A while back I'd had a talk with an editor I worked for back in the days when I cared enough about the world to write about it. He'd been wondering what I thought of some horror stories he'd sent over.
Each was a bad attempt to be clever...not because the idea was bad or the premise was cliche' but the skill to pull it off was simply not there.
You simply can't fake everything...least of all when you want to do a story about "Hell" like these stories tried to do. Be it literal or philisophical. Everyone has had misery in their lives and some a lot of depression...but that's not quite Hell. It's a term so loosely thrown around that it's like calling a person a "Genius" instead of being honest and just calling them "Talented'.
I'm not saying that their is a defenition of what Hell is exactly...but you sure as hell know it when you see it...or feel it as the case may be.
Story wise only two men I know of repeatedly took the Dante' like trip into Hell and came back with pages of blood. These are Jim Thompson and Peter Rabe. Their not horror writers and Rabe is pretty unknown outside of pulp crime circles.
Read Thompson's "The Killer Inside Me" and you'll not only be dissapointed by every Serial Killer movie EVER MADE after reading it...but you'll wonder why you've never killed a person. For the American Psycho crowd this could be a dissapointment...but for those who like intimate stories where a character feels real...you'll enjoy it many times over...for a diffrent reason each time.
Rabe's "Kill The Boss Goodbye" is about the best example you'll read about self destruction. Now I don't mean in the Sid and Nancy or Teen Goth/Punk/Industrial/Big Band/Polka Band Premise for a Song kind of way but in that natural way we all have. That lil voice that wants to destroy as much as create. Only in this tale the method to the madness is not only sickly delibrate...but the ultimate form of revenge. Very much a "Destroy Yourself and Take The World With You" kinda story...only with a very calm, poetic, and lovingly tragic absolute evil.
One really has to read these books and many of their others ( along with a generaly healthy reading habit) to see why these two stand alone. Their visions of Hell are not the kind that evolve out of personal taste or stylized visions...they are simply those few examples of things we wish were not true...and more so wish were not around the corner waiting for us to slip up.
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