Down here, everyone is right
A Journey Through the Nine Circles of the Modern Inferno
£12.99
Everyone in Hell has a reason. Most of them have paperwork.
Driving from Gdańsk to Chesterfield in a black Jaguar, Martin Rothery stops at a motorway service station outside Leicester. He wants coffee. What he finds is a door, a Porter, and a descent through nine circles built for the modern world.
There are spectators who film suffering rather than interrupt it. Trolls who have forgotten there is a person behind the screen. Football tribes who mistake hatred for belonging. Outrage merchants selling fury by the click. Courts where certainty has replaced justice. Ministries manufacturing truth, warmongers moving lives around maps, and clerks processing misery according to procedure.
At the bottom, there is no emperor of evil waiting on a throne.
There is a mirror.
Down Here, Everyone Is Right is a darkly funny, unsettling journey through the machinery that allows ordinary people to stop seeing one another. Drawing on thirty-eight years of work with human beings when the performance finally gives way, Martin Rothery follows cruelty back through fear, humiliation, tribalism, ambition and the small private permissions by which conscience is gradually outsourced.
This is not a tour of monsters.
It is a tour of us.
The Porter has the forms. The coffee is strong, black and sweet. The door has already closed.