Hell

Hell, in many religious and folkloric traditions, is a place of torment and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as eternal destinations while religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations. Typically these traditions locate hell in another dimension or under the Earth's surface and often include entrances to Hell from the land of the living. Other afterlife destinations include Heaven, Purgatory, Paradise, and Limbo.

Other traditions, which do not conceive of the afterlife as a place of punishment or reward, merely describe Hell as an abode of the dead, the grave, a neutral place located under the surface of Earth.

Literary comment
Numerous Harry Turtledove characters are Christians who believe in some kind of Hell and make reference to it. It is rarely significant to the plot.

Hell in "Clash of Arms"
Satan dragged Master Stephen de Windesore to Hell via an entrance located in a forest, after winning a wager based on knowledge of heraldry.

Hell in The Gladiator
The Italian People's Republic was officially an atheist state which believed in no kind of afterlife. Nevertheless, much of Italy's population followed Catholicism, a religion with a long tradition of speculating on the precise dimensions and demographics of Hell. The communist school system took advantage of this by assigning students to study the template of Hell depicted by Dante Alighieri in the Inferno, and write lists of history's worst capitalist overlords, imagining which precise circles of Hell they were in.