Boychild is currently obsessed with death. This weekend he fashioned one of his toy boxes into a coffin for his, apparently departed, toy dog named Toto. He continually threatens to kill himself if I try to make him do things he doesn't want to do, and asks seemingly endless questions about what happens when one departs this motal coil. In the normal course of events I would have to refer him to Spouse to answer questions about heaven and hell since he actually listened in RE lessons, and strangely was a member of a church group in his youth. By contrast I was brought up by committed atheists, and irritated the hell (oops, bad pun) out of my RE teachers by constantly referring to religion being the opium of the people. Christ, I must have been an impossible child.
Now I have all the answers about where naughty little darlings go when they die, and I'm not afraid to share them. Forget the Bible, Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost - Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go by Dale E. Bayse - has all the answers you need. This book is, peculiarly, an enchanting story about siblings Milton's and Marlo's post-death shenanigans in child hell after they die at the hands of a freak marshmallow explosion in a shopping mall, as you do. I'm not a fan of otherworldly fiction, but Heck is something else, and fed my addiction to satire and punnagry, and a couple of perfectly executed digs at the French made me howl.
Now Boychild believes that should be meet an untimely end he will be greeted by Bea "Elsa" Bubb, the Principle of Heck; he will undergo SATS (Soul Aptitude Tests); take Ethics lessons from Richard Nixon; and discover whether Home Economics teacher, Lizzie Borden, has an axe to grind with him. All this in a luridly evoked world of demons and, well, lashings of poo. The book works on a number of levels, from the ingenious concept to the savage humour and literary references, together with a really very touching development of the siblings relationship. The only thing that I don't get about Heck is that it seems to be marketed at children. It's far to good for them.
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