"It is a cruel book and if any novellas in Slovak literature have earned the title cruel, this book of fourteen tales of Lahola certainly has. Yet they are only more than cruel in the Villierse sense of the word. If I were to compare them to something I would choose to fourteen circles of "modern hell - and I wouldn't do it out of mere wilfulness because the word hell appears a number of times and it isn't by chance that the author called one of his last dramas Inferno / Hell. And what sort of hell is it? Definitely not Dante's hell. In this hellish universe there are no ghostly gothic devils, symmetrical circles; there are no sinners. On the contrary, Lahola's hell differs from the hell that we have encountered in ancient religious images. It is a place where all of us are guilty. And yet Lahola's hell is close to the Dantesque Inferno; not with its appearance but with its inner meaning. It truly is a place ruled by Evil, an Evil not of a religious-metaphysical design but a design individual and unique for Earth."
Jozef Felix