cover image Ugly Heaven, Beautiful Hell

Ugly Heaven, Beautiful Hell

Jeffrey Thomas, Carlton Mellick III. Corrosion Press, $16.95 (276pp) ISBN 978-1-929653-86-7

Flamboyantly irreverent depictions of the afterlife give the two semi-satirical fantasy novels in this compilation considerable energy, if little direction. In Mellick's (Satan Burger) ""Ugly Heaven,"" two recently dead souls awaken with new identities in a perplexingly denatured Heaven populated by voracious shadows, unholy angels and strange life forms of inexplicable origin. As they struggle to find safe haven in this hostile environment, they make unsettling discoveries about their mortal lives and their peculiar deaths. Thomas's (Punktown) ""Beautiful Hell,"" a semi-sequel to his Letters from Hades (2003), is set in a Hell where a once-human sinner conspires with his demon lover to prevent wholesale elimination of Hell's satanic overseers by the Creator during one of His periodic visits to the underworld. Although wildly imagined, both novels are aimlessly episodic and revel long and discursively in their idiosyncracies. Only fans of the authors are likely to appreciate this book, and even then they may wish that each title had been fleshed out more fully as a stand-alone volume.