It's a Black Comedy featuring Hell in all of its horrifying glory. What did you expect?
Unmarked spoilers ahead
- As you might have guessed, Hell is no picnic, being the place where all the damned souls go to when they die. There's seven circles waiting for them, and all of them are awful:
- Envy is actually the Archdemon Sheol himself. While this is not the most horrific thing, it's still scary that your eternal home is as a part of the body of a giant whale-mouthed serpent with Extra Eyes ALL OVER HIS BODY. And most souls are forced to reside in the less than pleasant parts of his mostly hollow body.
- Sloth doesn't appear to be much at first...until our heroes realize that the sand is made from the bodies of millions of damned souls who lay there.
- Greed is a decadent city with No OSHA Compliance where one's next step on the catwalks could prove fatal. Also, most of the damned souls either get sent to mines to work for Mammon forever as slaves, or are made a part of the vile money-grubbing games for the demons, such as a burning wheel to spin with people impaled on it.
- Gluttony is one of the worse ones, being a disgusting swamp full of excrement, noxious gasses, withered plants, and many demons that will even feast on their own kind given the chance.
- Lust isn't so bad on the outside, being just a poorly-managed town full of brothels and dim lights, but it's heavily implied that whatever goes on in those houses is decidedly NOT pleasurable for the damned. Matilda also mentions how some damned are made to reenact their sins in a twisted sort of pageant show. It usually agitates the demons into tearing them apart.
- Wrath is your typical Fire and Brimstone Hell with a couple twists. For one, there's rivers and lakes of lava everywhere, blood and guts liter the barren landscape, and some places feature hordes of hands rising from the ground to grab at anything just so they can tear it apart. If you let that sin take over your life, one of those hands could be yours. Also, there is constant warfare, and in the few breaks in-between, the residents of the Malebolge, presumably both mortal and demon alike, are left in shell-shocked horror every time.
- And finally, the circle of Pride. More specifically, Lake Cocytus. Not only is this where Lucifer resides, but the absolute worst of the worst are either tortured endlessly by imps or kept in suspended animation in the Archdemon's amphitheater to one day watch him ascend.
- The beginning scene of Pug torturing a guy while politely talking with him and being blissfully unaware of the man's suffering really highlights how, as altruistic and lovable Pug is, he's still an imp of Hell.
- Alichino's introduction has her skewering a mortal running away from Pug. Then, after gaining the imp's name, she chases after him, intent on keeping him like a pet.
- Her appearance is unsettling too, looking like a harlequin who's outfit is a part of her large body.
- Moloch describing how, if any imp disobeys Lucifer, he'd smash that imp, and then do it again and again every time he reforms until the end of the world. Considering he's talking while he knows Pug is present, it's a major Implied Death Threat.
- The chapter that details how Mephistopheles caused the first sin among humans. He notices Cain, as in Cain and Abel, sulking, and upon hearing about how jealous he is of his brother, recommends that he just kill him. To demonstrate his point in how killing a person is no different than killing anything else, he summons a mouse just to crush it in his hand. Then he gaslights Cain into believing that because no one really knows him, he's free to take his own brother's life. And he does. Sure enough, he's in total shock that he did it. Mephistopheles then twists the knife further by convincing him that the pain in his stomach from the act is just weakness, and if he preaches the act of murder to other people, it will go away. Later, Cain's damned soul, the first ever damned soul, is given to him by Azrael. The demon feeds it to an eager Sheol, and then gets the idea to start a whole business involving all of this. In other words, he's the reason the damned suffer.
- We later learn that humans would have sinned anyway without him, but that doesn't take away from the fact that he figured out how to send people to eternal damnation.
- While in Gluttony, Pug gets lost in the swamp of Scathatch, only to come across Valac, a Duke who at first just looks like a very young-looking mortal with an adult voice. Then once Pug is none the wiser, that body is revealed to be the middle head of a three-headed Draconic Abomination that instantly rises from the mire and swallows the imp. He very nearly has Matilda eaten too before Alichino rips through one of his heads and rescues both lesser demons.
