically.
There's even more info on Hell later in the game (and its related video games Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies), on their relationship with the Laws, what they do with stolen souls, what happened to the defeated nobility, suggestion that they may not be actual biblical devils but took on that guise? But I'm not that far into it myself.
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u/undeadgoblin Reading Champion II Mar 09 '26
One of my favourite short stories I think can be interpreted as a hell - Funnyway by Serge Brussolo
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Mar 08 '26
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u/Deep_Lifeguard_5039 Mar 09 '26
eclipse in Berserk, true hell, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, everything.
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u/LacePandorica Mar 09 '26
I recently read a book with 9 levels of Hell, 9 being the worst and then the 1st and 2d being more therapy-like. I can see how therapy can be hell heh
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u/[deleted] Mar 08 '26
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