DETROIT, Mich. (Glossy News) — Coming years after the much lauded success of his beloved novel, “The Five People You Meet In Heaven,” author Mitch Albom now returns to the best seller charts with “The Five People You Meet In Hell,” which he emphasizes is not a sequel.
In the first book, an amusement park maintenance man named Eddie dies unexpectedly while trying to save a young girl’s life at Ruby Pier. He unexpectedly finds that ‘life’ doesn’t end with his death. Upon reaching the other side, the protagonist meets key individuals with whom he had life-changing experiences during his mortal years.
Because they now exist in an ethereal world stripped of illusion, Eddie is able to see his life and other people more objectively.
These meetings allow Eddie to view his life in a wider dimension than before and to see his life from a spiritual perspective. Similar only in structure and title to the original book, “The Five People You Meet In Hell” follows the story of an American everyman named Ralph who dies and meets people in the afterlife that he had known before, but with not-so-uplifting circumstances. The characters he meets again are the villains of his terrestrial life, and embody adversarial creatures with whom most readers say they readily identified. Included in the story are the following “people.”
The lawyer who represented Ralph in court and took a bribe to set him up for a long prison sentence. He then fooled around with Ralph’s wife while he was locked up, lived off Ralph’s savings account, cashed in Ralph’s bonds and wrecked his car.
The nun in school who had it out for Ralph because he was always harassing the girls in his Junior High class, belittled Ralph mercilessly and wrote in excruciatingly fine detail Ralph’s failings in the school records that to this day still prevent him from getting a good job.
The ex-girl friend whom Ralph broke up with. She never quite got over it, and ended stalking Ralph until he had to place a restraining order on her because of the sexually explicit and unfortunately accurate graffiti she wrote nightly on the outside of his apartment in large, bold letters.
The neighborhood kid who was smarter than Ralph as a child and would sneak over to his yard and set booby traps, such as covered holes filled with paint, along with a wide range of variations on the fudge bag, each succeeding more devastatingly than the rest.
The landlord who would never fix Ralph’s hot water heater or the leaks in his roof because he despised Ralph and had his rock-and-roller son-in-law move in downstairs where he and his trash metal band would serenade you at 2 in the morning.
And they are all waiting to greet you when you croak.
Author’s Note: Apologies to Mitch Albom for this satire. Your books are really super.
Editor’s Note: I haven’t heard of Mr. Albom, so I guess I’ll have to make my amends when he suffers the misfortune of meeting me in hell.