Down Here
A Journey Through the Nine Circles of the Modern Inferno
Dante had nine circles. He also had the enormous advantage of writing before readers could reply beneath the poem. Human nature has changed less than its equipment. Wrath got broadband. Pride found analytics. Treachery hired legal and a communications team. Hell needed updating.
* Direct online price on martinrothery.com. Amazon prices are set separately and may differ.
The old sins survived. The distribution system improved.
At two sixteen on a wet Tuesday morning, on the last stretch of a drive from Gdańsk to Chesterfield, Martin finds a grey door beside the toilets in a motorway service station outside Leicester.
Behind it is a staircase, a Porter with a brass luggage trolley, and nine circles of Hell redesigned for the modern world.
There are no devils with forks. There are people filming instead of helping. Trolls turning strangers into targets. Crowds borrowing hatred from one another. Markets selling outrage by the jar. Courts where everyone is righteous. Ministries where language makes the person disappear. War rooms where bodies become symbols. Offices where cruelty is processed correctly.
And beneath them all, a mirror.
Fiction, although the mechanisms are not.
The deeper you go, the better the lighting becomes.
The upper circles are loud. They have screens, chants, slogans and excellent engagement figures. Lower down, people wear lanyards. Nobody raises their voice. The coffee is included in the meeting package.
The Spectators
Emergencies become content. Feeling becomes evidence of goodness. Everybody is waiting for someone to do something.
The Comment Pit
Strangers are reduced to profile pictures, labels and material. Cruelty learns to call itself opinion, truth or banter.
The Terrace
Belonging becomes tribalism. The crowd lends ordinary people a cruelty they might never have managed alone.
The Market of Outrage
Attention is sold through emotion. Fear, disgust and certainty are packaged, measured and replenished before they expire.
The Court of the Righteous
A cause may be right while its servants become cruel. The accused changes, but the need for guilt remains.
The Ministry of Truthful Information
Facts, implications and institutional reputation are processed through language precise enough to hide what happened.
The War Room
People become targets, assets, threats and acceptable losses. Distance turns a life into a movable symbol on a map.
The Office of Necessary Procedures
Rules designed to protect fairness become cover for absence. Every outcome is correct because every box was ticked.
The Mirror
The obvious villains are not at the bottom. The deepest circle contains the people who knew, had some power, and did not act.
The first 20 pages.
This is the actual book, not a specially polished sample. Read the opening and decide whether you want the rest.
One purchase. Your digital edition.
Buy Down Here directly from this site. Your available digital edition is delivered after payment.
Buy direct
If both PDF and EPUB are available, both are included automatically. Book Club members can use their personal discount code at checkout.
The door is beside the toilets. The Porter is waiting.
The trolley is already making its way down the stairs. The humour lets you breathe. The question follows you out.
Buy Down Here · £12.99