Book Review: A Glorious Day in Hell by John Eudy

While technically rough, from an artistic/creative viewpoint, A Glorious Day in Hell shines. It’s “The Harrowing of Hell” in long short story, or perhaps novella, form, bringing to mind Dante’s “broken bridge,” Chrysostom’s, “Hell was troubled by encountering Him below…took a body and discovered God…” and those fantastically-proportioned Medieval paintings depicting Christ raising Adam and Eve from their graves.

Like all earthly imaginings of Heavenly activity (with the possible exception of that immortal Easter Homily) it’s flawed…incomplete…but any author who decides to write a novella about the greatest event of all time, and succeeds this well, is worth reading.

A few nitpicks:

I don’t like narratives in the present tense. I really don’t.

The writing is fairly smooth, but definitely could have used an editor for a final polish.

In my personal opinion, the story would have been stronger if it had stuck with only one viewpoint—Caelius’s, for choice. He was the better, more-developed character anyway. Having two viewpoints was unnecessarily confusing and added little to the story.

It quickly became apparent that the author and I don’t see eye-to-eye theologically on some things, but seriously, what does that matter when we agree on the Main Thing?

All in all, A Glorious Day in Hell is a fine piece of speculative Christian fiction, filled with faith, hope and joy.

I received a copy of the novella in for the purpose of sharing a fair and honest review. Check it out HERE on Goodreads.