The ghosts begin in the Grey Town in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.
Published in 1945, the allegorical novella follows a group of inhabitants who leave a bleak, shadowy city on a bus and travel to a brighter country. The Grey Town represents a spiritual condition marked by isolation, dissatisfaction, and refusal of joy rather than functioning as an ordinary realistic city.
The travelers encounter beings from the brighter country who try to help them understand what they are being offered. Lewis uses conversations and striking images to explore freedom, desire, repentance, and the consequences of choosing self-centeredness.
The book is not a sequel to Dante’s Divine Comedy, although its journey structure and afterlife setting invite comparison. Its title alludes to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, presenting a theological and imaginative argument about the incompatibility of heaven and hell.