- By far one of the most horrific chapters in the entire books is, somewhat appropriately, "No Sympathies". It's a flashback featuring an exorcist and a young girl possessed by Beelzebub. It only goes downhill from there.
- The exorcist finds the girl surrounded by bile and half-eaten food. Then the possessed girl shows up. She's covered in sores, her ribs are plainly visible from how malnourished she is, occasionally her belly bloats like a frog's throat, and her body contorts and moves with the speed and grace of an insect. Oh, and when she's forced back by the exorcist, her eyes become big and bulbous like the demon possessing her.
"Feed me!"- When the exorcist questions Beelzebub as to why he and demonkind do the things they do, the Archdemon gleefully breaks the man down by answering his questions truthfully, but in a way that repeatedly tests his faith by either making him sympathize with Hell's plight, or sharing his own theories on why God would condemn so many to such a horrible place. In particular is his musing on how God must either be not that powerful, an idiot, or just that heartless. He actually leans on the second one, claiming that the Creator made everything with too many contradictions for it to be considered reasonable.
- And then, when it's all finished, Beelzebub reveals that he sent the girl's soul to Heaven well before her mortal form could be saved, and proceeds to rise out of the body in the most unsettling and brutal way imaginable. Bones break, skin stretches, and the monstrous dragon-man-bug monstrosity leaves the corpse behind as a sludgy heap before leaving the exorcist with nothing.
- Much later in the book, it revealed that the exorcist is one of the frozen prisoners in Lucifer's tower, something Beelzebub recognizes with glee.
- In the chapter about Samael and Lilith's doomed relationship, Lucifer immediately assumes that Samael is after the throne and his daughter for lustful reasons, and resorts to castrating him with his lance. Ouch. He threatens to take away much more if he doesn't end he and Lilith's romance.
- Pug is in a bad situaton already. Mephistopheles has come for him, Alichino is in a losing battle with Moloch, and the ruler of tempters is keen to let him be tortured by the demon general. Then the portal Sheol opened to the mortal realm is revealed to have nothing but a black void in it. The mortal realm is nowhere to be seen. And THEN...a huge eye opens up within the darkness, and with it comes tentacles of inky blackness and a smaller monster that just screams Body Horror with its human-like mouth attached to a spindly neck and a cape made of flesh. The Intruders are here.
- The Intruders as a whole are nightmare fuel incarnate. Aside from their varied, grotesque appearances, they have come to Hell with one goal in mind: EAT EVERYONE. When Moloch attacks the first Intruder, it just makes it stronger, and he's soon overwhelmed and nearly drained of all of his lifeforce before Samael saves him. It gets even worse when the Intruder army starts to invade the other circles, with demons getting outright absorbed and eaten by hordes of these abominations. In particular is Mammon watching one of his generals, Astaroth, get overwhelmed by two of them and graphically swallowed when they turn inside-out and absorb her. He's left appropriately shell-shocked.
- Making matters worse is that no one seems to know where they came from until God explains. As it turns out, mankind is dead, their souls now all in Heaven or Hell. But without their mortal bodies in the living world, the sin that was inherent to their creation has gone unbound, and it turned into the monsters that are now invading Hell to find even more sin to bolster themselves further. In other words, WE had these things swimming in our minds the whole time.
- The main Intruder is as bad as one might guess, looking like a traditional Lovecraftian horror with its starfish-like body and the tons of Extra Eyes and maniacal mouths lining its pitch-black body. To say nothing when it absorbs its own army and devours almost all of Hell's inhabitants, trapping them in an endless dark prison within it.
- Sheol falling down from the top of Hell and smashing through all of Pandaemonium, reducing Mammon's proudest creation to rubble while he's still in his tower. He ends up falling down with the rest of his empire to the bottom.
- One of Lucifer's demons, Old Scratch, drags a mortal soul right to him. At first, the Archdemon acts cordial and understanding, before just as casually asking his minion to rip out the man's tongue, and then his arms, then his face.
- Azrael is one of the scariest beings associated with Heaven, being The Grim Reaper and with the looks of a bat-winged sythe-wielding skeleton. However, it's subverted by how cordial she is to our heroes.
