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I started doing trivia threads for my novels with my second one ever, The Atomic Time of Monsters Volume 1, which means that poor No Sympathies (available for purchase here!) was left in the lurch all this time! Well, now that it's ten years old, I think it's high time I corrected that, especially since there's SO MUCH fun trivia I can go over for it! So let's right some wrongs and dive into a true smorgasbord of references to Hellish literature!
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I've called No Sympathies as "a Paradise Lost fix fic" on a few occasions, and I was only halfway joking. Milton's epic poem is one of the primary sources of inspiration for No Sympathies, and there are so many references to it in the book that I probably won't be able to point them out. Dante's The Divine Comedy, and specifically the Inferno section of it, was also a major influence - the Hell of No Sympathies is a hybrid of the pit in Paradise Lost and the layered corkscrew cavern of the Inferno, and Lucifer, the leader of all the devils in my novel, takes his appearance and personality from Satan from Paradise Lost but is trapped in ice that's made by the beating of his own wings ala Satan in The Divine Comedy. So if you've read either of these excellent classical works of literature, there should be quite a lot of fun for you in spotting their influence!
The rough organization of Hell's society is primarily based on the concept of the Seven Princes of Hell, which was popularized by a demonologist named Peter Binsfeld. It posits that Hell is ruled by seven demons that align with the Seven Deadly Sins. In addition to being pretty easy for audiences to grasp, this had the benefit of merging Dante's Hell, which is physically built into seven circles corredsponding to the seven deadly sins (and a few extra ones because Dante was a cheeky fucker), and Milton's Hell, where Lucifer has a coalition of demons working with him as a sort of royal court. My exact lineup for the seven princes is unique - Binsfeld had Lucifer as Pride, Mammon as Greed, Asmodeus as Lust, Beelzebub as Gluttony, Belphegor as Sloth, Satan as Wrath, and Leviathan as Envy. I kept the first five more or less the same, but substituted two differen demons for Wrath and Envy. I wanted "Satan" to not be the name of a particular devil in my setting, but rather a title/official pseudonym that ALL demons use to hide their real names. This was in part to homage the fact that Satan originally WAS a title rather than a name, essentially meaning "the designated opponent/counter-argument-er," as well as to cover the fact that practically EVERY devil has claimed to be Satan/The Devil in one work of fiction or another. Likewise, I prefer it when Leviathan and Behemoth (you know, from the Bible) are interpreted as mortal creatures rather than demons, because it just seems more interesting to me. The Bible is sorely lacking in monsters, we can't make ALL of them demons, you know? So I took some more obscure but incredibly cool demons that fit the same criteria and bumped them up to 7 Prince status: Abaddon/Apollyon becomes my Prince of Wrath, in part because of his appearance in Pilgrim's Progress where he is VERY wrathful indeed, and also because his name means DESTRUCTION, which feels suitable for the ruler of the war-torn Malebolge. Sheol, a character who is literally the personification of Hell itself, gets to be our Leviathan substitute, because Leviathan is sometimes portrayed as the Hellmouth, i.e. a giant demon whose mouth serves as a bridge between the mortal world and Hell itself in art. Sheol becomes a circle of Hell unto himself, literally personifying a seventh of the place of lamentation, and serving as the literal mouth of Hell through which all sinners are devoured and vented out into the pit below.
More about Hell's layout: I placed the seven circles of Hell with the idea that they should all flow into each other. We start with Envy - staring at the Heaven you lost, cursing others for having what you think you can never have. You get so over-focused on this that you neglect everything else in your life, succumbing to the next sin, Sloth. As you commit yourself to doing nothing for others, you decide that what you can do is steal their resources away - not to use, but simply to have and, more importantly, keep them from having. Now you're in Greed, and once you have amassed a hoard of wealth to make everyone else envious, well... you can surely use it a bit, right? Perhaps even to excess - especially if you make sure that any resources you don't use are rendered unusable to others. Which is the sin of Gluttony! And now that you're gluttonously consuming everything you can, why not add more pleasure to your plate? Hell, let's pursue that to utter excess, devoting yourself to your own gratification - which, of course, is Lust. And when you're consumed by your own passion, it's not a big leap to decide that anyone who annoys you deserves to be destroyed for it, and you commit a portion of your massive resources to the destruction of any who oppose you. Wrath. Your unifying ethos is that you deserve everything and everyone else deserves nothing, for you are the only important person in the world. Which is pride. Unfortunately, you look out and see some people who have things you don't. Those fuckers, how dare they? Envy, and sloth, and greed and gluttony and lust and wrath and on and on it goes, pride in its seven faces circling itself forever. That's the layout of Hell.
Every demon in the book takes their name and rough character concept from either works of literature, demonology texts, or both. I won't go through them in this one bullet point, but to start us out: Pug is based on the imp of the same name in Ben Jonson's play The Devil Is an Ass (Jonson's Pug actually succeeded in going to the mortal realm, but was totally unprepared to deal with how awful human beings were and ultimately begged to be taken back to Hell, where people are nicer to him). Matilda is based on the witch of the same name from Matthew Lewis's 1796 horror novel The Monk - said witch is said to actually be a lesser demon by Lucifer at the end of the book, though whether Lucifer is telling the truth in the book is left ambiguous. Both Matildas were temptresses who fell in love with their marks, though, which is what ultimately becomes the core of Matilda in my devil story. Alichino is one of the named members of the Malebranche, a group of demons who torment sinners in The Divine Comedy and specifically reside in the layer of Hell called the Malebolge. The name Alichino is derived from the word harlequin, and Dante's Alichino was very much a slapstick character, so turning her into a literal clown demon didn't feel like a stretch here.
