When anyone comes to think about the main description of Hell in a horror narrative, almost always that vision is of a fiery landscape.  The dark afterlife dimension to most people is an arid, smoky location that is consumed completely at all sides by fire.  This fire is relentless, consuming not only the landscape but anyone trapped in the area for eternal damnation.  Almost everyone who thinks of Hell always goes to this apocalyptic fiery setting that seriously lacks any type of diversification from person to person.

  In reality, the landscape of Hell is designed to be really anything, so long as it represents something undesirable to most people.  Through the classic novel Dante's Inferno, Hell is described as not only a fiery landscape, but a diverse terrain with multiple types of environments.  Depending on how bad the person is, they could end up in a completely frozen tundra that makes the worst winters on Earth look like nothing or an endless dark sea filled with the suffering of sinners.  The point of depicting Hell in this way was to give context to its real role; a dimension of eternal torture that shapes itself to fit the diverse punishments of its sinned citizens.

  Whether or not you do believe in Hell, you can attest that the landscape in fiction and in religious texts are meant to adjust to unique types of individual crimes against humanity and the diverse punishments the Devil comes up with.  It is not merely a fiery landscape that sinners are meant to wander in forever.  It is a place of constant punishment that really has no true form.

  This is the direction that the TV show American Horror Story took for its version of Hell, especially in the third season, Coven.  Depending solely on the person, their version of Hell can be completely different than someone else's version of Hell.  A vain person like the witch Madison Montgomery will end up in the tortuous location of a busy convenience store where the line to the cash register is endless and the customers complain constantly about needless issues.  However, a person bent solely on revenge like the show's version of Marie Laveau will be forced to endlessly torture their worst enemy, even if they are completely satisfied with the punishment the person had received already.  All versions of Hell in this show are completely unique and not the same for each person.  Instead, everyone is isolated to what they consider the worst form of punishment, which are just as unique as each of the sinners.

  It is a combination of what Dante's Inferno and American Horror Story consider to be Hell that I consider to be the right direction to depict the landscape fictionally.  You do not have to make the landscape always a fiery terrain when depicting it in fiction just because it is the common ideology shared by the public.  Instead, you can be unique and create a different looking torture dimension that changes appearances depending on the particular story.  There can be diversity in how you want to personally depict the cursed landscape.

  All you need to keep in mind when constructing your unique version of Hell is that it must fill the role of being a dark landscape built to punish sinners.  It cannot be something too positive such as some type of Candyland or something too simplistic like the area just being darker lit than its alternative on Earth.  Hell has to fit the role of a location people completely dread going to and will try committing as many positive acts as possible to not end up in during the afterlife.  It cannot be some type of gothic party that sinners go to after they die.  Sure, the demons can enjoy the location, but the sinned souls themselves have to show some type of suffering to depict the area correctly.

  As long as Hell is depicted as undesirable, you can really interpret the location for yourself any way you want.  You do not have to limit yourself completely to the common ideology that it is solely a fiery, dark landscape.  Anything is allowed so long as the basic requirements for the landscape are depicted well.  Just go nuts with whatever you consider to be undesirable.