House-Boat on the Styx

Death, it turns out, isn't a judgment. It's a waiting room. When the recently deceased arrive at the Styx, they discover that the river of the underworld has been commandeered by a house boat, and that the legendary Charon has been demoted from ferryman to janitor. What follows is a series of comic encounters as history's most famous figures find themselves in close quarters: philosophers argue with emperors, literary giants trade barbs, and the entire apparatus of the afterlife runs on sheer British bureaucracy. This is Victorian speculative humor at its most delightful, not Dante's Inferno but something closer to a gentleman's club where the guest list happens to include everyone who ever lived. Bangs treats death not with dread but with absurdist play, asking the reader to consider: what would we actually do with eternity, if we had to spend it in the company of everyone who came before us?