[Book Review] The History of Transgressive Canonical Horror in ‘Infernas’

Infernas (Ambrose, 2023) is part of a long line of responses to Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, which engage with horror tropes or are outright horrific. Even Mary Shelley would invoke “the Dantesque monster” (Milbank 132) in the genre-defining work Frankenstein. The cosmic hopelessness tempered with awe-inspiring wonder has made Dante’s Hell a touchstone for many working in the realm of horror and the Gothic. West Ambrose’s verse novel glosses over the original Inferno with the wordplay in its title, proposing Infernas as "a place or condition suggestive of hell...a conflagration [and]...the lower parts of the body, the abdomen" (Ambrose, ii). In this respect, Ambrose recontextualizes the original Divine Comedy as a site of body horror as well as psychological anguish. This is further supported by the premise of the novel, where both Dante and Virgil are paradoxically trapped in bodies which do not fit and must seek out appropriate bodies—which may or may not exist. In this situation, Dante and Virgil have become the “two inside one fire” (Dante, Canto 26); as with Frankenstein and his monster, Dante and Virgil’s separate attempts at self-distinction are alternately frustrated and bolstered by the other’s burning energy.

The notion of interdependency and codependency as a source and site of horror is nothing new in the field, and arguably takes its antecedent from Romantic views of monomaniacal sailors, tragically linked siblings, and evil monks. Recently, codependency to the point of unsightly and irreversibly physical interminglings has been the subject of several horror films, such as Us (2019), Together (2025), and The Substance (2024). In each of these works, self-perception becomes negated by an understanding and overriding fear of a perception of the other. Be it that of a sinister doppelgänger, a neglected parasocial following, or the gaze of an isolated and insatiable lover, the horror of needing and being needed is a recent anxiety underwritten by ancient tropes.

The horror of codependency provides an additional and startling complement to the mode of traditional terza rima; the master rhyme of the previous triplet becomes both sandwiched and uncoupled by another rhyme in the next. Ambrose’s rhymeless triplets are even more wild and unsettling. Sentences may be interrupted and read two ways due to the imposition of the stanza:

“The darkness lunged and we sat in the back.
Our scraped, stiff knees knocked together as we
ate stale granola bars, trying to forget

that neither of us spoke Italian.
He knew Latin, Greek, gaijin Japanese.
“You’re brilliant.” I crumbled the wrapper.”
—Ambrose, 5

“Trying to forget” takes on a special prominence in its placement here, and forgetting becomes both specific and general as a result. Ambrose takes an opportunity from scansion to disorient and reorient his bewildering world, in Italy, which is both empty and crowded as a Christian Hell. In a text primarily concerned with dissociation, disarticulation, and disembodiment in every sense of the words, sentence-breaking becomes especially significant and contributes to the sense of horror, that of not being heard or not being heard correctly. The non-Italianness of the language amplifies the otheredness of Virgil and Dante, wherein both are spoken over or spoken behind. The introduction of their native Italian compatriot Beatrice casts their foreignness into an even sharper relief. The wedge Beatrice drives between Virgil and Dante is underlined via Italian, as demonstrated by this parting exchange between the two:

“Greta Garbo making one last movie,
a focused spotlight on an absent dancer, a
knife through Monet’s floating lilies.

He was past tense, not present when he faced
that sunrise in two deliberate strides
and replied,‘Andiamo, baby.’”
—Ambrose, 72

Italian and Italian culture become the indicator of the horror of codependency. As figures who both predate the unification of Italy in 1867, Dante and Virgil are Italian without the country, and often excluded from its dialogue and reference indexing, as shown in this tense dialogue scene following Virgil’s departure:

“‘Always nice to meet fresh blood,’ the shorter
woman said. ‘She’s joking, but the hours

can be rough.’ As we walked, I fell behind,
observing. To them no tongue was foreign,
nothing old, new. They were Rosetta

Stones with Gucci and Marc Jacob sandals.
They were the Roman emperors and I
was staring at sleek, marble fountains, stained-

glass revolving doors, sand stuck in my socks,
wondering where the lions were and who
were the gladiators they once slaughtered?”
—Ambrose, 86

Trapped by Italy but unable to escape it or disengage with it, Dante, Beatrice, and Virgil make a tomb of the whole country. In “confronting something and not/quite knowing yet what it is” (118), Dante begins to dig himself out. Afterwards, freshly born as “lonely/divine roadkill” (103), Dante becomes ribald and wild. 

In the “after party of the scorched” (133), Dante becomes “The New Vampire of the Old World” (134), and consumes his former guide whole. Now “dawn soaked and prodigal” (135), Dante directly addresses the reader and admits he does not “know if I’m/really there either;” (135), which ends the narrative on an uncertain and catharsis-dodging non-end. In subverting the full stop as well as preventing the clean ending of that stanza, this finishing triplet releases Dante from the strictures of terza rima and deftly places his new, monstrous self in our world. As with Adelaide’s “tethered” double Red in Us, a newly monstrousDante breaks from his literary form and is free to transgress and transcend into the real world.

Infernas consolidates the unsettling of Dante’s Divine Comedy by making horrific the entanglements of terza rima and the famous, entwined fates of the shades in the original Inferno. It meets the contemporary disquiet with both Classics and real human connections by depicting the fulsome extent of such consumption.

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• Works Cited

  Ambrose, West. Infernas, West of Canon Press, 2023.

  Dante. The Divine Comedy. trans. Henry Francis Cary. Project Gutenberg, 2005.

  Milbank, Alison. “Hideous Progeny.” God & the Gothic, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Article written by Oscar Cadeau

Oscar Cadeau is a writer residing in Southeast Ontario. He enjoys movies and baking, and can often found on the lake, kayaking!

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