GREETINGS FROM GEHENNA

A screenplay based on a novella focuses on the strange city of Gehenna.

As this story opens, the Judgemaster, a Faust-like figure who describes himself as “the Lord and Law of Gehenna,” is confessing to his servant Grin that he’s grown weary of his role. “I’m tired,” he says. “Tired of other people, they’re so phony and artificial. And what is human life worth? We can’t” be weighed “like produce.” Hell, the official decides, is other people—and he asks Grin to kill him and take his place as master of the walled city of Gehenna. The action then shifts to Riga, Waltz, and Fitz, three hunters who are traveling to New Eden, where they find themselves embarking on a mission without really understanding why. “I don’t rightly know actually,” Fitz comments at one point. “It just feels like something we’re supposed to do.” Along the way, the wide-ranging tale offers many rich, evocative reflections about life and fate. But the narrative strengths that the story may have had as a novella written under the pen name of Etzel Edelweiss evaporate when transplanted to a dialogue-heavy screenplay. The translation to this format only serves to attract attention to how archly pretentious some of the dialogue is, much of it in rhymes. At one point the Narrator asserts: “Did my story not give them life, were they free from strife, are they not real, just because they can’t think or feel, weren’t they alive in your head, till the moment I told you they were dead.” Still, the thought-provoking “Pig’s Parable” detailed at the end of Dillon’s work, featuring autocratic pigs repressing happy-go-lucky dogs who enjoy their “little green plant,” reads like something George Orwell might have written early in his career.

An intriguing but uneven tale about destiny and life’s mysteries.