"There has been a lot of debate over what Hell looks like. Christians serve it up Dante style, with caverns of fire and lakes of lava. Muslims change the names, but they're mostly on the same page. The Buddhists have Naraka, with its pus rivers and infinite tortures. Jews have an undesirable piece of real estate where everyone gets Saturdays off and someone's always burning garbage. But when damned souls of any denomination finally come face-to-face with the real thing what they generally feel is disappointment, and that's the genius of Hell.
Hell falls short of expectations. Hell disappoints. Hell underwhelms. Hell is always worse than you thought it would be. Tackier. Cheaper. Dirtier. Uglier. Hell looks like someone slept in it the night before and didn't wash it afterwards: it's soiled, rumpled, stained and unpleasant. Almost everything in Hell is broken and hardly anything works. The things that do work have been repaired so poorly, so many times, that they're actually harder to use than before. Dante got the general gist - he was there, after all - but, being Italian, when it came time to write it up he couldn't resist making it seem romantic. Hell is about as romantic as a soup kitchen. A soup kitchen where everyone is naked, dirty and dead."
~ Grady Hendrix, Satan Loves You
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