Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Hurtle of Hell: An Atheist Comedy Featuring God and a Confused Young Man from Hackney
    The Hurtle of Hell: An Atheist Comedy Featuring God and a Confused Young Man from Hackney
    The Hurtle of Hell: An Atheist Comedy Featuring God and a Confused Young Man from Hackney
    Ebook304 pages4 hours

    The Hurtle of Hell: An Atheist Comedy Featuring God and a Confused Young Man from Hackney

    By Simon Edge

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    When gay, pleasure-seeking Stefano Cartwright is almost killed by a wave while at the beach, his journey up a tunnel of light convinces him that God exists after all, and he may need to change his ways if he is not to end up in hell. When God happens to look down his celestial telescope and see Stefano, he is obliged to pay unprecedented attention to an obscure planet in a distant galaxy, and ends up on the greatest adventure of his multi-eon existence. The Hurtle of Hell combines a tender, human story of rejection and reconnection with an utterly original and often very funny theological thought-experiment, in an entrancing fable that is both mischievous and big-hearted.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLightning Books
    Release dateJul 5, 2018
    ISBN9781785630729
    The Hurtle of Hell: An Atheist Comedy Featuring God and a Confused Young Man from Hackney
    Author

    Simon Edge

    From the author of The End of the World is Flat The Terg wars are over. Now meet the Yerfs 'Brilliant! Perfectly captures both the absurdity and horror of this madness'. Gareth Roberts. When Tara Farrier returns to the UK after a long spell as an aid worker in war-torn Yemen, she’s hoping for a well-deserved rest. But a cultural battleground has emerged while she’s been away, and she’s unprepared for the sensitivities of her new colleagues at an international thinktank. A throwaway reference to volcanic activity millions of years ago gets her into hot water and she discovers she belongs to the group reviled by fashionable activists as ‘Young Earth Rejecting Fascists’, or ‘Yerfs’. Faster than she can say ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’, she is at the centre of a gruelling legal drama. In the keenly awaited follow-up to his acclaimed The End of the World is Flat, Simon Edge stabs once again at modern crank beliefs and herd behaviour with stiletto-sharp satire.

    Read more from Simon Edge

    Related to The Hurtle of Hell

    Related ebooks

    Humor & Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      New York Public Library Makes Banned Books Available For Free

      Apr 15, 2022

      Anyone 13 and older can access some of the commonly banned books through the library's app. The Brooklyn Public Library has also launched a similar initiative.

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Magic Of The Moors

      May 27, 2020

      The Magic Of The Moors
      5 min read

    • Article

      Exodus

      Nov 10, 2021

      Kibō Maru coasted through the void at a quarter of the speed of light, fleeing Earth. Outside, the vacuum was cold and silent, as the sweep of the ship’s radar, patiently scanning for obstacles, returned no echoes. Inside, there was light and warmth

      14 min read

    • Article

      Take a Writer Like Him: My Complicated Love Affair with Kingsley Amis

      Aug 24, 2018

      1. As much as I may rack my brain, there are 15 minutes or so in the dark that I can’t account for and that I’ll never get back—15 minutes during which, I have to think, that creep’s hands were touching my body. It’s a weird thing to think about all

      12 min read

    • Article

      What Does ‘Justice’ Mean To Justin Bieber?

      Mar 28, 2021

      JUSTIN Bieber’s Justice isn’t the first pop album to feature a reformed bad seed performing starry-eyed odes to marital happiness. It’s not even the first Bieber album to do so – his previous release, Changes, covered most of the same ground. But the

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Birth Of The Semicolon

      Aug 1, 2019

      The Birth Of The Semicolon
      4 min read

    • Article

      ‘It Wasn’t Really About The Money’: The Shocking Story Of Hollywood’s Con Queen

      Jun 5, 2023

      In hindsight, of course it was a set-up. The messages that fell fairy dust-like into the inboxes of cinematographers and actors, makeup artists and security workers, came from the email addresses of top female Hollywood executives, women who probably

      4 min read

    • Article

      'The Fetishist' Examines Racial And Sexual Politics

      Jan 10, 2024

      Katherine Min's well-crafted posthumous novel is inspired by Lolita -- but with an Asian fetishist as Humbert Humbert and the objects of his objectification given voice.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Rome After Dark

      Mar 2, 2020

      Rome After Dark
      7 min read

    • Article

      ‘There Was Practically A Riot At King’s Cross’: An Oral History Of Harry Potter At 25

      Jun 18, 2022

      “He’ll be famous – a legend – every child in our world will know his name.” So predicts Professor McGonagall in the opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Breaking sales records from the beginning, Harry Potter is the biggest su

      14 min read

    • Article

      Breaking In

      Dec 21, 2020

      The Cyborg Tinkerer (Steampunk/space opera, November, iWriterly LLC) “A circus competition. A tinkerer tasked with removing the losing cyborgs’ implants. Who is she to protect when she falls for both the handsome ringleader and the beautiful acrobat?

