Hell and Damnation.

[Doctor Dugald Eldritch]

Hello. I would like to remark that another form of literature I am interested in is the concept of Hell and the afterlife. Any piece of literature that deals with Hell in an intelligent manner. Aside from The Divine Comedy, Dante's Inferno, No Exit and Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, can anyone recommend me any other piece of fiction that is focused on the Afterworld, and perhaps deals with it in a dark, grim and pessimistic fashion? Any good phantasy of a person condemned to Hell? As always, I would be most grateful.

[Waffiesnaq]

Stanley Elkin's The Living End comes to mind. It's hilarious. Also, Chuck Palahniuk's Damned ("Are you there, Satan?"), although it's not quite as clever as the former.

Adrian Lyne and Bruce Joel Rubin's excellent, excellent film Jacob's Ladder is all about the afterlife; heaven, hell, damnation, salvation. It's loosely based on Dante and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I know you asked for literature and not cinema, so I'm recommending you

the screenplay

 

the screenplay

instead.

Stephen King's "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French" is a very short and effective portrayal of eternal damnation. It plays on Sartre's No Exit.

[Waffiesnaq]

You're making me jealous, HG. You have a fine flick ahead of you with Jacob's Ladder, especially when watching for the first time.

I don't really seek out horror screenplays unless I know it'll add a special dimension to the actual viewing experience (the JC screenplay I promoted has some nice goodies in the form of essays, unused scenes/shots, etc.; in fact, I had to order a new copy after tearing up the book to use some pages as mini-posters). I recently read the screenplay to The Blair Witch Project, and it's curious how a story one has seen played out multiple times can suddenly appear so alternately cerebral, so more internalized yet expansive, like a Beckett play. Reading Blair Witch is even more claustrophobic than witnessing it, which I would not have suspected beforehand.

While hardly a horror film, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe is one spectral experience that cannot be classified as anything except sui generis. When selling it to friends I tend to describe it as a "ghost story without a ghost"; its dreamy structure, shimmering lighting, and funereal cinematography lends credence to the idea of a post-life narrative unfolding around the two principals. Life is portrayed as afterlife throughout, being as totally transmutable, cause and effect as a sick joke, and the ending... well, this film is definitely one of the strangest and most melancholic movies I've seen; its interpretable nature is contrasted by its script being only a fistful of pages long. It's voidal cinema at its finest, and I like to think Cioran would have gotten a becalming break from brooding at the bistro seeing this. So click on the crotch.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-a_LXS_KI0

[njhorror]

The title of this thread would be a great title for an anthology, or should I say a "helluva" title? I kill myself. Really, I do.