Brad Leithhauser contemplates various authors versions of Hell. He’s not talking about a literal Hell:
The heat I’m talking about has little to do with traditional hellfire. It’s the hell of overheated emotions. Wind is a prevailing weather condition: gusts of storming rage. Molten waves of unrequited lust break and sprawl on its rocky shores. It’s a place where rationality collapses. Nothing is predictable. You can’t count on your adversary for anything—even to act in his own self-interest. His fury may be such that he’d embrace mutual destruction before seeing you escape his wrath. It’s a hell Huck Finn knows well, embodied in the ragtag shape of his drunken father. There’s no reasoning with Huck’s old man, so suffused is he with bigotry and outraged indignation. (“But when they tell me there’s a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote… I says I’ll never vote agin.”) He’s forever subjecting Huck—and, hence, the empathizing reader—to a beating with his hickory stick (“making it warm for him”), and eventually goes after his son with a knife.
The Dish 