      5 min read

    • Article

      Writing Something Irresponsible: The Millions Interviews Andrew Martin

      Jul 24, 2018

      I first met Andrew Martin about a year ago through a friend (whom I had also, basically, met through a friend) at bar in a Brooklyn. I had some questions about my literary future—meaning I had some questions about how to get out of my stagnant presen

      9 min read

    • Article

      Juno Dawson

      Jun 15, 2022

      BECAUSE OF THE 30-YEAR RULE, THE 1990S are back. For the uninitiated, this is the idea that even the most ephemeral pop culture of three decades ago can be brought back into the light by those who grew up with it. Just ask Juno Dawson. “I’ve tried to

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Wrong Side Of History

      Oct 10, 2021

      As blood pumped from the gash on his neck and the world before his eyes darkened, Senator Arnold McCoy’s last conscious thought was to wonder if being assassinated was enough to put him on the right side of history. It was his birthday. Surely, he co

      27 min read

    • Article

      Katharine Kilalea

      Dec 15, 2017

      Katharine Kilalea
      37 min read

    • Article

      Perfect Prose II

      May 15, 2020

      Perfect Prose II
      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      Summer Beach Reads

      Jan 10, 2021

      Summer Beach Reads
      7 min read

    • Article

      Meet Your New Favorite Poet

      Feb 20, 2019

      Meet Your New Favorite Poet
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Hurtle of Hell

    4/5

    3 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Stephen Carter had known as a teenager that he was gay but had thought that his very traditional, unadventurous parents would never accept this. Aged sixteen, and soon after finishing his exams, he took all his savings and escaped to a new life in London where he reinvented himself. He became Stefano Cartwright and, giving little thought to the effect it might have on them, cut off all contact with his family, apart from sending a birthday card to his younger sister for the five years until she was eighteen. As the story opens he is living in Hackney, working in a gay bar and is in a committed relationship with Adam, with whom he is enjoying a holiday on a small volcanic island. In general, his life feels pretty good and he is reasonably content. However, a freak accident is about to plunge him into a state of utter confusion and make him question all his previously-held beliefs and assumptions. When a massive wave almost kills him, he has a near death, out of body experience. As a fellow holiday maker is giving him the kiss of life, he finds himself travelling up a tunnel of light, a journey which culminates in a close encounter with a giant blue eye peering back at him. When the life-saving efforts work and Stefano regains consciousness, he is convinced that what he saw was the eye of God and believes that, if he is not to end up in hell, he needs to change his life. This belief will have profound effects, not just on him but on everyone he is close to. As this is happening to Stefano, God is looking down his “seeing tube”, surveying, as he has been doing since he created it, his vast universe. The commotion on the beach draws his attention and he focuses his tube on it, only to be taken aback when he sees two large green eyes looking back at him, first in astonishment and then in fear. They suddenly disappear and his tube becomes dark, leaving him confused about what has just happened. Over the millennia he has paid sporadic attention to planet Earth, observing its progress in a vaguely affectionate but rather desultory way. However, the experience of being spotted is a new, and not altogether welcome one. Intrigued, and possibly bored, he decides to find out more about the fate of Stefano and his life on earth.This wonderful story (the title is taken from The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins) is told in alternating chapters through the voices of Stefano, Adam and God (an important fourth voice is introduced later in the book but I don’t want to spoil the surprise of whose voice that is!) The reader follows their struggles as each of them tries to adjust and come to terms with the implications of Stefano’s struggle to reconcile his gay lifestyle with his new-found belief in the existence of what, he assumes, is a disapproving, judgemental God. There are moments of truly laugh-out-loud humour throughout the story as the author describes the personal journey each of his characters makes. It turns out that it isn’t only the humans who are confused, God is often equally perplexed about his place in the universe and what may exist beyond its boundaries. He often frets about this and then tries to convince himself that he must stop himself creating potential catastrophes! The idea of God often feeling very alone in his vast universe and using his “telescope” to see what was going on “out there” was certainly a novel one and I frequently found myself feeling rather sorry for him! I loved his frequently hilarious reflections on his observations of human behaviour and his becoming perplexed about all the strange notions people have about his existence and his powers. He cannot, for instance, understand how people have come to believe that that he has a son!Although there is a humorous lightness to Simon Edge’s writing, there is an underlying seriousness to many of his thought-provoking explorations on life and human behaviour, on the complexities of relationships, on belief, religion and spirituality and on the propensity for human beings to exaggerate their significance in the universe. The story captures the huge shift there has been in the church’s attitudes towards gay people since the turn of the millennium, when there was considerable opposition to any dismantling of discriminatory anti-gay laws and when homosexuality was firmly denounced as a sin by so many senior clerics. Whilst these attitudes do still exist, they are far less strident than they once were and are now more frequently and confidently challenged.Another theme which runs throughout the story is what gay people do or do not share with family and friends and how fears of rejection frequently stop people from being honest about their sexuality. However, this avoidance all too often fails to recognise the capacity people have to accept difference, to encompass change and to unreservedly offer love and support, without judgement or condemnation. Consequently, at its heart this is a story about the need to be true to oneself, about love and tolerance, forgiveness and redemption.This thought-provoking exploration of homosexuality, atheism and God with a telescope is a delight. Without any reservation I recommend it as a story which will both make you laugh and make you think.

