Go to Hell A Heated History of the Underworld

Close your eyes and picture -- just for a moment -- hell. Fire? Demons? Eternal torment? Well, yes -- that's the place, in one very hot nutshell. But that's not all there is to the forbidding world beneath us. For a few millennia now, we mortals have imagined and reimagined hell in countless ways: as a realm of damnation, as an inspiration for highest art, as a setting for the lowest of lowbrow comedy. One might conclude that for all our good intentions to enter para- dise, we can't seem to get enough vivid details of its counterpart, hell. Provocative, colorful, and damned entertaining, Go to Helltakes readers on a tour of the underworld that is both darkly comical and seriously informative. From the frozen hell of the Vikings to the sun-drenched Cayman Islands' town of Hell (where tourists line up to have their postcards aptly postmarked), from Dante's circles of hell to Buffy the Vampire Slayer'sHellmouth, Go to Hellembraces our evolving relationship with the sinner's final destination, revealing how we truly think of ourselves in thisworld. What's down below? Meet HEL, the hideous, half-rotting goddess of the Viking underworld. Beware the Egyptians' AM-MUT, an unsightly mix of lion, crocodile, and hippo parts, and insatiably hungry for wicked souls. Visit JIGOKU, a Buddhist realm of eight fiery hells and eight icy hells: an all-you-can-suffer hot-and-cold buffet. Step into the INFERNO for a tour of Dante's nine circles of the damned...

Chuck Crisafulli, a writer and journalist, and Kyra Thompson, an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, have collaborated previously on a variety of film scripts, teleplays, and series treatments. Crisafulli is the author of two nonfiction books, Teen Spirit and Moonlight Drive. As a freelance journalist, he has covered pop culture for the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, and Rolling Stone, and he was a contributing editor with Option magazine. Thompson's award-winning and -nominated documentary work includes Dying to Tell the Story, a film about war journalists, and The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, a history of women in film. They both live in California.