The Correctional Facility: A Journey into Dante's Inferno and the Ensuing Metastasis of Evil

Written by Bill Schubart

Narrated by Kent Cassella

Raised as a Catholic in rural Vermont, I was infused with an awareness of sin and penitence, but also absolution and forgiveness. My late teenage encounter with Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” shattered my youthful allegiance to Catholic dogma, but it’s one thing to walk away from Catholic doctrine and quite another to lose the weight of its beauty, fear, and guilt.

Shortly after I read The Brothers Karamazov, in which “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” occurs as a story told by Ivan Karamazov, the sybarite, to his novice monk brother, Alyosha, I read Dante’s Inferno. I was fascinated by the vivid portrayal of the hell I’d heard about so graphically from the Québécois sisters who came down to teach Saturday morning catechism. I saw in Dante’s work and the extraordinary illustrations of Gustav Doré the hell I had imagined in catechism, a hell that haunts my imagination to this day.

Is sin a temporal concept? Some of the sins of Dante’s time are not viewed as such today: heresy, suicide, concupiscence. His simple architecture of human sin is lost today in scale and technology. In 1320, one killed with one’s hands or with a piercing weapon like a stiletto, battle-axe, or sword, or with poison. Today, we have drones, nuclear bombs, and industrial toxins leaching into our soil, water, food, and air — and Pharma: subliminal mass homicides.

The Correctional Facility comes after a lifetime of living with Catholicism and Dante’s weight of sin, evil, punishment, expiation, and redemption, and is my effort to make sense of it all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author's Republic /Magic Hill Press
• Release date: Oct 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667927923

Bill Schubart

Bill Schubart has lived with his family in Vermont since 1947. Educated locally and at Exeter, Kenyon, and the University of Vermont. He is fluent in French language and culture, which he taught before entering communications as an entrepreneur. He co-founded Philo Records and is the author of the highly successful Lamoille Stories (2008), a collection of Vermont tales. His bibliography includes three short story collections and four novels. His latest novel Lila & Theron is distributed by Simon and Schuster recently won a Benjamin Franklin Silver Award at the Independent Book Publishers for popular fiction. He has served on many boards and currently chairs the Vermont College of Fine Arts, known for its writing programs. He speaks extensively on the media and the arts, and writes about Vermont in fiction, humor, and opinion pieces. He is also a regular public radio commentator and blogger. He is the great, great nephew of the renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz and lives in Vermont, with his wife Katherine, also a writer.Bibliography:The Lamoille Stories: Uncle Benoit’s Wake (short stories)Fat People (short stories)Panhead: A Journey Home (novel)I am Baybie: Based on the true Story of the Rev. Baybie Hoover and her friend Virginia Brown (novel)http://www.IAmBaybie.com offers readers a gallery of images of the two women and a live sampling of songs they sang on the street.Photographic Memory (novel)The Lamoille Stories II (short stories)Lila & Theron (novel) (published by Charles Michael Pub., Dist. by Simon & Schuster)