She and Carpentier then begin the same journey he had undertaken with Benito many years earlier (even though there are no technical ‘years’ in Hell) to find tormented souls in need of release and lead them safely out of Hell. Carpentier burns the tree down that houses her soul and the actual physical form of Plath is released. This tree turns out to be the famous poet/novelist, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in the 1963 shortly after the publication of her penultimate work, THE BELL JAR. Within the Woods of Suicide, he befriends a tree that has human-like features including the ability to speak. Allen Carpentier starts his journey back where he originally began his own trek in INFERNO, on the outskirts of Hell.

Thus begins the premise of ESCAPE FROM HELL, written a full twenty-three (23) years after INFERNO. At the end of that novel, Benito is able to leave Hell while Carpentier decides to stay - with a newfound desire to free all those who are undeservedly stuck in this land of torment and torture. They travel through each of the intricately detailed circles of Hell and find them to be exactly as Dante originally described in his classic poem. Carpentier finds out before the end of INFERNO that he is actually Benito Mussolini.

His savior and tour guide through the many circles of Hell was a suspiciously familiar character who calls himself Benito. In INFERNO, a science-fiction author named Allen Carpentier awakes after an apparent suicide and finds himself on the outskirts of what he calls Infernoland and later realizes it is actually Hell. What if the nether-world popularly known as the Hell, as imagined by Dante Alighieri in his DIVINE COMEDY, actually existed? That was the premised presented by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in their 1976 sci-fi classic novel, INFERNO.

Escape from hell larry niven