    Book preview

    The Hurtle of Hell - Simon Edge

    ɪ2^book_preview_excerpt.html\KFr *fɡu[3(rdD2L @`ljtɜD{YEl8dw>y_Z56Tqs [z[uMj_Zm<`7nz>-K5;7,x7YX}X<~wu uU_V>4MU~ZӏS)FaEʕ"uN&? M\/[~v|ITE} O**!^݈ Z;=5рa B3$E JoVibΨ X q?BǞ7 pBmMk&,.)YNC4&ʻ?ƚz-B3!]n:_/' < u hU7rZbrv*6[JIFFE]？,.trԀf$KUWG1;1:Lu4FNnqti;g|4(B_rDl_,+%g/ـ.tmD;SrE! ^% Nd?N)`ԓ`J0 lMBtJGl a~e5A),164 bG&aܨ֥>fL1;a?y<Ŧ9$ f)*dB/Џiԫ]e/'łg9%^&S&a:y%V@( $q4dj w-f>G9LQ1|]ښ+7K  Pތ%qE^lԄB豜R-Zn%Q=i Į&,Q Ɓُˎ% Hk#&8^I. a\`r{LIۦ։uu-, 6,N@dH8fxF"@toFLQ Z8n)5tjTQ_`ZB+opwP#!C[%0˹nƆWXXtT O$X JWےL$-.թ_ W^%6&&oy$K&e@ o]@HkpڌӊU='Mal*âH] @un5GI4ƽQYߖ0{D eYVˆp*^kɷ3G$!4%F.DY>{%UOJkJ"ͮ.w|~# h08UlY|^bWTahX (zV7~45$d8+ztܕ"ޔL<,6+LWy0ʔ#,! 5n [_0[JdIK&@%SX௛6sר^yb1\Xܜ`<&E9G+wuꭒ)FuEJsz5FKMӘ` h>WO4%w'ugQ0JeBA'Fod 5cXHku쐨d9i 0rQҡo giˬYdVC ֒ك<х25 m'}Mdc;B@bkzttH ʜKWqp3QE0FIu@FUPb|Q'_g({J=B}C$ %* ^tsyLʄ%-{-CD& rEwwK"[.utt( L$j"`0/tvQ4XuډMI%WIj-Y!= y) .Lεb8N3^%aRDX@Nzg7XC޿2Fl^ sŏX]9C"su/ƜRs\WG/Vqx@(3Z(^"REri+gBꖴ@ ٬C'6tV;s I0l 2#vLf ~ E4(Út\*Ho%/2^6SL:H"*k`Og B/8)i3!ӱ OЌ1g$?aL= ' ڟ9 bw& `Kߪ_`Q\Ut<̑f^^CNd $N&@HD2H3K)fH 29H& _G08;MS9]aIE0 řAkpbT|ɇ2#NЭM5vJ 7$BLxSNaR(8kRhNvy,hP8h' JpϬeL2f(Kk[V @m&O3NW(L5ڠ_Vx:[>!HL>z<PYk.%gՌE^G5ZצPƩK$_ (v¬O"lDIV_ a)XNV~|p܅R%p N>PBgZ&֒=R:WAr cihEp!k(7C }a5v//N baR(1' n V9jYq<!h[O{WH}-;2couHn, o$!<>E0C8)5|,j {bBϝbGQ$8^5*^aЇZЎk*a&wfBC4Qt`ؗO|+k vT?mPIdGŭKé#2 piPP_d}X}.*KqVj@fHowQ::)t%~ 6źv3m],P%W-MhzAˍRAou+ ̈́o.lfY25bp<yv6-uAMQ @h)#>-"F _ՙ$E-B&lTEb y? fحC:.$^'ny=^^`H뵳lH`D+!