Interesting take on a combination of myths. The author has clearly thought a lot about what hell might be like. Maybe too much. A minor weakness of the book is there is no clear understanding of what causes a soul to end up in hell vs. heaven, just that a lot more people end up in hell.

Fairly enjoyable. ( )

Not catastrophically bad, but the book spends a lot of time literally in hell, witnessing the literally endless torments of the suffering souls, which seemed pretty gratuitous, and I found I had little taste for it, so I didn't finish it. ( )

If you’re planning a trip to Hell to get back your lost love, the best way to get there is by Checker Cab, because if you live in Los Angeles, the entrance to Hell is probably not where you think it is. This particular cab driver, however, knows the way and will get you there, if not without incident, at least in one piece. Welcome to the singular mind of Steve Boyett, where the souls of the dead are feathers, the torments of Hell are worse than you thought, and it just might be possible to save someone with a song.

Mortality Bridge is the story of Niko, an ex-junkie musician whose fame has come from literally making a deal with the devil (actually, an agent of the devil named Phil). After achieving success and some amount of happiness, Niko’s girlfriend Jemma falls ill and dies, and like Orpheus before him, he sets out on a journey into Hell to try to get her back. That’s the short version. In reality, Niko’s odyssey is a long, painful trip through gleefully rendered torment. As Niko proceeds through the various plains and mountains, rivers and oceans of “The Park,” as its inhabitants fondly refer to Hell, Boyett’s unrelenting descriptions of torture boggle the mind, and like being compelled to look at a car crash on the side of the road, I found myself reading certain horrible passages over and over again. At one point it occurred to me that once Niko got to where he was going, he would have to go back through it all in order to get out. (Not to worry, readers, the return trip is fairly swift.) Niko is aided along the way by a variety of Hell’s denizens, including demons and acquaintances from his past. On a speeding train we meet Nikodemus, Niko’s own demon, a strangely loveable character who embodies all of Niko’s past mistakes and is now determined to help him get home.

The story moves at breakneck speed from start to finish, punctuated by flashbacks from Niko’s past as he reminisces about his fractured relationship with Jemma, life as a drug-addled musician, and the sudden and terrible death of his brother Van. But the horror of Hell is tempered by Steve’s mastery of prose. His lovely, uncommon sentence structure is especially poignant as Niko muses on his past with Jemma:

“…in his heart he’d felt a driven nail of terror because she already loved him more than ever he would her.”

It is sentences like this that enable the reader to understand how keenly Niko feels for those he has failed. And in the background, like an unsteady pulse, Niko’s music accompanies him on his journey, as references to the blues are scattered throughout the story. (The chapter names, in fact, are all blues song titles.)

I won’t tell you what happens to Niko. You’ll just have to read Mortality Bridge for yourself. I will tell you this, however: it was worth the painful trip to Hell and back just to get to the end. Niko’s story may end on page 417, but his journey has just begun. ( )

A few months ago I read in John Scalzi's blog a "Big Idea" article written by Steve Boyett about this book. The more he said about the book the more I knew I had to read it. So I put a hold on my library's copy which was still on order and I waited. Since I have the memory of an attenuated gnat by the time the book became available I had forgotten all about it. Pretty soon it came back to me though as I started to read the inside front cover.

Niko is a talented musician who probably would not be alive and certainly would not have achieved the fame he did if he had not signed a deal with the devil. His reason for signing it was not just because he wanted to become rich and famous. The real reson becomes clear about halfway through the book and once I understood his reason I liked Niko a lot more. Niko was prepared to live with whatever consequences the deal demanded from him but when his girlfriend, Jemma, becomes ill and he realizes it is because of the deal he decides to fight back. When Jemma's soul is taken to Hell he follows her and fights to get her back. Boyett is quite clear that he borrowed this story from the myth of Orpheus. In fact, he has structured this book as a continuation of a series of attempts by this person to bring his wife's soul back from Hell. In all the previous tries he fails just as he is about to escape because he looks back even though he has been told to never look back.

Boyett's portrayal of Hell is gruesome, violent, gut-wrenching and vivid. I had a hard time getting through some of the various torments. But there are also moments of entities (I initially said people but they certainly are not alive and some of them may never have been alive) helping each other and Niko and that kind of made up for the horrifying aspects. Even Niko's own personal devil assists him. I grew rather fond of Nikodemus. The other great character in the book is the Checker cab driver who delivers Niko to the gateway to hell. Boyett explains that the idea for her came from poet Nancy Lambert. The last lines of the book are " Nancy, I like to think you traded jokes and smokes and breathtaking lines with the driver of your own taxi when it came for you." I hope he's right. ( )