Steven Brust’s To Reign in Hell : The Real Story

Authors rewrite canonical texts for various reasons. In his 1984 fantasy novel, To Reign in Hell, Steven Brust reimagines the events leading up to and including the war in Heaven in Paradise Lost to make it available and palatable to a secular, multicultural audience. The contemporary reader of fantasy is receptive to alternative realities, more inclined to prefer off-center than traditional perspectives, and certainly more sympathetic to (if not more interested in) Satan than was Milton’s seventeenth-century reader. But, because Milton’s poem is itself a rewriting of the founding myth of Christianity, To Reign in Hell is not a simple recovery of a historically distant work. In Alan Sinfield’s provocative term for the process of rewriting, Brust engages in an act of “creative vandalism,” and produces a novel that is an “anti-reading”1 because its version of events offers a flat contradiction to the assumptions and items of faith that underlie Paradise Lost. It is a truism that history is written from the point of view of the victor: To Reign in Hell purports to give us the “real” story behind the authorized version written by John Milton. Not surprisingly, since it is fictive revisionist history, the novel is about leadership and power, the awesome responsibilities of both, and their potentially transformative effects.