The novel begins in the moments after the fall. The exiled rebel angels, thousands of them now transformed to hideous demons, have bruisingly impacted the crust of hell, scattered far across its geography—a land of complex features such as the Flaming Cut, some natives known as Abyssals, and one or two prior monstrous exiles. (Lucifer, their leader, is missing, however, and remains so for millennia.)

The new demons pick themselves up and begin to try to re-create some kind of civilization. Each Demon Major accretes a city around himself, reflecting his personality. Beelzebub, first among equals, builds the unparalled fortress of Dis, where gobbets of flesh, ponds of blood and the wails of tortured human Souls predominate and where Beelzebub's First Consort, the beautiful Lilith, lives in constant subjection and fear.

But our Byronic anti-hero, Sargatanas, builds something unusual by the river Acheron: Adamantinarx, an eerily beautiful city of learning and culture—at least as much as can obtain in the weird realm of hell. Here, the human Souls receive marginally better treatment than elsewhere. (One, named Hani, will eventually be allowed to develop a startling afterlife career.) Here sensitive under-demons like Eligor, the scribe who is rendering this narrative as one long flashback, can afford to meditate in the castle library (where, admittedly, the books recite their contents in the voices of the damned).

But such peace and relative ease cannot last in hell. A jealous and insane Beelzebub, aka The Fly, determines to undermine Sargatanas and his city-state, at first by proxy and then in direct assault. Two final goads to Beelzebub's ambition arise.

Lilith steals away to Adamantinarx and becomes Sargatanas' lover.

And Sargatanas decides he's going to attempt to depart hell and return to heaven, to beg forgiveness from "the Throne."

Such an insult to hell's dominion cannot stand, and only mighty battles, treachery and demonic heroism will settle the quarrel.

An infernal King Arthur and his bone table

Wayne Barlowe, in his debut novel, manages to translate the vibrant painted visions of his idiosyncratic home-brewed hell (visit the book's Web site http://www.godsdemon. com for a sample of these fantastical conceptions) into a fierce and stout narrative that echoes certain other fantasy classics even more so than it does the canonical authors Milton and Dante, while retaining a splendid novelty of conception. But before naming those literary ancestors, let's examine the real weirdness of Barlowe's hell.

He creates a quasi-organic realm of eternal gloom and torture (the plains of this hell throb with veins) that nonetheless can support a truly heroic tale. Like some infernal Camelot, Barlowe's hell hosts an Arthur (Sargatanas), a Mordred (Beelzebub), a Guinevere (Lilith), a Lancelot (Faraii, a loner "knight"), a Merlin/Gawain (Eligor) and so on through the complete chivalric catalogue. Their exploits, thanks to Barlowe's unfailing commitment to cinematic and sensorily rich prose, have the heft of old legends. Barlowe's world is consistent, captivating and confounding, always full of surprises and marvels.

As to authors and books I seem to hear trapped within this novel, like the Souls transformed to bricks that make up the buildings of hell, I would cite the following.

Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Named Shayol" (1961), for its organic metamorphoses used as punishment. In the same vein, Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters (1963) and The Last Castle (1967) come into play.

For an air of doomed Armageddon and battles fought over high if futile dreams, I would cite E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922) and M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence as cousins.

And finally, in terms of general gothic eerieness, Clark Ashton Smith and H.R. Giger seems to hover over this tale like dark spirits.

So, given all these inflowing currents into the mighty river of Barlowe's own imagination, the book attains a weighty magnificence—on the atmospheric, characterological, action-packed narrative fronts.

But where it falls short is the theology.

Hell simply cannot mean to a modern reader what it meant to the readers of Dante's and Milton's time. As such, the spiritual consequences and dilemmas never transcend a certain Marvel Comics lightweightness. (And there are theological contradictions as well. If hell opened for business only some time after the creation of humanity, what happened to those Souls who died before hell came into being?) We accept the premise and the characters' motivations, but the cosmic and spiritual import are really nil in this lurid game of battling demons.