Enter a world of nightmares and dreamscapes, in this fiercely haunting yet very original look into the world of the surreal.  An Autumn in Hell is a collection of chilling, and often terrifying, verses that will attack your senses and your psyche.  It will take you to the depths of the unimaginable, where hideously eerie, spine-tingling images are ingeniously crafted.  From the abyss of darkness and perdition, R.P. Dodge’s, An Autumn in Hell poetically displays the confrontation between dysfunctional reality and the sordid soul.

R.P. Dodge is an experienced writer/poet for over twenty years.  He is a teacher of history and English in a suburb of northern Illinois.  An Autumn in Hell is his first published work in book format.

An Autumn in Hell is a collection of poems that probe into the darker side of life, and often the very surreal.  From pieces such as “The Tempest Verdict” which pits man against a raging ocean storm, to “The McMillan Impulsion” which follows the traces of the mind of a serial killer.

There is however humor to this dark side, as seen in poems like “When Tigers Go to Doctors”, “The Animal Dance”, and “A Vegetable Orchestra”.

Six Feet Down

Six feet down,

            Dark and hollow the sound.

Impervious to light the wretched

            Writhe with the circumcision of the soul.

What ghostly and ghastly sounds they encumber

            Guests crowd the shroud in which they slumber.

White gates surrounded in vines that wither.

Soliloquies put forth, to the crowd,

            With lies that dither.

Chamber the voices of the discontent

            And silence those incontinent.

Brace one’s bastion of bereavement with rock

            Estranged spirits, be earthed and buried

            Locked in a box.

An absence of conscience

            Guided by the metaphysical.

Gray stone slabs left as memorials

            For pulpiteers placed on pedestals.

Among those who orate their nirvanic dreamscapes

            In valedictorian homilies of prattle and prate,

            Pass for providence

            A blessing for this estate.

In the journey towards light behind one’s demise

            Rests an angel of lucidity

            With hazel eyes.

A calm repose now heard by the crowd,

            An explanation of life,

            For the here and now.

The great unnumbered descend from the estate

            Leaving the buried

            To rest with their fate.....