AS A Catholic child growing up in an overwhelmingly Presbyterian environment, I was taught that the afterlife offered four possibilities: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo. Each of these realms was governed by its own inexorable and, to my seven-year-old mind, wonderfully inhuman logic. All but one lasted forever.

When I say "taught", of course, I am guilty of understatement: brainwashed is probably a more accurate term. Like the members of any minority, my priests, teachers and parents were careful to emphasise those matters of doctrine and character that distinguished us from the dominant group, and the nature of the afterlife was one of the most contentious. For Protestants, Limbo did not exist and, for the more enlightened among them, the Hell of fire and ice could be seen as a metaphor for spiritual or moral failure. Even when the inferno was seen as a real place in the post-mortem world, it was topographically rather vague.

For Catholics, however, Hell was not only a matter of fact, but its geography and intricate legal system were Jesuitical in their complexity. For example: a Catholic who died in a state of unconfessed mortal sin was inevitably damned to eternal punishment, according to the nature of his crime, but someone who had never heard the Christian message - Socrates, say, or a pygmy tribesman - would go instead to that suburb of Hell that we called Limbo, along with unbaptised children and, according to the more compassionate but entirely heterodox of my teachers - the family cat. Hell was reserved, in other words, for those who had been vouchsafed the knowledge of Heaven but, whether from weakness or perversity, had refused to take advantage of that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Meanwhile, a not particularly wicked person who happened to commit a mortal sin then die before his next confession was consigned to the flames, while a chronically malevolent, vicious and self-indulgent sinner of the first order could pick up a get-out-of-jail-free card, simply by repenting on his death bed. For him, Purgatory awaited.

I have to say, I liked the idea of Limbo, partly because it was unique to Catholicism, partly for the vision it afforded of Aristotle and the Buddha conversing with tiny, half-naked bushmen but mostly, if I am honest, because I thought there might be animals in that other world I had come to see as an endless expanse of wild, sun-whitened meadows where nobody suffered and - blessed relief - nobody was troubled by the thought of God and all his angels. By contrast, Purgatory seemed mechanical, and I could not quite wrap my head around the idea that, according to the remission of sins rule, sinners who left behind large families - and so had plenty of people to pray for them and light candles in the chapel - had an unfair advantage over the lonely and childless. Meanwhile, to a seven-year-old, Heaven sounded unimaginably boring. All that whiteness and bliss, all that drapery and incense, all the goody-goody saints praising God for all eternity and not a fox or a cat or a horse in sight (animals being barred from Heaven, because only humans had mortal souls - a notion transparently arrogant to any seven-year-old worth his salt).

And then there was Hell - a source of endless fascination. Perhaps it was my morbid temperament (and what seven-year-old boy isn't morbid?), perhaps it was the nascent writer in me stumbling across a potential subject but, whatever the reason, I found myself thinking about the dark side of the afterlife far more than was healthy. I pondered the injustice of eternal misery (after all, who among us, other than a handful of politicians, deserves to suffer Hell for ever?); I considered the relative piquancy of a garment of fire, a second skin of ice and a wide variety of sharp implements, from scalpels to pitchforks. At seven, and through my teens, mine was a mediaeval Hell, and I did not think beyond it. It was the inferno that Dante describes: a place of bodily torment both gruesomely visceral and surprisingly remote, an extreme but abstract terra incognita that, because it was not actually of this world, belonged ultimately to the realm of allegory. As much as I might shudder over, or delight in, its detail and cruelty, I was never entirely convinced that this inferno was anything more than a cautionary tale, or a series of metaphors. In short, for me the afterlife was already a work of the imagination, already a work of art.

With such a history, I was almost bound to end up writing about Hell - and it isn't too far-fetched to say that my new novel, Glister, has been 40 years in the making, if only at some subterranean level of fantasy and dark brooding. It is the story of a boy named Leonard who has spent his entire life in a dank, polluted corner of the Earth that the rest of the world has forgotten, a post-industrial wasteland of slow poisoning and disease where the children run wild and, every now and then, disappear into who knows where. Above it all stands the abandoned chemical plant, a labyrinth of ruined furnaces and storerooms that, for this lonely, intelligent, grieving child, is both a refuge and a locus of terror. Nevertheless, though the landscape of the novel is not that far from Gustave Dore's illustrations for the Inferno, it was not to Dante that I looked for my initial inspiration.

Every time a writer picks up a pencil, he or she enters, and must negotiate with, a live tradition. Nobody writing about Hell can ignore Dante. Yet the writers I found myself returning to most, as I created my own, somewhat local version of inferno, were more recent, and less obviously religious in their approach. Dante's sinners still retain the ability to move us, but with the coming of modernity, a subtler, cooler, less violent, yet equally chilling vision of Hell came into play. There were no fires, no instruments of torture, in these tales, but that was exactly what made them seem so much more frightening to me, as a modern reader.

Dante's Inferno exists in an elsewhere, a supernatural region that, no matter how vivid, and no matter how dramatic the accounts of the damned, still retains an allegorical quality; more recent Hells belong to the world we live in day to day. At any moment, a character might enter into some mundane horror that goes on forever, according to its own inscrutable logic, a waking nightmare, a quotidian madness. In Kafka and Gogol, for example, ordinary clerks find themselves transformed into giant insects, or condemned in absentia for a crime that is never named, or they are plunged into torment by some everyday matter, like the purchase of a new overcoat, or a minor task that, for trivial reasons, is left unfinished.

