arold Bloom likes to annoy people by saying that Shakespeare invented the human. Stripped of Bloom-speak, what that means is that the inner lives we think we learned about from Freud were actually revealed to us by Shakespeare, since Bloom credits his characters with being the first both to speak and to listen to themselves. If sheer cultural influence is the measure of greatness, though, Dante Alighieri should probably rank higher than Shakespeare, since Dante dreamed up something that, sadly, has had even more impact than depth psychology. He invented the infernal. Dante's ''Inferno'' gave us our first glimpse of a universe we once again inhabit: a topography of graphic, gruesome suffering. The Dante scholar John Freccero might have been talking about Kosovo or Rwanda or any other post-genocidal landscape when he wrote, ''The ruined portals and fallen bridges of Hell are emblems of the failure of all bonds among the souls who might once have been members of the human community.''

That the medieval Dante has become prophetically modern is suggested not only by the booming industry in Dante translations. He can currently be read in scholarly, poetic, Irish and Longfellovian English, with the recent reissue of Longfellow's 1867 translation of the ''Inferno.'' There is also the evidence of two new quasi-commercial thrillers, Matthew Pearl's brainy though belabored ''Dante Club'' and Nick Tosches' deliriously weird ''In the Hand of Dante.''

And so Dante is remade as a pop figure. Actually, he became one a long time ago, when Romantic poets began feeling a dangerous affinity for his chorus of the damned. By now the infernal has become so ubiquitous we no longer even realize how many of our nightmares derive from it. Dante's ghost haunts pulp fiction and genre movies; his emanations lurk in the alleyways of our urban dystopias. Film noir is Dantean. Goth is Dantean. James Ellroy and Martin Scorsese are Dantean. It is the resonance of what James Joyce once called ''the lingerous longerous book of the dark'' that makes Pearl's and Tosches' effort to deal with Dante by putting him in thrillers seem so oddly literal, like turning Shakespeare into the hero of a romantic comedy titled ''Shakespeare in Love.'' Dante devotees will find Pearl's novel the more interesting, set as it is at a curious moment in literary history -- just after the Civil War, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is trying to produce the first American translation of what was then a forgotten Italian classic with the assistance of the Harvard professors James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a group called the Dante Club. The Harvard administration, meanwhile, is trying to quash the translation, out of a prim attachment to dead languages and a fear and hatred of all things Roman Catholic. To the horror, then terror, of the Dante Club, someone starts murdering prominent Bostonians and leaving clues making it clear that the killer has read his Dante. The novel bogs down in the mechanics of plot resolution, but before that happens we are briefly allowed to imagine that the killer will turn out to be a supernatural manifestation of Dante's spirit, awakened by Longfellow and determined to expose the hypocrisies of Boston Brahmin society.

Nick Tosches also flirts with the figure of Dante as some sort of death-dealing presence. The novel has two halves; in the more successful, an author named Nick Tosches is hired by mobster buddies to help steal and sell a long-lost original manuscript of the ''Comedy.'' Tosches is accompanied on his travels by a bleakly funny psychopath named Louie, by far the best character in the book, who knocks off everyone who comes into contact with the manuscript, and a few who don't. (The other half is a bildungsroman of the Florentine poet, written in florid poeticisms.)

Pearl's and Tosches' books couldn't be more different in tone, but both mark a change in the popular view of Dante. Whereas the Romantics focused on the pilgrim Dante, the pitier of poor suffering sinners, we post-Romantics would appear to be fascinated (and appalled) by the poet-narrator who disposes, godlike, of the souls of the damnable. Pearl, a recent law school graduate who is also a Dante scholar, has a theory about this. In an essay published recently in Legal Affairs, he explained the appeal of Dante's penology -- the Dantean word for it is contrapasso, or ''counterstrike,'' ''an act of divine justice that redirects the essence of a crime back against the perpetrator.'' The contrapasso imposes a pointedly specific and appropriately intense punishment upon the evildoer, an intimate brand of justice not found in our more impersonal judicial system, with its sentencing guidelines. That at least some Americans long for a cleansing dose of Dantean retribution is clear from Bill O'Reilly's recent declaration on Fox News that he opposes the death penalty because ''I don't think it's punitive enough.''

Every age, I suppose, gets the Dante it deserves. Ours would appear to be a disabused Dante, a tragic realist Dante, a radio talk show Dante who has overcome his liberal sympathy for the damned and come to accept the need for brutality. Kafka foresaw this interpretation of Dante in ''In the Penal Colony,'' in which criminals are strapped into a machine that incises a hieroglyphic account of their crimes into their backs, an enigmatic message they understand only in an ecstatic burst of clarity at the moment of death. Their masochistic compliance underscores the horror of the penal regime. Both Pearl and Tosches are ambivalent about their hardhearted Dante, and back away from him before their tales are done. Pearl will pin the murders on some unexpected but perfectly obvious figure. Tosches' actual Dante (as opposed to Louie, the Dantesque avenging angel) will come to doubt his fitness to serve as the judge of his Florentine peers, and to repudiate his hubris in thinking he could do so. But Louie is the more authentically Dantean. He is both our Dante and our Virgil, creator and guide to a hell more ungodly than any the Catholic poet could have imagined. It's no coincidence that this killer and his gang of thugs, familiar as they are to any consumer of pop culture, are also more memorable than anyone else in both novels. The infernal turns out to have a life of its own.