Our versions of the afterlife are predicated on our personal hopes and fears. This is why we tend to populate Hell with sadistic demons and brutal monsters surrounded by fire and brimstone, and Heaven with angels handing out mojitos in a permanent paradisiacal retreat. Religion informs a lot of this spiritual visualization, providing guidelines to secure a spot in the more pleasant of the two options.
In A Short Stay in Hell (2009), author Steven L. Peck, explores this idea by pouring a bucket of cold water on our ideations of what comes after death. It hits hard, going lengths to prove that being left alone with yourself is perhaps the worst form of torture imaginable. It’s so terrible a fate that you’ll wish for a demon with a pitchfork if only to keep you company.
The book follows a Mormon man called Soran. He’s died and made it to an impossibly large library that contains every book that can ever be written in its stacks. He first meets a devil that tells him that he followed the wrong religion while on Earth, thus earning him a stay in Hell. He’s informed that the one true religion is Zoroastrianism, which focuses on ethical dualism in the struggle between Good and Evil.
This Hell is not eternal, though. The devil tells Soran that if he finds the book that tells the story of his life, he can escape. It’s just a matter of hunting it down in the terrifyingly massive library, where years of searching might only cover a tiny section of a floor, with thousands upon thousands of other levels to go. To make matters worse, most of the books are made up of gibberish. Finding a coherent sentence in one of them becomes an event.
A Short Stay in Hell was inspired by Jorge Luis Bórges’s story “The Library of Babel,” which centers on a library that contains every book that could possibly be written with an ordering of 25 basic characters. Peck runs with this concept and turns into a short but intense bout of existential horror in which salvation is cruelly teased but never sold as a certainty.
Soren is not the only person roaming the library. Peck is quick to establish that there are other people there also spending cosmic amounts of time in search of their books. It stands to reason, then, that Soren will meet some of them along the way. Lovers come, build relationships that last multiple decades, and then leave never to be seen again; frustrated souls unleash unspeakable violence on the people they come across; and strange cults rise and fall with no lasting effects. The only constant is the library, and it remains indifferent to the things that happen in it.
As such, Peck uses this version of Hell to flip the script on time. Whereas time is often thought of as a preciously limited resource in life, in death it becomes a burden. Too much of it slowly chips away at meaning. It erodes spontaneity and excitement, dulling the edges of purpose and giving way to a superior form of punishment: boredom.
The language on display here points to Peck’s background in poetry and evolutionary biology in magnificent ways. There’s an observational quality to the language that allows for complex worldbuilding. And yet, the book is accessible despite challenging the reader with profound questions about faith, love, damnation, and memory.
Peck wants his readers to get lost in each page, demanding a lot of imagination from them. But he doesn’t merely want them to paint a series of visuals that account for the characters and their surroundings. Instead, he develops a world filled with mathematical and philosophical improbabilities for readers to try and make sense of. It works to produce one of the most intellectually rewarding experiences in modern literature.
A Short Stay in Hell, like its interpretation of the titular realm, is a unique read with considerable staying power. It plants ideas, breaks them apart, and then asks the reader to put them together. In a way, it’s an interrogation of the things we categorize as essential to our sense of self. You’ll simply wish you could spend more time on this journey into the philosophy of Hell.