(2}bZ3R2oCr v@!zx̰ęƝoB28%-,忭Y2mEƈ{_b ҭJA4` ٷAJAiZԾy_}I`{ #)2OAr\nͯS^Y4+aJs[$;\UTxwtƪR@mUULv32dq >wVK0>Ve?q~oH@wV|ѝ(d-"۵" Bݲ+03/X2 ֤XPXLv).-s*K*4:d*l=8 wcm)m%X،*4|g*4ռ%KNzUD,y֨nVH&/rjVҒH%վq\Tcy(e@ Oʫ`'&dcs*?"l P RO^([fTe[@Ј؃,\^ 0}~=:0W4m:upW /35Gvw_S%̉pM\b[?}8X/$fURUEީ Sqsy;e'KV%\N̅4X2aKϙ4GTTz0v o.Fc=lNVFwb5 f5f^I*;l&D>( _V&Lyj`B)ex䌂-!Dq /ijD7h@ ^3}jy?KnԢ$L+[[fxj"T W-aMvN}8bDwJ10mq脹 22e5X1TuHR?1B ] `J]cƒz%dŚ>fRU(cY'M_Qqb@uu=yքjHOˡuhKit3 V3sЫGʏr@!Tq g,_lCs#:t/CfwְY^dEbzz 6 P?^=>Z۽vĽs$G; 1/~ kYK/Y.$NRpv96;i[=4x8ֈl:24ƽd05TRO1ʃqD!R((a`@z"NPӍu6;Obuآ6#Xс*`퐏_E+ݺ Fl)- a}NYU#w*7-C3#S{/Ev @ѣ YN쵎QSOC v9/׭eh{xh+VOְ,#A4:\[إqUlqo7GT9`TVjq_Y{(1ֆ-9U5W< x:E]WRZG /M V-Nh^_?BA/6-nEɱBzY9DLLon+zzf6e!uJv;INw]+ڜG߇Eӳ0ϲQ3]DGsЯ~nR1ʃجe*y`eWoT6wE/.<^D2h/SȌ{O[;]OUs߫p%% u:`h*3@]f%'QAP< 5dGtsse]KⱨY?֛Uy!kNC.v9gX1a< 1:{: Ǵ$)gj7 <¾OԏV-@އ4tHЙZ J r5~g csgZźr9E49M^.eKO%qO VfFuO_ykRՆʡ5S)#(;0(3SOn4DЁ8TU0-nh{OE36w9#Azo::t;cm*їUQey,:_XI^^hCY )<{&($K^ U~zՄjJb` ktН_ЏɎy|fP`^'k'*a;}á{-+zsφeW wSG 3jܙ5UB7;=mԝ9"Q6\^W=~O@n-yŝ,И,69KmDNM|.V{@͊ Mt,}Cݴ=ewU_Wn9MoX4,WI{sژP|ԡ+exYS:PTfxH􆊿ClhOcgCB7OD-f_)C” 7gWNtNP7]SWr]}YI}=#x: '_oI %56ѳl:m+:Wރ-np9k > 14N)S[9_ezzvVc{Ou0ná !WY{յsOP]b'n8 <~9 o.q utI=E e\wmFEjP[:IxEGꤶ&~$^ *^/6⹷,w3r j'aD*hK܀~(W GO啬Β3 :vx{ CIoޖ?DT(cG$aGanAEajHFTUTN`O!1kcvF7Ɍv` +G[? uљYWs1bqyU۵C7M `Tjb؋)u^ۋFJ qୖhḥV-{-:!xӖ܍Qn{͌u q_YA)?Ӝ}_.@:j!{ W_G7"y#1Y˱[`a/My!% V̎<|Z@ & =6oD~ bAQN cQ&%=O(Y誶V4&d=r+`L-'q,{bgCC/-?7j}K Zg|ahr7/dⳙ;W]u&R|T>}}`< qMv/hJ>ϪϘ0saړG^h4ލAkb`}{CYbj ǼnW@+%痮a=.Zqλ@@V_ wڵ3Ϡc Уt?@7,e`)YIvk?.` ckmys[H!3FΎuç\&AO?+^
    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1