Ok, let's start digging in chapter by chapter now. Our story begins in Cocytus, the bottom of the pit of Hell, which is covered in ice. This is a direct reference to Dante - in The Divine Comedy, the very heart of Hell is the frozen lake of Cocytus, where Lucifer sits waist-deep in a pool of his own tears, which are frozen by the winds kicked up by his six flapping wings. Cocytus is also one of the four underworld rivers in Greco-Roman mythology, and that's not an accident - Dante's Hell is as much an adaptation of the underworld from Greco-Roman myth as it is a Christian underworld. For No Sympathies, the point of this reference (beyond me just liking Dante's poem) is to draw a comparison between Pug and Dante's journey. We have a vast tradition of literature about mortal humans traveling from the mortal world to Hell, giving a human perspective on the underworld. Dante travels from a mortal forest all the way down to Cocytus - that's the big, famous take on this concept from the Inferno. No Sympathies is focused on inverting the perspectives that we usually get from devil stories, and so we don't start on the mortal world, but in Cocytus, the very deepest part of Hell, and follow a demon traveling up to the mortal world, so we can see Hell through the eyes of its native residents for once.
Pug suggests throwing a snowball in Hell. Please laugh.
One of the running gags in the book involves off-handed mentions of how Hell doesn't really have a constant concept of time - that is to say, time does not move in a consistent, fully linear fashion there the way it does in the mortal world, and yet demons keep using terms like "Any day now" anyway because its infectious. This is actually inspired by Paradise Lost, believe it or not! One of the features of that book's portrayal of the afterlife, especially during the scenes depicting the War in Heaven, is that Milton structures his descriptive passages in a way where you can never fully tell what is figurative and what is literal in regards to both space and time. Is Lucifer's lance literally miles long, or is that hyperbole, etc. I tried to replicate the same effect so the afterlife retains its unearthly quality, just, you know, humorously.
Pug refers to Mephistopheles, his direct superior, as "Chief!" This is a reference to The Devil Is an Ass, i.e. the play where the literary demon Pug originate from, wherein Pug refers to the unnamed devil who bosses him around merely as chief. I made Mephistopheles Pug's boss in part because Ben Jonson, the playwright who wrote The Devil Is an Ass, was a contemporary of Christopher Marlowe, a playwright who's held is higher esteem (indeed, considered second only to Shakespeare himself among the playwrights of that time period) and who wrote an adaptation of a MUCH more famous devil story, Faust. The Devil Is an Ass reads very much like a parody of Faust, both in general and specifically in regards to Marlowe's take, so having Pug be a subordinate to Mephistopheles (and one who is particularly skilled at annoying the more respected demon) felt like a cheeky bit of meta commentary. Both plays are wonderful, by the way, please check them out.
Because Faust has more or less become THE story of people making deals with the devil (it's even common to call such deals Faustian pacts), Mephistopheles is positioned as the most famous and successful demon to hold the position of Tempter to mortal souls in No Sympathies. He might technically be low-ranked in Hell's hierarchy, but he's got prestige nonetheless - which fits with how Mephistopheles is often portrayed as a low-level demon in Faust stories, and yet has achieved real world fame for his work on par with big names like Lucifer and Beelzebub.
Pug's decision to go to the mortal world and become a tempter even after his boss refused his request for a promotion in turn posits him as an inverse of Satan from Paradise Lost - where Satan rebelled against Heaven for demanding he serve God, Pug rebels against Mephistopheles for refusing to let him do more in the service of Hell. Now we not only see the demon's perspective, but the virtue in devilish ideals - because Pug's rebellion and pride are in service of helping others, not just himself.
Chapter 2! "The War in Heaven Abridged" is so named because where Milton took several chapters of Paradise Lost to go over it, I took one. The jist of the story is well known, there are just some details for my version that need to be laid out to establish how all this Hell stuff began in this world.
Lucifer's pre-fall name is my invention. There is a semi-canonical one I considered using - Lumiel, which goes with the theme naming of Lucifer as a "light bringer." But the one I made up, Lucifel, appealed for three reasons: first, it fits angel naming conventions (i.e. ending in "el," which means "of God"), second, it sounds more like Lucifer, which I found was helpful for my beta readers who didn't know shit about demon folklore, and thirdly, it sounds like "Luci Fell," as in Lucifer Fell. His pre-fall name ends up forshadowing his fate! I dunno, felt clever.
The choirs of angels Lucifer lists are mostly taken from Catholic theology, though I nixed two of the canon choirs - Archangels and Angels - for being too confusing to readers who aren't up on their angel folklore, and added a new choir for Psychopomps, since angels of death are important enough to the setting I'm establishing with this book that I felt they needed their own choir.
