This was my first foray into Robert Olen Butler’s world, back in the day; suffice to say I am now hooked and completely understand how he won a Pulitzer. How can you not love a book whose main character – the anchorman from Hell, literally – manages to be both hero and anti-hero at the same time? Hell is a very clever take on the idea that hell is personal to each of us and features exactly those torments designed to maximize the hellishness of the experience. The banality of what comprises the greatest possible eternal torture is both thought-provoking and laugh-inducing (Schadenfreude, anyone?). I mean really, how can you not admire a mind that determines that the most Hellish thing possible for Anne Boleyn would be getting stuck in a quasi-relationship that can never be consummated, all the while regularly losing her head, literally, while constantly searching for a bloated old King Henry VIII who doesn’t want to see her?
Leave a Reply