Just so you know, this book lives in our teenage section, and is clearly labelled ‘Not suitable for younger readers’. Fair enough. You can’t say you weren’t warned. My personal view, for what it’s worth, is that people should read what they want, when they want. After all, the main theme of Anthony McGowan’s ‘Hellbent’ - the inventively gruesome torments that await some of us in the afterlife - is pretty much what you will find in the first part of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, and most parents and librarians would be thrilled to bits if a younger reader asked for that one. But there we are. When 15 year old Conor O’Neil is knocked down by an ice-cream van, and sent with his disgusting dog Scrote to Hell, he doesn’t know what to expect. Nor, it seems, do the demons. As McGowan is careful to explain in this devilishly clever and entertaining novel, very few young people end up there. You need to have done something really, really bad before they’ll even consider you. The fate devised for Conor by his personal demon, Clarence, is an eternity of dull radio programmes and musty books. Oh, and there’s no toilet paper. He has to use, amongst other things, a cheese grater, a trombone, a bunch of keys, and a jellyfish. After much deliberation he decides the jellyfish is probably the worst. There’s also a great deal of poo. Oceans of it. At one point, Conor sits down to eat a meal of the stuff. I think this is what the Americans call ‘gross-out’. If that was McGowan’s aim, he certainly succeeds. I cannot claim, gentle reader, that these excremental frolics were altogether to my taste, but then he didn’t write this book for the grown-up me. He wrote it for the teenage me, who I suspect would have found these parts so hilarious he wouldn’t have minded, or even noticed, the somewhat abstruse discussions Conor and Clarence have on the nature of sin, free will, and chaos theory. A spoonful of sugar, as they say, helps the medicine go down. McGowan doesn’t give us sugar, of course, and there’s much more than a spoonful of it, but the principle’s the same.