Lucifer has been given many motivations for starting the War in Heaven in literature before - a rivalry with Jesus and/or God Himself is often what is cited. I chose to make his reason the existence of mortal life itself - Hell is founded on his contempt for life different than his own, which makes the fact that mortals come to feel that same contempt for demons feel more tragic to me. I called the book No Sympathies for a reason - it's about the reasons we write off other people, and the challenge there is in NOT denying the personhood of those who offend us. So it's important to establish early on that the origin of Lucifer's fall, of the creation of Hell and all its suffering, is a choice he and his followers made to feel no sympathy, and that as long as they lack that compassion, they'll remain in Hell.
The mortal life Lucifer takes offense to is, notably, NOT human beings, but rather early bacteria. This is one of many ways that my novel is purposely heretical and in violation of Biblical canon. It may be a book about God and demons and angels, but it's not really a Christian story.
(This also makes Lucifer ranting about how primitive and worthless bacteria is draw a comparison to how some Christian will rant and rave that evolution can't be real because humans are clearly so superior to "lesser" life forms.)
Lucifer's batshit insane argument that he may have created himself because he doesn't remember his creation, and only has it on faith that God did the creating, is lifted directly from Paradise Lost.
Lucifer then holds himself as superior to God because he and his followers created armor, weapons, and an army, while God has only made a ball of dirt - essentially echoing the real world argument that humans are superior to all other life because we created civilization, which we posit is inherently superior to the natural world. Lucifer's bigotry and pride is OUR bigotry and pride, just turned against us.
In demonology, the seven princes of Hell are opposed by seven human saints who represent the seven Heavenly Virtues, which in turn oppose/temper the seven Deadly Sins. This is because most Christian demonology, and indeed theology in general, accepts the idea that humans are the most important thing in the world second only to God himself. I did not want that for my setting, however, and so seven arch-angels are made to serve as the Heavenly Virtue counterparts to the Seven Princes of Hell. These arch-angels come from Christian theology and literature too - the archangel Michael is often portrayed as Lucifer's nemesis, so I made her the Archangel of Humility. Gabriel and Raphael are the two most famous archangels after Michael, so I added them to the pool - Raphael's scenes where he mentors Adam in Paradise Lost stuck with me, so I made her the angel of Kindness, while I thought Gabriel the hornblower made for an interesting nemesis to the more violent demon Abaddon, and so made her the archangel of Patience. Uriel is said to be the angel with the flaming sword who keeps humanity out of Eden in some texts, and that felt like a good fit for Chastity, the virtue opposed to Lust. Azarael is often portrayed as the Angel of Death, and my angels of death are all inspired by the duty-focused Death from Discworld, so Diligence made sense for Azarael's virtue. Then I took two angels that are sometimes listed as archangels in texts, Camael and Barachiel, and assigned them the remaining virtues solely because I think their names are cool.
Michael's fight with Lucifer has a couple of references to the fight between Macduff and Macbeth from the end of Macbeth. I was co-directing a high school production of that play while writing the book, and it bled into it a bit.
Lucifer impales Michael on his lance, but she recovered shortly after. This is to clearly establish that you cannot die in the afterlife, something I think a story set in it should do as early as possible, especially if it's an important plot point.
Like Dante before me, I cribbed a bit from Greek Mythology here - namely, when Lucifer attacks God, God defeats him by simply showing his true glory, which Lucifer cannot bear to witness. That's how Zeus accidentalyl killed one of his mortal wives! Lucifer lives because, you know, we just established you can't die in the afterlife, but till, it loses the war for him.
Chapter three spotlights the Malebolge, which is another layer of Hell taken in both name and rough layout from Dante. The Malebolge is probably the most iconic part of Dante's Hell - lakes of fire, demons with pitchforks, the classic imagery your brain conjurs up when Hell is mentioned is on display here.
This chapter changed the most from draft to draft - originally Pug encountered the ENTIRE Malebranche, who fairly direct adaptations of the group of demons of the same name that appeared in Dante’s Malebolge. In draft one, though, it became clear that Alichino was kind of a standout character (or at least too fun for me to write to leave her in just that chapter), and so she ended up tagging along with Pug for the rest of the story. When I reworked things for Draft 2, this chapter was changed to focus almost entirely on just Pug and Alichino, being the later’s character introduction, and ended up a lot stronger for it. Given the fact that Alichino is overwhelmingly the favorite character of people who’ve read No Sympathies, I think it was a good choice.
Alichino warns Pug not to fly over the lakes of fire because they’re full of sinners who will drag him under if given the chance. If you’ve read The Divine Comedy, you might recall that getting dragged into the lake of fire by sinners happened to none other than Alichino herself! Well, ok, himself, I suppose, since Dante made his Malebranche exclusively male. So her warning comes from personal experience.
The description of Moloch in this chapter references the Allen Ginsburg’s epic poem Howl, particularly in regards to Moloch’s many epithets. Moloch is a prominent demon in a lot of of literature, and portrayed as a loyal ally to Lucifer in Paradise Lost, which is why he is one of Lucifer’s top generals here. With his bull-like head, he also calls to mind the demonic Minotaur that appears in Dante’s Inferno, so yeah we’re covering a lot of bases here with ol’ Moloch.
Chapter 4’s title is an inversion of The Divine Comedy, just in case I haven’t been blunted enough about what we’re doing here.
