Steven L. Peck

So it turns out there is a God, & Hell is a real place for all the non-believers, & the one true faith is ... Zoroastrianism. Everyone else goes to Hell.

But, our hero, a 45 year old Mormon father & cancer victim, finds out that Hell is finite: not a place of eternal burning, but of "correction." He also learns there is more than 1 Hell. Different people go to different Hells. Soren seems to have lived a decent life, with the one fatal flaw of choosing the wrong religion. So he gets sent to show more the Library of Babel, a place that contains all books ever written, yet to be written, & all variations thereof.

And, at first blush, Hell doesn't seem so bad: everyone seems to be in their perfect body, you can order whatever you like to eat & it comes immediately, you owe nothing, you are not bound by Earthly obligations, you can drink to excess with no hangover, you can die... & you will come back the next day, perfect again. And... You are not alone. This is not a personal Hell. The trick is this: to get out, you must find the book containing the story of your life, in its perfect form - no errors, complete - and push it through a slot.

Given the size of the library, you know this isn't quite as easy as it sounds. But you don't know the real magnitude until someone opens a book, & sees a book full of punctuation. They're not sorting through just real books, or books about other people, or such books with errors. They must sort through any book possible, a Sisyphean task if there ever was one.

Soren realizes that humans will do what humans do, no matter where they are: love, learn, create order & structure, create chaos, doubt, believe ... But he also learns that without hope, it is all meaningless.

It's a short listen/read, but this book captures the big themes of life in a brief synopsis. Pick it up when you're in the mood for reflection on the nature of mankind. show less

This little novel has been stuck in my head (and my heart) for months now. It presents questions about the sense and scale of time and size that I still cannot wrap my head around. It's about being wrong, cosmically wrong, and having to accept it. It's about love, too. And loss. It made me think of my girl and if I ever show you this review, Bethany, I would look for you in the stacks. Forever.

fiction, novella (dark humor, Mormon protagonist in a Zoroastrian version of Hell) - this one has a waitlist at my library, and I had figured perhaps the people on the waitlist were just curious library staffers (since the story is set in a library as Hell--all of the books are randomly generated characters/gibberish with the very rare word or sentence happening by chance), but there must also be some buzz because there are at least 30+ people on the waitlist, and it is a pretty quick read, show more so also quite a few library patrons who have heard of it somewhere.

This is a thought-provoking world carefully packed into a short story. I liked that it was sparing and was only as long as it needed to be, contained only what details it needed to have, and thus is a much more effective story than it might have otherwise been. show less

More a thought experiment than a story, Steven L. Peck's A Short Stay in Hell takes the premise of Borges' famous story 'The Library of Babel' – a near-infinite library that contains not only every book that ever existed, but every book that ever could exist (including ones of complete gibberish) – and takes it to its logical end. Calculating that this would mean more books on shelves than there are electrons in the universe (pg. 92), Peck goes a great job of extrapolating what a 'Hell' show more composed of such a scenario would actually mean for one sentenced to it. The infinite totalitarian bleakness of Peck's novella is hard to describe, and genuinely terrifying.

What makes it more terrifying is its sheer capriciousness; those sentenced to this Hell do not know why they have, what they did wrong, nor does the task in front of them seem negotiable. (In order to escape this Hell, they must find the 'book of their life' from amongst the shelves and submit it.) On this front, A Short Stay in Hell is more of a mixed bag.

On one hand, the capriciousness of the task gives a sense of terrifying futility to their lot, a dose of stark existentialism that is daunting for the reader to ponder. However, the hastiness of some of the premise undercuts this and raises more questions than the short book can satisfactorily answer. A demon (yes, the sort with horns) glibly consigns people to this peculiar fate because they didn't follow the one true faith, but the implication that Zoroastrianism is the one truth faith means just about everyone who dies is consigned to Hell's torture by default and through no fault of their own. The task of finding the book is, by any reasonable measure, impossible; early on, it is noted that given the dimensions of the library even writing down the floor number it is on would be a longer number than the book could hold (pg. 2). It leads to a question, why would a God submit his people to this torture?

Of course, the idea of a capricious, or mad, or unfeeling God is in itself terrifying, particularly when such a God has sentenced you to an impossible eternal task that you cannot escape. But sometimes the questions raised by Peck's book felt like loopholes or oversights in the thought experiment, rather than implications, and that is before we even get onto some of the arbitrary particulars left unanswered (such as why everyone in this Hell is a white American – something remarked upon so often I assumed there would be a reason for it – or why they need food, or why the library resets every night).

I suppose the fact that the reader can be left alternately perplexed, frustrated or disturbed by the arbitrariness shows that Peck's Hell is working. Nevertheless, I had expected more resolution, or at least more in-depth consideration of the implications of Peck's world. Given the nature of the concept, I half-expected the 'solution' to be to submit any book – any of the gibberish on Hell's shelves – through the slot provided, because although each book was meaningless, so too was a life (from this existential perspective), and consequently a meaningless sequence of babble would be analogous to the 'story of your life'.

However, Peck leaves all of this on the table. The relentless questions that bobble up, futilely, might not be narratively satisfying, but the realisation that "we can't make a difference – all meaning has been subtracted" (pg. 65) is shown in its totality here. Peck has created a genuine Hell, one that shows the various hells that can be found in infinity, in belief, in time, in people, even in love. It's a profoundly disturbing, mind-destroying scenario, and one can only hope that if there is a god or power at work in the world, it is not cruel enough to create such a place. Peck's Hell is palatable only when safely ringfenced as fiction. show less