R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Hell Is What You Make It

[dem bones]

R. Chetwynd-Hayes - Hell Is What You Make It (Robert Hale, 1994)

Barbara Walton

Prologue

Count Apollo: The Summer Palace
The Garden
The Housing Estate
The Town
The Train
The Village
The Camp
The Headquarters

Blurb:

The (no one knows who] narrator is led by Count Apollo through the various stations of Hell and it does not take long for either the reader or narrator to know who the Count is ...

This is a fine and supremely imaginative book, the kind of satirical fantasy for which R. Chetwynd-Hayes is known. Pathos, humour and more than a sprinkling of horror hold the reader transfixed to the end ... which may have been the beginning.

Red faces in Hell as an author arrives before his time, having somehow found his way to the once fiery pit via the Gate of Sleep as opposed to the Valley of Death. Count Apollo gamely allows him to treat the excursion as a fact finding mission, even provides a guided tour - He has a soft spot for writers as only priests do more to promote His kingdom. Their first port of call is;

The Garden: Where an old woman awaits the return of her daughter and grandson from a boutique in town. The embittered ancient, whose joy in life is wrecking said daughter's relationships and generally making her life a misery. Won't you stay for another tea? Did you hear a car? They should be back any minute now.

The Housing Estate: If The Garden is understated, this second story ... Face it. Setting RCH loose in a dodgy pub (The Naked Arms) among council estate tenants .... well, he's not going to enjoy the experience, is he? Features Fanny the camp barman (calls everyone "Ducky"); Black Beard, the belligerent bruiser who swings a tankard above his head, bellowing jolly stuff like "Cursed be he or she who thinks, for they shall be stricken by knowledge" and "By Lucifer! How we hate each others guts!"; and Grandpa, who reckons it's all very well for the young 'uns, rogering everything that moves. How about sorting him out for "a bit of crackling," instead of thinking only of themselves? A tomcat drags something into the bushes, as we head toward ...

[cauldronbrewer]

Cool art by Barbara Walton. She did some great covers for Robert Hale over the years (see also this one).

[dem bones]

Feb 18, 2020 17:39:36 GMT humgoo said:

The Vault RCH A-Z is quite monumental really. How many entries does it have? Mr. Jones' bibliography lists 225 short story entries. (And the interview is indeed reprinted from Skeleton Crew according to the Acknowledgements section.)

Friend Humgoo, should you get to read this. Next time you have your copy of Gaslight, Ghosts & Ghouls at hand, can you let us know if Stephen Jones' biblio includes the Hell Is What You Make It chapters as individual short stories?

Meanwhile.

The Town: A bus ride to the Thugsville shopping centre to stock up on instruments of violence and torture, which, other than beer, is all they sell around here. The currency is curses, which makes things difficult for narrator (who may or may not be "the Prince of Ghoul Land") as he is hopeless at swearing. Somehow he gets involved with persons known as Agent 069, aka 'the Man from Auntie' and Glorious Glanda of DIMP (Department of Immoral Purposes), who are preparing a raid on the premises of Cross-Eyed Nick of SMUT, who is suspected of keeping an orderly house and distributing non-pornographic literature "liable to corrupt the minds of all bad-intentioned citizens." God, but he didn't half write some bloody nonsense.

[humgoo]

No, Dem, Mr. Jones lists it as a novel only. RCH as Dante taking an underworld tour? Are they more like vignettes or full-fledged stories? Goofy stuff?

[dem bones]

Sept 28, 2020 17:35:29 GMT humgoo said:

No, Dem, Mr. Jones lists it as a novel only. RCH as Dante taking an underworld tour? Are they more like vignettes or full-fledged stories? Goofy stuff?

Thanks so much for taking the time and trouble to check, C.

Stories, I guess, and 'Goofy' is about right, with honourable exception of The Garden which is as accomplished an example of 'quiet horror' as I've read in what seems ages. RCH's is very much a snobbish, middle class/ middle England vision of Hell. Spend an afternoon in Ruislip and you're there.

The Train: After a too brief visit to the Poison Pen Club (lit critics' Hell), narrator boards a train to the Village. He's joined by Viscount So What, bastard son of Apollo, who talks bollocks for several pages. There's also some tedious business involving an imp. The train stalls in a tunnel. The carriage fills with sheep-headed people. I'm not sure how much more of this I can take. Does existence exist? Does anything matter? What a pointless waste of time everything is.

[dem bones]

"Don't know what's come over you youngsters these days."
"We're all dead. Have you forgotten, we're all dead."

The Village: Arriving at The Village, narrator (who now answers to 'John' for convenience sake) is met by the station master, a non-sweary former Kings Cross porter who informs him he is now among the Actuals - "we actually existed." He directs 'John' to the rectory to meet the Controller, a former clergyman, whose lack of good works condemned to this equivalent of Limbo, a place of sheer tedium where one must remain contented with whist drives, gardening, a pie competition, a pub, the weekly dance and boredom. To become discontent, or to attempt escape, is ... not advisable. In other words, it's a Loughville knock off, where hellhounds, Jumpity-Jims and a phantom carriage driver have taken over ghoul duties and sullen, bad-tempered Jenny Perkins is surrogate Luna, right down to the ghostly pale beauty and long black hair. When her father is taken away aboard the Collector's carriage, Jenny confides in John that she must get away or die again in the attempt. Even now she is unsure if anything - even the possibility of something akin to the delusion called 'love' - is worth the effort.

"Oh, what's the point to all this? ... Suppose the Celestial Mountains do lie beyond the moor, and suppose one was lucky enough to dodge the hellhounds - what then? Do you suppose I want to reach heaven, to exist for all eternity in some holy paradise>? How do you suppose I died? Let me tell you, I took an overdose of sleeping pills. And you know why? So I could be nothing. Yes, nothing. I don't want eternal life, I want to sleep forever; to stir sometimes and hear the wind brush softly over my grave, and know for a certainty that I need never get up. Think of it, John; the glorious blackness of the eternal night; the endless ending of a bottomless, sideless, upless nothing. That is heaven."

"And existence is hell, I nodded, but I wasn't sure if I agreed or not."

Not great, but a poor man's Humgoo is far more than some of us dared hope for during the preceding railway journey.

[dem bones]

The Camp: Charles Hargraves, MP, is summoned before the Sergeant Major to explain why, election years apart, he's not once visited his constituency in twenty years. That he represents somewhere called Little Muddleton-on-the-Marsh is explanation enough for some of us, but despite these strong mitigating circumstances, his sentence is severe. Hargraves must live among those he represents and address their every petty complaint for two years. You'd think I'd be inured to it by now but there are times when I wonder if this torture porn stuff is getting too sick and twisted for public consumption. This is one such occasion.

The Head Quarters: Finally, Count Apollo invites 'John' (who, it transpires is indeed a John, at least in his current incarnation), to witness the big one - the end that is the beginning - whereupon all is - sort of - tied up in a glib punchline.

What with The Psychic Detective, The Haunted Grange, now this, it's probably for the best that we've now exhausted meagre supply of RCH novels available to me.

Bloody Britain beckons!