Book Review: The Travellers' Guide to Hell

Title: The Travellers' Guide to Hell
Authors: Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls
Published: Tinselhouse (2014)
Amazon Kindle Purchase Info

The Travellers' Guide to Hell, by Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls is available as of right now as a FREE Kindle download from Amazon, so if you're interested, jump on it now!  And I definitely suggest you do!  I absolutely loved this book, despite it not being exactly what I thought it was going to be...

It's advertised as being a fun little travel guide formatted book, taking you down through the depths of Hell itself.  I was expecting something very humorous and honestly, something that was probably going to be poorly written and not very factual.  However, I found just the opposite--almost.

This is still a comical look at Hell, from its history to its geography to its inhabitants and literally everything else you could think of.  However, its a very well-written and well-researched comprehensive, and even scholarly, look at the perceptions of Hell.  The idea of Hell is explored across history and across different cultures, bringing in references from a variety of literary and uh, "first-hand" accounts.  It actually loses a little bit of the actual "travel guide" formatting, but that fact is quickly forgotten, thanks to all the awesome information crammed into this book.  I especially found the information on the Chinese version of Hell and Gilligan's Island as an allegory of Hell, to be especially intriguing...so head's up:  I might be blogging about those later on!

And, like all the other books I review here, this is a title that I do recommend for paranormal researchers.  So many times we hear that religion has absolutely no place in paranormal research...and that's true, but only to a point.  We cannot allow our own faith or belief system to interfere with an objective and scientific study of the truth.

 However, for those groups and individuals working directly with clients, its crucial to have an understanding of how different religions and different cultures view the afterlife, and that includes opinions and even the mythology of what we know as Hell in order to relate to those clients and give them the best possible investigation possible based on their needs.  If you have to learn about Hell, then it makes sense to have a little fun with it, and get a comprehensive cross-culture view all in one FREE ebook!