This entire chapter is heavily inspired by Paradise Lost, particularly the scene early in the poem where Lucifer sits down with all his high ranking demon pals to try and discuss what they should do in the immediate aftermath of being cast out of Heaven. There’s a later scene in the poem where Lucifer and pals are transformed from angels to demons as a punishment for the whole Garden of Eden fiasco. No Sympathies kind of combines those two scenes, having the transformation occur directly after the Fall instead of later on, and showing the conference of the seven most powerful demons as they try to figure out what to do about their newfound fallen state.
A point of contrast between the two is that Lucifer leads the conversation in Paradise Lost, but here he is more or less silent, too busy figuring out how to cover his bruised ego to deal with the problem at hand.
The squabbling of the seven princes here also takes a great deal from the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal. There’s just something fun about tremendously powerful evil villains pettily squabbling when left alone with each other, you know?
Each demon having their own throne (and Lucifer’s being a little better than the others) is a detail taken directly from Paradise Lost. The fact that there is no stated king of Hell, with the seven princes being called such to uphold the illusion that everyone there is equal, while at the same time everyone treats Lucifer as more or less the leader and de facto king, is likewise extrapolated from the way the demon society of Hell functions in that poem. There’s just a lovely hypocrisy to it, right?
Chapter 5! Dis is a city of Hell in The Divine Comedy, and here is merged with the Circle of Lust, taking the later’s distinctive weather patterns of deadly winds as well as its thorny bushes made from the souls of dead sinners.
While it’s not clearly established here (because No Sympathies does not focus on human sinners in Hell), the main torments in Dis are styled after The Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place to Visit,” with sinners being allowed to indulge in shallow pleasures until the hollowness of it drives them mad with despair. And when that wears off they get more physical punishments, because, you know, it’s Hell.
As Mephistopheles observes the mortal world, he sees tiny lifeforms described as “things that swarm and multiply” - the first of MANY direct allusions I make to The War of the Worlds across my many novels. It’s nothing compared to how often ATOM referneces that book, though - there’s four chapters of ATOM alone that are basically one giant WotW homage. But we’re getting sidetracked!
As I said earlier, No Sympathies deliberately contradicts Biblical canon on several occasions, and it does so here with its retelling of the Cain and Abel story. Originally I wanted to make it even MORE out of sync with the Bible - rather than have the patriarch of Cain’s clan be named Adam, I named him Abraham, after a different but just as prominent patriarch in the Bible, to show that the “truth” presented in this story was rearranged by the Biblical stories it inspired. It didn’t work for my beta readers, though - they just thought I hadn’t done enough research and didn’t realize Adam was Cain and Abel’s father instead of Abraham, which taught me a valuable lesson as a writer: if people don’t understand something you write, they will assume it’s because you were stupid, not that there was an intention they didn’t get. So I made the patriarch here Adam instead.
Chapter 7! The mire of Scathatch is described as “poisonous slime and noxious muck,” which is a reference to the song “Toxic Love” from Ferngully, as sung by the irreplaceable Tim Curry. Said song is about pollution, which is considered part of the sin of Gluttony, which this circle represents, so it’s a fairly fitting reference!
Scathatch got its name fairly late in the writing process - originally I called this layer Tantarus, which is a fusion of Tartarus (i.e. the part of the afterlife in Greek mythology where the wicked are punished) and Tantalus (a sinner in Greek mythology whose ironic punishment is in many ways the blueprint for the visceral punishments depicted in various Christian takes on Hell). However, I took a class on medieval depictions of Hell around the time I was preparing to publish No Sympathies, and one of them mentioned that Scathatch had been used as a name for the Christian Hell before! Since that name wasn’t cobbled together out of two different ones and felt more distinct, I quickly edited it in.
Valac is here primarily because I had drawn a design for him that I really liked and felt he could make for a good obstacle on Pug’s journey. I was delighted, however, to end up watching one of those Conjuring movies after I had finished No Sympathies only to find that Valac was the big bad in it! Most of the cast of No Sympathies came from big appearances they made in novels, poems, or movies, and in this case, Valac’s time to shine on film came after he appeared in my book! I dunno, it was neat for me.
Chapter 8, the title drop chapter! Obviously the title of No Sympathies is in part a reference to the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil,” and in some ways this chapter is a riff on that song’s concept: we hear a devil’s history from his own mouth, hear his justifications for his actions, and in the process are made to see how our sin and his are not that different - how we cannot condemn the devil without condemning ourselves. To further drive this home, I made our viewpoint character for this chapter an exorcist, i.e. an archetypal devil-slaying hero. Yet our exorcist ultimately comes off as less human than the devil he’s opposing, or at least far less compassionate and self reflective when it comes to his own actions. By the end of the chapter, you may or may not side with Beelzebub, but at the very least it’s hard to say the exorcist is any better than the demon he’s opposing.
According to the books on demonology I’ve read, Beelzebub is often listed as a demon who possesses people, which inspired his role as the demon possessing the little girl in this chapter - and, in turn, really shaped his character into what it became in this book. My original idea for Beelzebub was a sort of simpering, pathetic character, but when I wrote this chapter he turned into a much sharper and more nuanced (though still humorous) demon.
When Beelzebub refers to “that little bedtime story you made up about the charlatan,” he is specifically referring to the Adam and Eve story, which did not occur in the world of No Sympathies. Again, we’re violating canon here folks!
