They say the Sign to Hell reads, "Be of Good Cheer"

Hello, friend. I'd like you to join me in a meditation on the universe. Come along and contemplate how the ley lines of the cosmos could be so hideously contorted as to result in the aside image. Feel free to click on it, peruse it, soak it in. Bathe in its sumptuous vagaries. It's a translation of Dante's inferno, untampered, with a version of Dante on the cover who does not appear anywhere within the following pages. In fact, he comes from this video game adaptation which could be said to stray ever so slightly from the source material. And by stray, I mean that you fight man-eating dicks and vaginas with a scythe that you stole from Death itself because you KILLED HIM.

Nonetheless, Del Ray publishing requires a hearty salute. I haven't seen this much chutzpah in the promotion of a literary classic since Bantam Spectra placed Will Smith on the cover of I, Robot and boldly declared, "One man saw it coming":



Too bad he wasn't in the book. Of course, neither was the plot of the movie, but that's a small quibble.

But to fully get a sense for the kind of visionary thinking that has gone into the Del Ray edition of Dante's inferno, which includes an introduction by Dante's Inferno Executive Producer Jonathon Knight and a 16 page full color art insert, I may need to put this whole thing another way. Let me get my freak on and recontextualize this shit for you.

Try to imagine how this:


"il Sommo Poeta" Dante Alighieri

Becomes this:


"Sows and Mows" Dante

Followed by the precise and painstakingly crafted translation work of this man:


19th century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Turning into a video game that runs a marketing campaign like this:


Leading to an “animated epic” like this:



Giving us immortal lines of poetry like this:

"You're gonna love it. We've got bodies flying around. We've got Dante literally being shoved up a monster's butt." - Director Vic Cook

And this:

"In the original game script we wrote that Cerberus was going to shove Dante up his ass...it was a crazy, crazy scene. We just couldn't do it in the game for a lot of reasons. To have that moment that was in the game script that was cut from the game to show up in the animated feature is just really cool." - Executive Producer Jonathon Knight

Which makes me feel like this: