WINNETKA, IL—Describing a conversation that took place at a family gathering Friday, relatives of local conservative man Dennis Sherman told reporters it was obvious the 57-year-old’s terrifying descriptions of Chicago had come directly from Dante’s Inferno. “He goes on and on about how depraved and awful the city is, but he’s clearly just regurgitating verbatim all the stuff he’s read about hell in the first canticle of The Divine Comedy,” said Sherman’s niece Stella Simmons, a student at Columbia College in downtown Chicago, which her uncle referred to as a place where residents are constantly at risk of having their flesh gnawed upon for all eternity by the three mouths of Lucifer. “He asked me how I could possibly live there among the tortured souls of the damned, and grumbled that you couldn’t pay him to go south of the Phlegethon these days because it’s nothing more than sinners getting shot full of arrows in a river of boiling blood. I tried to tell him that’s not how it is day to day, but he kept saying he’s read about a plain of burning sand along the Red Line where it rains fire and people are routinely feasted upon by harpies.” The conservative man did concede Chicago had some good restaurants, but said it wasn’t worth paying the toll at the River of Oblivion just to end up getting hacked to pieces by a horned demon who wields a flaming sword.
