Have You Read This? Everybody Lies in Hell by Dave Zeltserman

We can all picture Hell, or at least what stories and paintings have told us hell is. Asked to picture it, most of us come up with the same image: blackened caverns filled with lakes of fire populated by red, pitchfork-wielding devils that may or may not belong on a box of Red Hots candy. However, there are some that imagine Hell to be a different place. While still a place for the damned, there are some stories that offer a more original and surprisingly fun version, considering that it is a realm that is literally designed for eternal punishment. Dave Zeltserman’s novel Everybody Lies in Hell has conceived a hell that is literally created by those who inhabit it.

Detective Mike Stone’s version of Hell, for example, is a sparsely inhabited New York, but he is able to travel to other hells where he is able to continue what he did in life: work as a private detective. Typically, his afterlife is spent looking into the lives of people who have enough awareness to hold onto who they were when they died to determine how they died, who killed them, and even what they did that got them sent down here. He also tries to avoid religious zealots and brutal warlords whose deeds got them sent to Hell but who are still able to make Mike’s hell truly awful. Mike soon gets a case which forces him to question how he’s been spending his eternal damnation and ultimately raises the question of if anyone, even those eternally damned, are capable of saving themselves.

Zeltserman is obviously adept at writing down-to-earth crime novels like Small Crimes. That talent also comes into play here. Other than taking place in Hell, this feels like a straight up crime noir with a hard-boiled protagonist who has a quick-witted secretary, a femme fatale, the chasing down of various leads, and the eventual feeling like all the walls are closing in. Mike Stone may be a damned soul who earned his spot in the afterlife, but readers can still root for the guy. And the Hell he inhabits, as well as other hells of more “aware” people, are all richly detailed, based on the individuals that created them. The mechanics of Hell, whether some souls create their own hells, are absorbed into others, or simply left to mindlessly torture themselves for all eternity, is revealed in a great example of top-notch world building. For people who like the crime noir of James Ellroy as well as fantasies with plenty of world-building, Everybody Lies In Hell is one trip to Hell that they should put on their travel itinerary.