(or **** stars)
OH MY DAYS!
This is an utterly bonkers and utterly scary book(let).
Originally published in 1874, this was, incredibly, a book intended to ‘educate’ children about the torments that await them for any misdemeanours they might commit. And what torments they are…
“There is a sound just like that of a kettle boiling. Is it really a kettle which is boiling? No; then what is it? Hear what it is. The blood is boiling in the scalded veins of that boy. The brain is boiling and bubbling in his head. The marrow is boiling in his bones!”…
“The little child is in this red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet against the floor of the oven…God was very good to this child. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, that it would never repent, and so it would have to be punished much more in hell.”
Of course, this is the extreme end of fundamentalism that makes the ‘Jack Chick’ cartoon booklets seem like the model of sanity and it is of course laughable that anyone would take this seriously. Except one assumes, that for the author, it was a serious thing. This is why I found it a truly disturbing read; because the relishing and gloating manner with which the torments were described made me think that that this text is not so far removed from the relish of the witch-trials, the atrocities of war (Vietnam, ISIS/ISIL) or the cruelty of blood ‘sports’ such as bullfighting.
I have this idea that because one cannot ‘unsee’ what one has seen, the worst things cast a permanent mark or shadow over your inner ‘self’. As they cannot be erased/forgotten you either become inured/hardened to them or are weighed down and sunk by them. This book skirts very close to that territory by association and brings out my most misanthropic/suicidal tendencies neither of which I am proud of. Approach with caution.