Hell

I arrived in my destination, Hell. The Vestibule to Hell looks like something out of a heavy metal concert, a giant archway made with the bones of various animals, mainly human. The guards were fifteen-foot tall cloaked and horned sentinels, with necklaces made of human skulls. I was surrounded by undulating hordes of people, some with blood literally squirting out. I smelled a whole gamut of horrid scents; sulfur, phosphorus, vomit, and feces, to name a few. There was a veritable fog of sound, shrieks continuous and non-stopping, and inhuman barks from all order of demons.
Once I got over the initial shock of being in the most dreaded place conceived by man I decided to look around a bit, the River Styx was fairly cool, looking from the shore the surface was a mist with countless ghostlike souls swimming around in the depths. The river went on for as far as the eye could see and, did not flow very fast. The main chamber of Hell was a sight to see, the largest cavern I had ever observed. The lake of fire burned bright, as always, with demon surfers hanging ten on the ten-foot flames. In the very middle of the lake was Lucifer’s castle, the concave cliffs rose hundreds of feet into the air before the castle even began. The castle itself had countless ramparts with frightful gargoyles perched all along the top. Every now and again a gargoyle would swoop off its perch and bite the head of one of the many humans below. The spires of the castle had many a writhing person impaled on their spines, never dying and ever suffering.
The cavern that Hell was located in was very spacious, the ceiling being many hundreds of feet in the air. The walls had cracks running all throughout them, it seemed like rock climbers would love it here. The ceiling had very large stalactites hanging from it, some one hundred feet long. The floor of Hell, most of it at least, seemed high class; stone was perpetually warmed from all the fire throughout Hell, it fairly pleasing to the feet, definitely an oversight on the devil’s part.
I decided to visit the torture chambers next. The first one I visited had an enormous lake of liquid feces. People were submerged in the pool and were made to stay under by demons flying overhead. As you can imagine the smell was horrible. Thankfully, because I was just visiting, they gave me a facemask. The lake had to be at least 500 feet in every direction, the lake seemed to undulate and writhe because of the moving bodies just under the surface. A writhing lake of feces is an extremely disgusting sight.
Hell has countless torture methods, there are the more conventional tortures such as the feces treatment or the pulling of all of your finger and toenails along with hair. There are also the more unconventional methods of torture such as the treadmill that you have to run at full speed all day long and get no stronger, or the really attractive stranger who leads you on but will never return affections. I find these unconventional tortures the most interesting.
The denizens of hell were of all varieties, you needn’t be human to go to hell. the idea of heaven and hell must be universal because there were all manner of non-human entities living out their own punishments. Strangely those without the faculties to interpret the idea of god and the devil cannot be sorted because they know not how to realize the grace of god, they are sent to purgatory. Even with the species difference there seemed to be a general camaraderie among the suffering denizens of hell. Because of the suffering they all have to endure for all eternity they realize how useless it is to hurt, emotionally or physically, other people; making the people who have been there the longest fairly nice people, albeit a bit bitter.
The demons of hell were all of all sorts. Because of the interspecies diversity the demons had to be able to manage all sorts of beings. One type, made specifically for a huge pigeon like species, was a giant translucent wall that the pigeons always seemed to run into. One the more frightening types was nearly 40 feet tall and had horns that were 15 feet tall, these were mainly for a very aggressive horned bear type species. The one for humans was, unsurprisingly, the most frightening, it was slightly taller than the average human, around seven feet tall, had four arms, and carried two scimitars and walked on the other four limbs that were left. I cannot place what made it so frightening, maybe it was the six-inch long fangs or the claws but it was by far the most frightening thing I had ever seen.
After seeing that demon I decided I wanted no more time in hell. I went back to my original home, heaven, and made sure my supermodel wife was still making me sandwiches at home. When I got home she asked if I wanted a whole lot of money, and I decided against it, at that point I realized I was miserable. How was it that having everything you wanted is just as bad as having nothing?

I read the story "It Can't Be Helped, from Farewell to Manzanar" the story is written in the first person about a Japanese girl in the 1940's who is sent to a Japanese internment camp. The story doesn't go into the conditions of the camp at all, which I was disappointed with; it was more about the effort to keep her family together, and because the main character was a child she can do nothing to help keep the family together, it is a story about someone else's struggle. I did not like this story much because it was a very everyday sort of story. The story doesn't seem to go anywhere, only that they have to move a good bit and in the end go to an internment camp. There is nothing she is trying to achieve and the protagonist is completely helpless to change what happened to her, the story has no good or bad to it; things just happen.
There is no noticeable struggle in the story, which makes it uninteresting. There is no moral or meaning to this story, I did not gain any insight as to the living conditions of these internment camps because the story ends right when they get there. Unless you wanted back-story on the author, for instance at one point she says, "Instead of saying ba-ka-ta-re, a common insult meaning stupid, Terminal Islanders would say ba-ka-ya-ro, a coarser and exclusively masculine use of the word which implies gross stupidity" this does not make for very interesting narrative unless you are reading the story to see different japanese insults, which I care nothing for. The story does not reveal any information that would make you think about anything and that is essentially what books are for, to reveal information the reader cares about or tell an engaging story, and this story does neither.


I think the author’s purpose for writing the story was purely an internal one. The author does not show us much more hardship than we all have to endure. I think the author wrote this story so she could really organize part of her life. The story does not reveal anything that could have social significance, and I think it was written to better help the author figure out what she thought of her own circumstance at the time. for instance at one point she says, "One of his [she is referring to her father] threats to keep us younger kids in line was,'I'm going to sell you to the Chinaman.'" this only serves to illustrate the hostility between the chinese and the japanese, and nowhere in the story does this come into play.

I think it is important to read about other people's lives to expand our own understanding of the human condition. Through an autobiographical format a person can convey the idea and feelings they were experiencing much more accurately than in fiction. Many autobiographical works are intriguing because it tells of events, which we will never witness, with accuracy that only a person who actually experienced the event can convey.

The call of cthulhu and other weird stories

This book is a seires of short stories By the early 20th Century horror writer,
H.P. Lovecraft. I chose to read the Shadow Over Innsmouth.

H.P. Lovecraft's writing style is fairly nondescript, the reason being is that the terror his protagonists feel is from things they cannot describe or he has no idea why he is so horrified. His stories are typically about the sheer insignificance humans have in the universe. his stories are littered with beings that are indescribably horrifing with names the human speech organs cannot pronounce, such as Cthulhu. There is an otherworldy nature to some of his stories, such as, in one story, an island of black tar that comes out of the ocean one night under a man stranded in a boat. In another story a man has to traverse a giant antartic mountian range.

Mind you that I do not do the horror of this story any justice in this entry.

In this story our main character goes to a fairly rundown town in Rhode Island, inhabited by people who look, ever so slightly, like fish. Their fishy appearance is very horrifing to our main character, so he decided to ask some of the more normal looking people. He gets wind that a drunk in town knows a dark secret about the appearance and cult behaivaors of the townspeople. there is a surprise ending that I can't reveal.

Lovecraft has a somewhat antique way of writing, he uses intracate language mixed in with phrases that were out of use even for his time, like electric torch instead of flashlight. the writing style is similar to poe, one of his greatest influences. Overall the story was very enjoyable and I do like the language he uses, it makes some of the science fiction seem antique. the indescribable nature of most of the horror is more like how the mind works, it is most often very hard to describe what makes something truly terrifing. I would recommend most of Lovecraft's stories to fans of science fiction and horror.