This is the one customer service desk where the customer is always wrong. And no matter what, you’re going to Hell. by Hannah Murphy Winter “Welcome to Hell. This is the Hellp Desk.” A young woman with long, red hair and a glo wer that would make Miranda Priestly tremble stands in front of the gates of Hell. She holds your Soul File in her hand—a list of everything the Universe weighed when it decided if you were going to Paradise or headed to the gate you’re looking at now. Most of Hell is run by demons, but Lily, the woman holding your file, is a human: one who had a short lifetime full of customer service experience. And the line you’re in isn’t for everyone. It’s for the Karens, the crypto-bros, people who insist it was “just a joke.” Everyone who, on Earth, learned that if you’re loud, obnoxious, or cruel enough, you’ll eventually get what you want. Not here. This is the one customer service desk where the customer is always wrong. And no matter what, you’re going to Hell. All of it is courtesy of Hell’s Belles, the TikTok series created by Seattle’s Jaysea Lynn. Born of two traumas—religious indoctrination and customer service work—Hell’s Belles has built the afterlife we all wish existed: fair, nuanced, respectful of religion but devoid of dogma. The series has spent four years exploring morality, justice, and some of our best and worst human instincts, with a sprinkling of demon smut on top. The series has 1.8 million followers who scroll in five days a week to watch updates from the Hellp Desk. Hell’s Belles was only supposed to last a few episodes—an idea that Lynn had during a particularly bad day in, you guessed it, customer service. “This lady just told me to go to Hell,” Lynn told The Stranger. “The first skit came to me, and I was like ‘Cool, I’ll do, like, three or four of these. It’ll be cathartic, and I will fade into obscurity.’ And that was almost 600 episodes ago.” Lynn started out by pulling material from her own life, growing up in Astoria (yes, of The Goonies fame) in a conservative, religious home. “In college, I lived in an all-women’s Christian co-op that was essentially a cult,” she says. “When I connected with those same people after college, we had all left religion—and some of us had left faith completely. And it was like, ‘Okay, what were the things that happened? They mattered and they hurt us, and they’re worth talking about.’ Hell’s Belles was a place where I could start expressing that malcontent and that hurt and not have someone immediately go, ‘Well, that’s not God,’ to make it more comfortable for them to hear. It’s really validating to hear someone say, ‘That’s not what should have happened.’ Or ‘You were assaulted, and it wasn’t God trying to get your attention.’” In the Hell’s Belles afterlife, we’re all judged by the Universe on the same basic scale: Did you do your honest best to avoid doing harm? If you did, head to the paradise of your choosing. If you didn’t, you’ll find yourself walking past the Hellp Desk toward the gates of Hell. The first two levels aren’t punishment—think of them more like therapy. A place to work through the reasons you weren’t able to be as decent as you should have been on Earth. As you get deeper, the punishments get more severe, but Lynn’s version of Hell assumes that everyone is redeemable. No one is doomed to rot there as long as they’re willing to put in the work. Some of the desk’s patrons are archetypes: Christian mothers who rejected their queer children, abusers, and backyard puppy mill breeders. Others are pulled straight from headlines: the day Anita Bryant died, Miss Oklahoma came up to the desk (“The gay is not a determining factor in how many stairs you have to do.”) When Luigi Mangione shot and killed Brian Thompson, an unnamed healthcare CEO passed through (“When you were lying in that bed, dying, did you still think it was best for healthcare decisions to be made by an insurance panel with no medical training?” Lily asked. “Your claim for hellp has been denied.”) But between the Hellp Desk patrons is the whole “life” part of the afterlife. Lily falls in love with a hunky demon named Bel, they have a little found family that passes between the many levels of the afterlife and plays sexy trivia and sings “Margaritaville” karaoke, and of course, that’s where the sprinkling of demon smut comes in. The show ran for four years, and in addition to the whirlwind that comes with TikTok notoriety, Hell’s Belles also helped reconcile some of that religious trauma in her personal life. “I started living more authentically,” Lynn says. “And it was like creative therapy for me. I’m more willing to talk to my mom about this. And we were able to have these sometimes sad or harsh conversations that built over time.” But in January, as the TikTok ban loomed, it seemed like a chapter might be coming to an end. But the same week that TikTok went dark (if only for a day), Lynn signed a seven-figure, three-book deal, including her already self-published prequel to the series, For Whom the Belle Tolls. No matter which oligarch owns our various social media platforms, the Hell’s Belles universe will live on. The series prequel starts when Lily is still alive, sitting in her car that refused to start, just after getting a bleak cancer prognosis: “The doctor had given her options, of course. Options to prolong. To ease. But options were for people with money. People whose cars would start.” By Chapter 3, though, we’re in the afterlife: Lily gets judged by the Universe, sorted into her own paradise, and the Hellp Desk comes to be. The first book was the largest writing project Lynn has ever taken on—she doesn’t even script the Hell’s Belles episodes. But she’s excited to eventually move away from the daily grind of filming, editing, and posting an episode every day. “It’s not my favorite storytelling medium,” she says. And with a three-book deal, she may have the chance to (very, very slowly) move away from it. “At first I was like ‘Do you have two more books in you?’” she says. “As soon as I had the deal, I was like ‘Maybe I’m a fraud, and I only ever had one book in me, and this was all a fluke, and this is a lie, and they’re gonna put me in author jail.’ And then it was I took a nap and ate something, and I went, ‘No, I think I’ll be okay.’” There are two possibly perfect descriptions I’ve read of For Whom the Belle Tolls. The first comes from a document titled “Reading waiver for dad.” When Lynn’s religious father expressed interest in reading the manuscript before it was published, she agreed, but first, he had to initial and sign on a few dotted lines. “I know, from prior conversations, that you have read Dostoevsky and believe this book to be similar. While I am flattered, I’m also concerned,” the letter starts. “For Whom the Belle Tolls does—like Dostoevsky—deal with religion, morality, the human experience, and satire. However, it is not, in any way, like anything Dostoevsky wrote. Dostoevsky did not write sexy demons. Dostoevsky did not have customer service trauma that affected his work. Dostoevsky did not write sex scenes.” The second comes from the book’s dedication: “For anyone who has ever felt temporary. And for the nerds.” ...read more read less