There’s a short story called Confidence Trick, by John Wyndham, the English SF writer who wrote Day of the Triffids, where a group of train passengers are involved in a crash and end up supposedly in Hell. They notice a woman coming towards them dressed in a beautiful mink coat - but she seems very unhappy. The escorting demon explains: “Live minks. Very sharp teeth.”
Hey, I think that may be the story I was thinking about. Though it goes on from there…
It seems to be surprisingly hard to find any references to it nowadays?
I like the Hell depicted in Maciste Goes To Hell (1925). Maciste, a virtuous strongman, ends up in Hell, where he has a great time thrashing demons–ugly, hairy brutes–and nearly ends up there forever because one of the demonesses–all the demonesses are hubba hubba cuties–kisses him.
I really liked Wayne Barlowe’s God’s Demon, about a lordly demon who, after millennia, repents of his rebellion against the Almighty and strives to be worthy of returning to Heaven. It was often appalling, in its description of the torments of the damned, but also oddly touching at times.
Probably my all time favorite…was from Nickelodeon’s Rocko’s Modern Life, “Heck.”
The “caverns of fire and lava” were said to be “just for tourists”—the actual abode for the condemned we saw was just a ratty chair and a crummy TV, in a blank nothingness.
The punishment was watching his friend die, on Earth, because of the condemned’s own gluttony. That’s it—but in this case, that’s all that it ever needed to be.
Probably the best part, though, is when the condemned soul got revived on Earth, and his soul began to ascend back to the land of the living, the devil (“Peaches”) began an enraged, overdramatic “NOOOOOO”—before shrugging it off with a bored “eh, go ahead.”
Why bother caring? One measly soul didn’t really matter—there’s plenty more where that came from. Always will be.
Minimalism and an affirmation of cosmic insignificance. Elegant.
The vision of Hell shown in The Devil In Miss Jones wasn’t particularly interesting, but it had a point to it.
Miss Jones was a totally virtuous person, until she committed suicide. (It’s implied that’s why she committed suicide.) Because of her unfortunate “accident”, she couldn’t go to heaven. But because she had led a virtuous life, the Devil was in a quandary about what to do with her. He decides to send her back to Earth, for a limited period of time, where she is to develop a vice of her choice. She chooses lust. So she spends some time back on Earth doing all the kinky lustful things that are the makings of a porn movie. Thus defiled, she is fit to be sent to Hell. But not the fire-and-brimstone Hell as commonly portrayed. No, the Devil assures her, Hell is nothing like that. She is sent to a special bespoke Hell designed just for people with a vice like she now has.
In Terry Pratchetts “Eric”, a new demon has been apointed Prince of Hell, and decides to remodel hell based on ideas taken from big roundworld corporations and government bureaucracies. There’s now a waiting room decorated with potted plants that smells like dead sloths, and leafs that feel like they are made of leather. Sisyfos must, before he rolls his boulder uphill, listen to a demon read the multi-MULTI volume OSHA regulations on the task.
When Rincewind and company leaves, it is by a staircase, where on each step has been chiselled a sentence like “I thought you would like it”, “I did it for the children”, etc. You know what they say about the road to hell, and good intentions.
Agatha Christie had a nightclub called “Hades” in her novel The Labours of Hercule (Poirot, of course – he brings the dog Cerberus out of the club) that has exactly the same decoration. Possibly Pterry got it from Auntie Agatha, or possibly Great Minds Think Alike.