It’s an odd novel in that the explanatory passages are the most interesting. I really love the way everything about Lee’s version of Hell “adds up.” There is a clever and nicely explained piece of exposition for almost every economic, political and social facet of Hell. But wait, there’s more, because Cassie is a mortal in Hell she has crazy mystical powers that would give Satan the ability to manifest on Earth, thus she becomes a target of his demonic constabulary. Cassie decides to plunge deeper into the metropolis to find her twin sister, who died of a suicide. Not only that but hell isn’t all fire and brimstone, it’s a thriving city that runs on despair an carnage. The plot concerns Cassie, a young woman who finds herself in Hell, literally, after moving into her new house and making some new (dead) friends. Also, like Pullman’s novel, the parallels between Mephistopolis (Lee’s Hell) and our current society are not always in the most flattering. It is a setting that is clearly fantasy but still very much reflective of the place we live. Like The Golden Compass (or similar, lesser books) Lee builds a world that is both strange, but familiar. I compared Lee’s ultra-violent trip through hell to a children’s book. Lee’s book is less Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer and more Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

In truth what I got was something much stranger and, in my opinion, much more interesting. Whatever the explanation I planed on rectifying the problem when I bought City Infernal.Ĭity Infernal is the first book of Lee’s popular “Infernal Mythos.” I like to know very little about books before I dive in (you’ve seen how neurotic about spoilers I can get), but because Lee is known in the horror community for his stomach-churning gore (everything I had read prior to this confirms this) I figured that I was in for a sick, if a bit guilty, pleasure. It’s probably not his reputation for writing “extreme horror,” as Laymon and Ketchum are pretty extreme and are regular staples in my literary diet.

Then why have I been into horror for so long and mostly shied away from one of today’s big authors? I don’t have a good answer for you. A smattering of short stories, his novella The Cyesolagniac and his segment of Triage (which is a collection of three novellas by Lee, Jack Ketchum and Richard Laymon).

I’ve read tragically little of Edward Lee’s work.

City infernal by edward lee