A House-Boat on the Styx is a book written by John Kendrick Bangs and published in 1895.

Summary

The premise of the book is that everyone who has ever died (up until the time in which the book is set, which seems to be about the time of its publication) has gone to Styx. This does not appear to be the conventional Hell described by Dante in The Inferno, but rather the Hades described in Greek myth (both of which had Styxes): a universal collecting pot for dead souls, regardless of their deeds in life.

The book begins when Charon, ferryman of the Styx (in The Inferno, he was the ferryman of the river Acheron) being startled--and annoyed--by the arrival of a house boat on the Styx. At first afraid that the boat will put him out of business, he later finds out that he is actually to be appointed the boat's janitor.

What follows are eleven more stories (for a total of twelve) which are set on the house boat. There is no central theme, and the purpose of the book appears to be as a literary thought experiment to see what would happen if various famous dead people were put in the same room with each other. Each chapter is a short story featuring various souls from history and mythology. In the twelfth chapter the house boat disappears, seguing into the sequel, Pursuit of the House-Boat.

Notes

A House-Boat on the Styx appears to have no original fictional characters in it. All are borrowed--with varying degrees of accuracy--from either history of mythology.

Bangs' idea of setting people in Hell (called Bangsian fantasy) is quite similar to a book called God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut, although that work was set in Heaven (not that it matters—Vonnegut explains that everyone winds up there regardless). It is interesting that the one other thing the two books have in common is that Shakespeare did not, in fact, write his plays.

Heroes in Hell, the first book in a series of fantasy short story collections by various authors, has a similar, albeit more modern, theme. Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series is similar in that the main characters are, for the most part, historical figures who are resurrected on a planet with one great river winding around it.

External links

• Read or download the text of the book at http://manybooks.net/titles/bangsjohetext01hstyx10.html