Rasmoth was a young composition instructor at a junior college on his native Corhir but he also wrote pornography. When he died, unexpectedly and before he could mend his evil ways, he was condemned to Hell, which happened to be Earth and sentenced to be a frustrated newspaper writer. Living out a normal earthly life in the person of Hank Johnson he was unaware that he was really Rasmoth, or that he was paying for sins Rasmoth committed in another world. Hank just thought he wanted to be a newspaper writer. The staff that was managing his sentence from afar was not unlike a managerial staff one would find on Earth. Mistakes were made, orders were lost and deadlines were missed and the end result was that Hank Johnson took what is generally referred to on Earth as, "a long time to find himself." And when the people masterminding his punishment were on rare occasions successful, Hank's progress was often thwarted by his own rash decision-making. He wasn't always the best prisoner. He made bad choices at the wrong times and oftentimes treated common sense as the enemy. The most challenging problem in the universe seemed to be getting Hank and the people controlling his destiny on the same page at the same time. The plan was for him to be a newspaper writer but instead he found himself doing everything else imaginable while seemingly always existing on the fringe of the newspaper world he should have belonged to. Hank performed a wide variety of jobs on Earth that were obviously unrelated to his sentence and which no one seemed able to explain. He was a writer for the Army in Vietnam and for a while, after leaving the Army, he was a baker. No job was more confounding to the people monitoring his rehabilitation than when he became a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. In the course of serving Rasmoth's sentence, Hank associated with many unsavory characters, including one particularly mysterious vagrant unknown to anyone in the universe. This person, who frequently showed up unexpectedly and usually left without a trace played a pivotal role in Hank's life-sometimes for the better and sometimes not.