Beelzebub illustrates the Problem of Evil here, a philosophical debate in Christianity that has shaped devil folklore for hundreds of years. The question is this: how can God be all powerful, all knowing, pure good, and the creator of everything in existence, and yet also decide to create evil people who are then tortured for eternity in Hell? Christian theologians have proposed dozens upon dozens of attempted answers to this problem, but no answer they propose doesn’t undercut one aspect of the premise, as Beelzebub lays out here. Personally, my favorite answer that theologians provided was Origen’s, which posited that because God is all knowing, all powerful, purely good, and the creator of everything, Hell cannot be eternal, and is ultimately just turbo-mode purgatory designed to help the most lost of souls figure themselves out and redeem themselves in time. This answer was not only not accepted, but branded an outright heresy, because Christianity believes that an everlasting Hell for people it hates is more important than a God who is all knowing, all powerful, purely good, and the creator of everything. To most Christians, Hell is more important than God.
Beelzebub says creation is a “tale told by an idiot,” bringing our Macbeth reference counter to 2!
Chapter 9 brings us to Pandaemonium, where I set off a fun little Chekhov's Gun: Hell has a giant city hanging over the center of it that is very, very flimsy.
Nelchael appears as the clerk in this chapter in part because of her role as Lucifer’s bean counter in Glenn Duncan’s novel I, Lucifer, which is very good, by the way! As is the concept album of the same name by The Real Tuesday Weld, which was made as a soundtrack of sorts to the novel. I listened to said album a lot while writing No Sympathies, so working in a nod to it felt appropriate.
Melchom, Nelchael’s manager, is loosely based on Screwtape from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Unfortunately, since Screwtape is NOT a public domain demon, I couldn’t name his homage after him outright, and so subbed in one of the cool alternate names for Moloch instead.
Chapter 10! The Devil’s Date was actually the first chapter of No Sympathies I wrote, and was initially just meant to be a one-off short story, but it wasn’t too hard to tie it into the narrative as Matilda’s origin story of sorts.
Matilda’s intentionally flawed human disguise, as well as her general approach to tempting her mark in this chapter, is inspired by Arnold Friend from the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” - particularly the fact that, while her hooves aren’t visible, a keen-eyed person can see her feet don’t quite fit into human shoes right. Her hiding her inhuman eyes behind dark sunglasses is, well, actually a pretty common bit of demonic deception in literature, but was probably most directly inspired by the devil in O Brother Where Art Thou?
And of course, when she says she’s “In a bit of a bind” and “willing to make a deal” while approaching her mark, that is obviously a reference to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” which was the first devil story I remember experiencing, via a laser light show in Mackinaw City when I was four!
When Matilda says the price of her services is something “so inconsequential and trivial you’ll hardly even notice it,” she is paraphrasing Ursula’s description of the price of her services in the song “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” which is one of the best songs about a Faustian pact ever written. “A token, a trifle, you’ll never even miss it!”
The revision process of this chapter taught me something as a teetotaler: most people do not understand the different nuanced shades of drunkenness, because they’ve only ever experienced drunk people while drunk themselves. The earlier drafts made Matilda’s mark less full-on drunk and more just a little buzzed/tipsy, which confused a lot of my readers because you’re either drunk or you’re not - no signs of drunkenness or ALL signs of drunkenness, basically, because when you’re just a little drunk you THINK you’re acting the same as when you’re sober, and only realize you and others are drunk when you’re REALLY intoxicated. So the mark was changed to be more consistently wasted instead of just a bit tipsy, so it wouldn’t look like I “forgot” he was drunk for parts of the scene.
The mark saying that demons steal souls “in fiddle contests” is, of course, another reference to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”
Chapter 11! The layer of Sloth is named Gehenna, which is one of the alternate names for the Abrahamic Hell and basically means “waste dump.” While it could have been suitable for the Gluttony layer (pollution theming and all), I used it here to signify a different sort of waste - specifically, wasted potential/effort, i.e. sloth.
Verrine and Gemory here were originally going to be part of the main character crew in the outline stage of the novel, but I realized in the process of writing that they didn’t actually have much to do, and so limited them to their little scene here where they taunt Matilda for being a failed Temptress. If I ever write the full story of Matilda’s romance with her mark (working title: Love Is Hell), they’ll play a big role in it to compensate for their bad luck here.
When Pug lists the vices he’ll use to tempt mortals, he pays special attention to iniquity. This is a reference to The Devil Is an Ass, where, when asked the same question, that version of Pug literally brings out the anthropomorphic personification of the sin of Iniquity, who Pug’s boss proceeds to lambast as a pretty shitty temptation, much to poor Iniquity’s distress. A part of me kind of wishes I made anthropomorphic sins a part of Hell’s ecology, given how often they crop up in devil literature - but, then, I suppose they are involved in this story in a very different way…
Right after Pug blathers about iniquity, Verrine calls him an ass. Because The Devil Is an Ass, you see.
Chapter 12! Keryon is based on the demon Geryon from Dante’s The Divine Comedy, with his name slightly altered to distinguish him from the Geryon of Greek myth, who was just a really weird non-demonic giant. Dante’s Geryon plays a pretty big role as a messenger in Hell who gives Dante and Virgil a ride on his back in a display of uncharacteristic kindness for a demon, and I made sure Keryon kept up that role as being both a messenger and a pretty nice guy.
