Ok so I know based on the title, something else like The Divine Comedy might be a tall ask, but I can expand on that.
Basically, one of my COVID projects (that has since expanded to a general hobby/interest of mine) was tracking down different books/shows/pieces of media that show how Hell and the Devil works. Specifically my interest is to see how humanity's perception of the Devil or Hell has changed with time, or across different groups/cultures.
Books I've read so far:
Inferno and Purgatorio by Dante Alhigeri (I still have to read Paradiso) – since starting this project, this has become my all time favourite book
The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte – maybe the most obscure book on this list? A young, arrogant knight summons the devil and accidentally falls in love. But is it the devil's fault? Or all the fault of the knight who summoned it?
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (and other poems) by William Blake – I really hoped to love this going into it. His Songs of Innocence and Experience and Marriage of Heaven and Hell were good tbf, but most of his other prophetic works were way too dense for me
The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain – was a very interesting little read, though I'd read the Paine and Duneka edition which I've sibce learnt is fraudulent copy. I have since sought out the original version No 44, The Mysterious Stranger to read
The Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis – even seeing where this one was going, it was still very entertaining. I'm now waiting on an order for The Great Divorce, also by Lewis
Sandman by Neil Gaiman – finally finished reading this series maybe 1-2 years ago? Lucifer is a minor but recurring figure in this. I've since tracked down Mike Carey's following series of Lucifer comics. And Gaiman and Pratchett's Good Omens book.
Currently reading: Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I'm only just like 80 pages in, but so far it hasn't gotten to the main meat of the piece.
Books I aim to read:
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe – it being a play has made me hesitate reading it, if it's not as straightforward as reading a novel
Paradise Lost by John Milton – I DNF'd because I had to move places, and it required a lot of my attention to make sense of, I hope to get back to it.
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – similar to Marlowe above, didn't realise this was also a play
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Marturin – I know very little of this tbf
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky – I'm putting it off for it's length
No Exit by Jean Paul Satre – another play
I have other works I've tracked down to go along with this project of mine, but without listing them all I'm not always confident how closely it will answer my aim until I read them
I guess I should specify, despite my aims to see how human culture has represented the Devil and Hell, I'm mainly interested in fiction. I do have some non-fiction books on the subject, being the series of books by Jeffrey Burton Russel on the Devil, but given that I do research as a living, its hard to motivate myself to read non-fiction in my off time.
Tl:dr – I love Dante's Inferno, have tracked down some other obvious choices like Paradise Lost and Master and Margarita. Just wondering if there are any other major depictions I may have missed.
by FlyByTieDye
2 Comments
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
God’s Demon by Wayne Barlowe (and also Barlowe’s collection of artwork called Inferno)
You could start with Virgil’s Aeneid, although the concept of Hell and the Devil is absent it’s widely regarded as Virgil’s masterpiece and one of the greatest works of latin literature. Dante was himself profoundly influenced by the Aeneid. La Divina Commedia includes a number of quotations from and allusions to the Aeneid and famously features Virgil as a major character.