Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful color work and imagination
Review: This collection is basically Barlowe's visual interpretation of Dante's Inferno from The Divine Comedy. Each painting has a page of description pointing out the purpose and reason for every detail in the image. From a tortorous picture of Lillith, to the haunting painting of a minor demon riding on the backs of several tortoured souls held together with muck, they are each fascinating to examine. Like Dali and other fantastical artists, one can look at these paintings and see something new every time. The color work is fantastic, and in some paintings actually appears to be digital photography until one looks closer. A ver well-thought-out project, it is pleasing to see another side of Barlowe's intelligent work.
Rating:
Summary: Oh... HELL!
Review: Very highly recommended... but be certain all your lights are on when you open this beautiful but disturbing book.Although Barlowe's searing INFERNO imagery is rendered in a somewhat less photographic, more "painterly" style than his earlier books I have, it's dead-on target for depicting this eternally skin-crawling, hyper-grotesque netherworld. Helpfully described by a sort of narrative text, the twisted inhabitants of Barlowe's raging nightmarescapes purposefully go about their unending torments with skull-shredding focus: their horrors make bizarre sense. I first went through this visually and spiritually cacophonous, masterful work on Christmas day. What contrast: listening to carols about angels from Heaven, while staring at demon-shrieking souls in Hell. Final note; don't miss the deliciously caustic JUSTITIA OMNIBUS at the bottom of page 2.
Rating:
Summary: What a trip
Review: Wayne Barlowe has long been one of my favorite artists, up there with Bekinski and Giger. He has a real talent for pulling the viewer into his world, so that we can almost smell the sulfur. This and its companion piece Brushfire are my (current) favorite art volumes, as I seem to be in a very hellish phase right now. But even when I'm not feeling hellish, I'm in awe of Mr. Barlowe's talent. I love the texture of the worlds and characters, the deep, roaring, ash-filled atmosphere of the environs of hell he portrays. I am always inspired by his work.
| 