Lilith here is a combination of the Abrahamic Lilith, the first wife of Adam who turned into a demon because she did not want to submit to her husband, and the anthropomorphic personification of Sin itself in Paradise Lost, who is explicitly female (because Eve ate the apple first you see) and is born from Lucifer’s forehead like Athena was born from Zeus’s. So here in No Sympathies we have a Lilith who is born from Lucifer (and who Lucifer claims to be the sole parent of via that head-birthing method, although we later find out this was a lie to stroke his own ego and hide the fact that he had an affair with one of his underlings) and is more or less the youngt full-fledged, non-imp demon in Hell, having been conceived in Heaven and thus retaining some angelic grace, which all Hell-conceived demons (i.e. imps) lack. So… a very loose adaptation of both characters, really, but one that works for this story.
Lilith also… very loosely fills the role of the demonic Medusa that appears in The Divine Comedy, or at least she fills it enough that I didn’t feel the need to find another demon to work in as a cameo reference to her.
Samael’s prominent role in this chapter owes itself to the demon of the same name in the first Hellboy movie. While my Samael has little in common with that one from a character standpoint, I did design him to resemble the Hellboy Samael to some degree, and that take on Samael is just one of the coolest demons put to film, so I wanted to give him a nod if I could.
Chapter 13! I… actually don’t have a lot of trivia for this chapter, beyond the ending being a fairly obvious play on Nietche’s “When you gaze into the abyss…” quote. There’s too much plot stuff happening to fit in sly winks and nods here!
Chapter 14! We’re roughly in the second half of the book now, and the real plot has started, with the Intruders finally invading Hell. As I’ve mentioned before, the Intruders are meant to represent a more modern take on demons, being made of “pure evil/sin” and nothing more. As a result they’re not really characters or living beings, but rather a disaster made in a cruel caricature of life, if that makes sense. Like if someone put a human face on the Chernobyl Elephant’s Foot. This is why there are no canon designs for the Intruders. I mean, yes, I did make some concept art to give me a rough idea of what I wanted to describe in text, but none of my designs actually captured the soul-less, vacant, personality-void nature of these beings - no matter how I tried, every Intruder design I sketched ended up looking too much like a creature with some interiority, instead of just malice made flesh. I think the only way you could truly get that soul-less quality would be to use an AI art generator, albeit one trained to make what the lowest common denominator thinks is ugly instead of what the lowest common denominator thinks is attractive like all the current AI art machines. (This is not a call for anyone reading this to use an AI image generator to make Intruder designs, I genuinely think we should let that technology die).
For you Midgaheim fans out there, I’ve retroactively declared the Intruders to be one of the Eldritch Dream Lords, i.e. beings made from common mortal anxieties and desires. In this case, they would be the Dream Lord of Guilt and Sin, and unlike the other dream lords, they did not manifest until the very end of the mortal world - and as such lack the independent autonomy and souls that the other dream lords developed.
Astaroth shows up here in part because she (or rather he) made a big impression on me when she/he showed up in Hellboy as the titular hero’s kinda-helpful demon uncle. My sibling pointed out to me late in the writing process of this novel that Astaroth is a demonized version of the goddess Ishtar, and as such has a good reason to be a female demon. Since I like balancing the gender ratio of my stories, I quickly changed Astaroth to a female demon in turn. She gets to be a little heroic here in the same way Hellboy’s Astaroth was helpful despite still being an evil dude.
It’s kind of fun to see Andromalius show up in this chapter as little more than a name-drop when he’s ended up playing a big role in my Midgaheim campaigns. That’s the joy of building a big fictional universe!
Chapter 15! We begin with Beelzebub looking at his kingdom and noting it’s “foul, toxic, and stained,” and yep, that’s another reference to the lyrics of “Toxic Love!”
Beelzebub calling his subjects “Things of evil!” while attempting to get them to help him is a reference to “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe, where the narrator does much the same to the titular prophetic bird.
Naiberius is one of the synonyms for the Christian demon version of Cerberus in Greek Mythology, and appears here as a high-ranking servant of the Prince of Gluttony because, in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, a demonic Cerberus was the main antagonistic force in the Gluttony layer of Hell. Again, I want to keep the Greeek mythic characters distinct from the demons based on them in my cosmology, hence going with an alternate name for the Cerberus equivalent of my demon roster.
I just want to note the hypocrisy of Beelzebub, who lives in a literal pit of filth, judging Asmodeus for not taking better care of his circle.
Beelzebub calls Asmodeus “Asmoday” upon greeting him. Asmoday is an alternate name for Asmodeus, and here doubles as a sort of cute nickname Beelzebub has for him. They’re very close, you see.
Chapter 16! Mulciber is portrayed as Mammon’s right-hand demon because the two of them represented the forces of Greed in the demonic council scene of Paradise Lost, both arguing for beating Heaven by making Hell more beautiful through material wealth. As in the poem, they didn’t get very far on that front.
Prince Abaddon’s forces are heralded by a “flatulent trumpeting,” and the word choice there is specific! In The Divine Comedy, one of the members of the Malebranche, Barbariccia, announces the march of his group by bending over and farting out a trumpet noise in a satire of actual army procedure. That’s right, he’s a literal butt trumpet. That little character moment was too funny and juvenile for me to let it reside solely in one of the greatest and most influential poems of all time - I had to put it in my book too.