For these writers, and their contemporaries, Hell is not a religious matter - it is existential. As people gathered in cities and lost track of the natural rhythms of life, a new age of dread was born, an age of dark satanic mills and the death of God, an age of quiet desperation and the convoluted personal infernos exposed by early psychoanalysis; throughout the late 19th century, writers haunted by the spectre of syphilis created Hell-on-Earth narratives that remain as terrifying today as they must have been to their first readers. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is Le Horla, written by the syphilitic Guy de Maupassant on 1887. It is the story of a man who descends into madness, believing that he is accompanied by an invisible, vampire-like figure, the Horla: "I was walking at two o'clock among my rose-trees, in the full sunlight - in the walk bordered by autumn roses which are beginning to fall. As I stopped to look at a Geant de Bataille, which had three splendid blooms, I distinctly saw the stalk of one of the roses bend close to me, as if an invisible hand had bent it, and then break, as if that hand had picked it! Then the flower raised itself, following the curve which a hand would have described in carrying it toward a mouth, and remained suspended in the transparent air, alone and motionless, a terrible red spot, three yards from my eyes. In desperation I rushed at it to take it! I found nothing; it had disappeared. Then I was seized with furious rage against myself, for it is not wholesome for a reasonable and serious man to have such hallucinations.

"But was it a hallucination? I turned to look for the stalk, and I found it immediately under the bush, freshly broken, between the two other roses which remained on the branch. I returned home, then, with a much disturbed mind; for I am certain now, certain as I am of the alternation of day and night, that there exists close to me an invisible being who lives on milk and on water, who can touch objects, take them and change their places; who is, consequently, endowed with a material nature, although imperceptible to sense, and who lives as I do, under my roof."

This hallucination of some hidden companion who goes along with us is reminiscent of the terrible question Melville poses in Moby-Dick: "How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers?" It is a question that persists into the 20th century, where it comes to fruition in Sartre, who famously remarked that "Hell is others", but also noted, in more reflective mood, that "nothingness haunts being".

Sartre, in turn, was haunted by Dostoyevsky, a writer more conversant with nothingness than most. Arrested by Tsarist police in 1849 for his participation in the radical Petrashevsky Circle, the Russian writer was subjected to a mock execution before being shipped out to Siberia, where his experiences in a labour camp inspired one of the great visions of Hell on Earth, The House Of The Dead. Yet Dostoyevsky was a profoundly spiritual thinker, much concerned with the idea of redemption and, if any notion of Hell can be set against Sartre's, it is his, as spoken by Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov: "Fathers and teachers I ponder, What is Hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of no longer being able to love." Zosima is, for Dostoyevsky, an exemplary figure, a man who understands the principle that each of us is responsible for the wellbeing of all other living creatures, an idea enshrined in the Indian tradition of ahimsa (harm no living thing), and in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who felt, in contrast to Sartre, that Hell was not so much "others" as the failure of the self-absorbed individual to accept his or her responsibilities in an essentially shared world. It is no accident that Sartre's notorious remark is made in a work entitled Huis Clos (No Exit); for Levinas, the way out of Hell is to accept, and rise, moment by moment, to the challenge of the Other. It is also, perhaps, salutary to remember that, if Hell is others, then the Hell of others is me.

The Other, of course, need not be other people. Perhaps the thing that horrified me most during my Catholic education was the notion that only human creatures had souls, and my remedy for that aberrant view was to propose to my childhood self that the Other to which I was responsible, the Other that offered a way out of Hell, was the world itself - by which I meant, in my childish philosophy, everything that was the case, not only the living, but all things. I remember, as a student, approving of Gerard de Nerval, the French poet whose vision of a meaningful existence apportioned soul to stones and trees, cats and lobsters, men and women and the angelic spirits who visited him in his supposed madness - "How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it?" he wrote. "Everything lives and moves; everything corresponds; magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon Earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows" - and perhaps it is this vision that points the way to a full understanding of Hell in our time. Without descending into right-on environmentalist rhetoric, it isn't hard to see ourselves as the Hell of such blameless others as forests, polar bears and indigenous peoples everywhere. Recently, that Hell has come back to haunt us - proof, if it were needed, that we need an entirely new way of thinking about how we live in this world, and never mind what might happen in the hereafter.

Ultimately, though it may seem an odd choice, my textbook for this new way of thinking would be Flann O'Brien's darkly comic masterpiece, The Third Policeman, published in 1967, and still underappreciated. When he wrote it, O'Brien had in mind "a sort of Hell" in which a murderer is condemned to repeat the same actions again and again, while "being surprised and frightened at everything just as he was the first time".

In this vision of the world, "Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable" and the novel culminates in a scene in which the killer returns to the beginning of the story he is condemned to repeat forever, where he encounters an ordinary, white house that, for some reason, terrifies him out of his wits. It is a scene that reminds us that the realm of the damned, far from belonging to some allegorical otherworld, is forever, like the Kingdom of Heaven, "at hand". As such, it foreshadows the work of that other recent cartographer of damnation, David Lynch, whose narratives unfold in a world that is both familiar and strange, a world where Hell is no more than a couple of blocks away, or in the house next door, or just across the dinner table. For, like Heaven, Hell conceals itself in the things we take for granted but, unlike Heaven, it cannot wait - and as far as we are from Dante's world, as unconcerned as we may be with sin and redemption, the two remain in perpetual possibility: the Heaven of the just, and the Hell of the damned, both occupying this single place: a here-and-now where each of us is the destiny of all the others: friend and stranger; like and unlike; kith and kin; animal, vegetable and mineral.

*John Burnside's new novel, Glister, is published on May 15 by Jonathan Cape, £15.99