Peter Rostovsky’s graphic novel of hell and remedy

Damnation Diaries, by Peter Rostovsky. Uncivilized Books, 2023. 144 pages.

AMONG THE BEST PARTS of Peter Rostovsky’s new graphic novel, Damnation Diaries, are the jokes about art and art school. With its title, paired with opening pages that offer lush, textured, shaded black-and-blue images of hell—dense and respectfully horrific—readers might wonder what angle this book is taking on the inferno. Thankfully, the narration quickly clarifies. Our first-person protagonist, condemned to hell, relates his regular menu of torture, each item accompanied by a panel that depicts it: “The eye gouging. Perpetual castration. Slow fingernail removal. And lots of frustrating installation art.” A few pages later, this sympathetic narrator, a middle-aged professor we know only as PKRx354, reveals his plan to pay for therapy in hell—this talking cure will constitute the book’s central plotline—bytaking on increased tortures: “I’d just take on some extra time in the trampling stadium . . . or do a little bit of adjuncting at the local art school.” In frames reminiscent of Daniel Clowes’s classic 1991 send-up “Art School Confidential,” Rostovsky illustrates a studio crit, populated by humans and demons alike, in a room chock-full of earnest student canvases.

While some of the book’s jokes don’t land as well as others (are IKEA and Full House softer targets than art school?), most of them, with Rostovsky’s timing and deadpan delivery, are spot-on. In one of my favorite scenes, Rostovsky describes PKRx354’s dulled relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Mary, with whom he cohabitates in hell. In a pitch-perfect rendering of the studied absorption-in-something-else that marks the twilight of many relationships, he draws her from the shoulders up, eyes cast down: “Mary would just look at her rock, pretending it was a smartphone.” And throughout, Rostovsky takes effective satirical aim at capitalism, bureaucracy, and our bruising, post-9/11 political culture. Required toil for residents includes continuously building vast, slick new high-rise complexes, which remain empty and collapse; an anarchist plot by rebels known as UNDR (who have a “new vision of the underworld”) kickstarts panoptic surveillance measures and the lionizing of informants as celebrities.

Damnation Diaries tracks PKRx354’s shifting experience of hell after beginning therapy. (Rostovsky’s initials match those of his Virgil; he details other links to his life in the acknowledgments.) He is joined down below not only by Mary but also by his mother (who eventually becomes one of hell’s antiterrorist heroes) and his father, a deadbeat dad in the living world who now manifests as a sandwich that is perpetually eaten and reconstituted. In addition to this family drama, readers also follow a thread that focuses on the backstory of Dr. Fred Greenberg—and what he did to wind up as hell’s only resident psychotherapist. And while Fred’s personal life is messy, the book takes the work of treatment seriously, no matter how many gimmicks it provokes (the tagline on the cover announces, “In hell, everyone can hear you scream, but only one person listens”). 

In Fred’s story, as everywhere else, Damnation Diaries pulls off a complicated feat of tone. It is both a muscular, thoroughgoing satire, in its verbal jokes and its drawn grotesquerie, and it also manages moments of sincere connection and soul-searching gravity, holding this duality in tension. We see this, for instance, in one of Fred’s group therapy sessions, in which one participant’s listed “background issue” in their file is “musical aspirations”—while another’s is “abandoned infant daughter to child trafficker.” The story of the mother, and her pain, is sincerely haunting.

Rostovsky’s experience as a painter shows here to good effect. Even the process images he includes in the backmatter are impressive, particularly the pencil sketches, which exude a classical appeal. The visual surface is both luxurious and controlled, full of detail and color. For the episodes in hell, the artist selects one tone (green, orange, and yellow appear after the opening blue) for each chapter’s images, emphasizing the underworld’s starkness, while scenes from the living world—which sometimes interrupt the narrative as dramatic recollections—command a full repertoire of styles and colors. (Alas, while Damnation Diaries’ hues dazzle, the small black font can be hard to read.) 

Originally slated to be printed in China, Damnation Diaries was flagged by censors there earlier this year; the stated reason was its propensity for violence, which Rostovsky suggested in an email to me is a result of the book’s terrorism plotline, rather than its often disturbing images of bodily suffering (standard fare for mainstream comics). The printer, then, couldn’t take the job; it was moved last-minute to Lithuania. “All this time,” Rostovsky wrote me, “I thought I was satirizing the US and Trumpism! But in retrospect it also indicted the CCP.” The Russian-born Rostovsky added, referring to his publisher, Uncivilized Books’ Tom Kaczynski, “It’s just a sad irony that it would happen to two expats of the Soviet regime.” The widespread resonance of Rostovsky’s satire is an indicator of our Mephistophelian reality. Indeed, hell is everywhere.

— Hillary Chute