The Malebranche sing a little poem because I am a Tolkien nerd and the songs the goblins sing in The Hobbit left a profound effect on me. One of the lines in it, “Jaws that bite, ensnare, and snatch” is an homage to the poem “Jabberwocky,” which has the line “the jaws that bite, the claws that catch.”
Give it up for our boy Andromalius for nearly matching Astaroth in fending off the Intruders!
Chapter 17! The title of this chapter, “Lilith’s Cunning Plan,” came from me watching the entirety of the British comedy series Blackadder while writing this book. See, “I have a cunning plan!” is the catchphrase Baldrick in that show, and more often than not is just some insane nonsense that wouldn’t actually help anything. Lilith’s plan is a little better than Baldrick’s were.
Probably the most pointless trivia on this list, but: my father, who among other things is an academic scholar of Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, and poetry in general, said that Lilith is his favorite character in this book when he got through this chapter. He really liked it in general, too - of all my books, it’s the one that has the most of his and my shared nerderies.
Chapter 18! Not a lot of trivia for this one. Old Scratch appears here as one of Lucifer’s servants, and it’s a name used for the devil in a lot of folktales and American literature. I uh… probably included him because of Homestuck, though.
Chapter 19! Two of the sources of inspiration for the aesthetic of the Intruders were the monsters of the Silent Hill franchise and the cenobites from Hellraiser, which is why it’s frequently mentioned that they have a sort of Freudian psycho-sexual vibe to them. Don’t take that as a slam on those two franchises, though - the Intruders should be viewed as bad copies of those monsters, all the psycho-sexual shock value imagery with none of the thought put behind it.
Limbo here is loosely equivalent to the Limbo in The Divine Comedy. Since No Sympathies is intentionally heretical, there doesn’t need to be a place for good people who weren’t Christians and thus can’t be allowed in Heaven, because fuck that, if you’re good you go to Heaven no matter what cosmology you believed in. Still, having a liminal space between Heaven and Hell makes sense to me - if there’s a long fall between the two, SOMETHING has to put space between them, right? So we have Limbo, the void between Heaven and Hell where difficult cases can be litigated to determine whether a soul goes up or down.
A lot of stories with sympathetic demons go out of their way to make angels into unsympathetic assholes, because it’s edgy and an easy way to make excuses for the demons’ bad behavior. I wanted to avoid that trope, and consciously made an effort to make the angels that appear be as nice and helpful as they could reasonably be in this situation.
Chapter 20! Not a lot of trivia for this one. Lucifer’s rallying cry to his hosts, “Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!” is lifted directly from Paradise Lost, where he says it to the demons in the direct aftermath of their fall from Heaven. Likewise, him encouraging them to be strong by mentioning how he promised them all a “crown and a throne” comes from Lucifers promise of giving them the same thing in Paradise Lost.
Chapter 21! I’ve got nothing for this one, actually. Too much plot for references, I think.
Chapter 22! When Raphael describes the different ways people climb Purgatory, she is directly referencing the more detailed description of it in The Divine Comedy, where it has a whole section of the poem solely devoted to it. For the sake of pacing, I only gave it a chapter here.
Raphael serving as the guide to our demon heroes’ redemptive climb from Purgatory was inspired by Raphael’s big scene with Adam in Paradise Lost, where she (well, “he” there) very kindly and comfortingly explains, among other things, that humanity’s fall from grace is necessary for them to rise to the level of God and the angels. It is, in my eyes, the most important scene in the poem, as it’s the answer Milton comes to for the question he asks repeatedly in it: why did God allow humanity to sin? And it endeared Raphael to me a great deal among the many angels in Christianity.
Gabriel’s inclusion in the narrative is in part inspired by the song “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” from Anything Goes, which I put on the very short list of art that briefly makes me believe in Christianity when I experience, or at least reminds me of what it felt like when I did believe in it back when I was younger. For this reason I make it clear that Gabriel always carries her trumpet.
The garden of Eden being on the outskirts of Heaven is also taken from The Divine Comedy, where it was specifically the very last part of Purgatory before Heaven proper. Here I push it inside the pearly gates, as a place for the souls of nonsapient organisms like plants and animals to reside - which is also a heresy, by the way, since it’s pretty common Christian doctrine that only humans have souls. Again, this book goes out of its way to violate Christian canon!
Pug specifically noticing a crocodile among the souls in Heaven is part of an on-running obsession of mine with putting good crocodiles into Christian theology - when I was a kid I would always sneak one of my toy crocodiles into the manger scene among our Christmas decorations, and when we were called to write a Christmas story in the third grade I wrote one about a crocodile attending the birth of Jesus. I just don’t think Heaven would be Heaven if there weren’t crocodiles there.
Gabriel saying “power comes with responsibility” is, of course, a Spider-Man reference. Look, it’s not my fault that one of the greatest philosophical truths was boiled down to its most succinct and easily grasped articulation by a superhero comic book!
Gabriel tells Pug at the end of this chapter, “Come, there is more to see!” which I think is a reference to the Ghost of Christmas Present saying the same to Scrooge in A Muppet Christmas Carol? I mean, the line is a pretty stock line, but in the context of this scene, where a divine messenger shows a creature who has lived a life surrounded by misery what a world full of happiness and joy looks like, it feels like I was probably doing a specific reference with the phrasing there.
