Tito's Inferno — John Hutton

Winner of the 2013 Certificate of Recognition for Literary and Artistic Achievement.

A dystopic allegory of Dante's Inferno, set in a small-town big box store, the story follows 11-year-old Tito Skaggs, who thinks he's on just another lame summer car trip to Nature Worldâ"¢. A detour to polluted Sanguine Lake proves him wrong, as his parents are swept away by its newest tenant: TitanMart. Guided by a mysterious red-haired girl and a polite yet hulking figment -- his Virgil -- concocted in a hotel bathroom, he must rescue them, braving aisles packed with traps, henchmen clerks, and the wicked Gourdon, all doing the bidding of The Manager in a plot larger and more evil than he could have imagined.