The narrator of the story finds himself in a dim bleak town at a bus stop. He boards the bus with several other people, and finds out they are leaving Hell for a brief tour of Heaven. Hell is depicted as bleak, empty, sterile and uninteresting. There are, as of yet at least, no horrific torments, just emptiness and the shriveled souls who dwell there being unable to escape themselves.
Heaven, on the other hand is full of life and color, and, to the infernizens (my own coinage) literally painful. Throughout the course of the short novel, the damned meet the blessed and are confronted with the nature of their sins, as well as the choice to abandon them. One does so, and becomes one of the blessed himself, racing off into deeper heaven to join in the great dance.
If you haven't already read this book, I highly recommend it. Honestly, it's one of Lewis's works that can bring me to tears, even having read it before. Lewis spends relatively little time describing Hell itself, but plenty on the people who make it Hell. Effectively, he covers the entire range of The Divine Comedy, though. The reader goes all the way from Hell through Purgatory and into Heaven.
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