Chapter 23! The Intruders congeal into one massive star of sin. This is in part a reference to the “star of Wormwood” from the Book of Revelations, which is part of the apocalypse in much the same way the Intruders are here, and also a reference to Hellstar Remina from the Junji Ito manga of the same name, which is still one of the most frightening monsters in all of fiction for my money.
Lilith, the daughter of Lucifer, leading an army of mortal sinners against a force invading Hell, only to promptly get their asses kicked, probably reads like a dig against a certain popular animated series out right now, but it shouldn’t be given that this book was published several years before that series’ pilot premiered. Pretty funny coincidence though!
Chapter 24! Some might be confused by the idea that work/labor occurs in Heaven. The three years I spent writing No Sympathies were part of the six years of my life where I was forced to take various contractor gigs to make income, and had long periods where I didn’t have a job or money coming in. And you know what I realized? Not having work is traumatizing, to some degree! There is a pleasure in having a task to accomplish, and a torture in being left to just rot with nothing to do. There is a joy in doing something, and since Heaven is a play of all joys, I wanted that joy to be represented - just without the exploitation that often accompanies it in our world.
It’s here where I’ll mention that, while every character I write is a reflection of myself in some way or another, Matilda is the most “me” of any of the characters in my book.
If there was ever a film adaptation of No Sympathies, I would insist that they add the musical number Pug says he took part in while partying in Heaven.
Chapter 25! The most impossible task any author has when writing a story of Heaven and Hell: writing a take on God that actually feels like a divine force of ultimate good. Jesus Christ, I was an ambitious first time novelist.
The different interpretations this chapter offers of the appearance of the throne of God are taken from a variety of texts, and the idea that God is beyond our mortal comprehension is as well. I believe it’s even technically part of Catholic theology, or at least my mother, grandma, and several of my priests going up seemed to believe it was. You can’t fully understand Heaven till you get there, basically.
God’s beauty is described, amongst other things, as “all that was best of dark and bright,” which is a bit of description taken from Lord Byron’s poem “She Walks in Beauty,” which I had memorized to impress a girl in college. She really liked Lord Byron.
If I were to voice-cast God, I would pick the collection of actors who voiced Him in The Prince of Egypt, which is also on the short list of art that can briefly make me remember what it felt like to actually believe in the Christian god’s existence. Fuck, that burning bush scene still brings me to tears. So does “Through Heaven’s Eyes,” for that matter.
Chapter 26! “The Harrowing of Hell” is a term academics use for the broad canon of stories about mortals traveling into Hell and surviving the perils there to tell the tale. Since No Sympathies is an inverse of those sorts of stories, its final chapter inverts the phrase to “Hell Harrowed,” because yeah, Hell is facing some perils right now.
Abaddon having a big sword in his chest comes from many classic depictions of demons representing wrath who have big open chest wounds. The visual symbolism of this is pretty clear - wrath’s folly is in fighting to avenge yourself for a slight, while at the same time leaving the actual wound you received untreated (and, in fact, allowing it to get worse). So if you see a big demonic entity with an exposed heart, you should know what sin it’s representing.
Aw, Andromalius saves Astaroth! I must have had a clear idea of my characterization for him even back when he was just a minor character here.
Lilith calling Lucifer’s fake story of her springing from his head fully formed an “Olympian lie” as a reference to the fact that it’s taken from the myth of Athena doing the same from Zeus, which in turn was demonized in Milton’s Paradise Lost as I mentioned before.
Michael’s command for Lucifer to “Stop punishing yourself” is a blunt articulation of the Catholic doctrine that hell’s punishments are self-inflicted, which Dante illustrates very thoroughly in The Divine Comedy. Ultimately it isn’t God who keeps the damned in Hell, but their own refusal to give up their vices.
Her then saying that the angels wait to “drink and toast the prodigal sons” is also a reference to a great work of literature, specifically the song “Hot Cha” by They Might Be Giants. Oh, and the Biblical story of the prodigal son that the song alludes to in its lyrics, I guess.
Abaddon calling Alichino an “agent of chaos” is a cheeky reference to how she took a lot of inspiration from Harley Quinn.
So, in Paradise Lost, Milton breaks the fourth wall three times to directly call upon the muses, the saints, and God Himself for divine inspiration to “make clear the ways of God to man” - which in this specific case, means finding a satisfactory explanation for why sin, damnation, and Hell exist. It is my opinion, and I am not alone in this, that Milton tragically failed to completely meet his goal, because Milton was a good protestant and could not come to the correct conclusion that the only way this whole cosmology can work is if Hell is temporary. So we come to a conclusion in my story where Lucifer, contrary to his counterpart in Milton’s poem, reaches the realization of the message Raphael gave to Adam in Paradise Lost: that we sin because without it we cannot learn how to redeem ourselves, and truly know the value and nature of virtue. To rise, you must first fall. Milton had a good answer, he just needed the audacity to be heretic to make it work as intended.
I now have a little trilogy of Japan memoirs out. These would be a nice gift set for somebody if you’re looking for a last minute thing, or just marathon through them yourself to get through the holidays by vicariously traveling through Japan.
I now have a little trilogy of Japan memoirs out. These would be a nice gift set for somebody if you’re looking for a last minute thing, or just marathon through them yourself to get through the holidays by vicariously traveling through Japan.
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
pixelskylines
discoholicmusic
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
kaledo-art
