The Semblance of a Hell

Corson McCain is popular, a star-athlete and straight A student, but underneath this charming exterior lurks a highly medicated and tortured mind contemplating murder. Corson masks his growing instability from family and friends, though bares all to his psychiatrist Christopher Tobin, to whom he rants and raves about media violence, human atrocities and the horror genre while telling his life story as though it were a literary tale of mythological proportions. Christopher, however, has been dead for nearly 10 years and his rhetoric of morality is slowly waning from Corson’s conscience, his talk of compassion competing with the cacophony of malevolent voices that fill Corson's mind. When these voices begin to materialize around Corson, fantasy and reality coalesce, making his friends and phantasms indistinguishable from one another. No one suffers more in Corson’s lurid and hallucinatory world than Vanessa Tobin, the daughter Christopher left behind and the object of Corson’s increasingly obsessed eye – the lamb, as he sees her. Vanessa sought refuge in faith and religion when she lost her father. It is faith which eludes Corson and which he hopes to test in Vanessa. As the days pass and Vanessa catches glimpses of the deranged madman in her midst, she grows convinced Corson is responsible for her father's death and certain he plans to kill again. Unable to get anyone to believe her, Vanessa is left to face her Devil alone. With revenge consuming her mind and compassion pulling at her soul, Vanessa searches her heart for her father's guidance. Facilis descensus averni. The descent into Hell is easy.

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