Review: A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck

Estimated Reading Time: minutes

What I loved most about A Short Stay in Hell is the way Steven L. Peck builds on Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” without simply repeating it. I have always enjoyed Borges’ infinite library, and I love a story that builds off other fiction. Peck’s novella draws from that story, but also from afterlife literature like Dante’s Inferno, and even made me think of The Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last.” I can deeply related to the nightmare of being surrounded by books and still being trapped because they are entirely inaccessible.

Given my propensity for literature and comics, intertextuality is part of the meaning-making. This short novella works because it lets us draw on a whole wealth of other stories about libraries, hells, quests, punishments, and revelation. The central idea is that somewhere in this infinity of books is the book of your life, perfectly displayed, you only have to find it to escape.  It feels like a reflection of what reading itself can be. In some ways, that is what we as readers are often doing: searching for something that feels so true, maybe even truer than truth itself. And that search can be beautiful, but it can also drive us mad.

Peck uses religion and the afterlife to push the question of what happens if we are wrong, like wildly wrong. When the title character lands in the afterlife, Sorn, a devout Mormon, has to deal with an afterlife informed by Zoroastism.  The Zoroastrian twist worked because it reaches so far back in religious beliefs and asks: what if this was the right way all along, and we overwhelmingly dismissed it? But the more interesting question is also about life itself. What if some of the most meaningful ways to understand our lives were things we missed, dismissed, or were never really presented with? What if they were drowned out by other forces, other systems, so that we did not know what we were missing until we had to face the reality of that loss?

Despite the bleak angle, I found a strange serenity in the story. The novella is less about finding answers in books, or believing you have found the right book, than it is about surviving a massive disruption to your meaning and purpose. It is not only about Faith. It is about the faith of everyday life: the faith of our own inner lives, our own experience, our own ability to keep being in the world after the world has stopped making sense.  More timely now than ever.

Soren himself was not the most exciting part of the book. There were occasional lines I enjoyed, and his journey through the space was curious enough, but I was not deeply attached to him as a character. He felt more like a way into the world than the center of my investment. What mattered was following him into this impossible structure and seeing the questions it raised: about reading, eternity, belief, convention, and the limits of human understanding.

The brevity of the story was a strength. It does not linger too long, but gives us a taste of eternity: the eternity of time, the infinity of books, the expansiveness of the space itself. I liked the repeated attempts to explain just how infinite, unorthodox, strange, and weird this place is. It didn't feel rushed and it kept pushing our understanding of the boundaries. Every time I thought I understood the parameters of the space, Peck expanded them again.

That is what stayed with me most: the way A Short Stay in Hell turns an infinite library into a spiritual and existential pressure chamber. It is horrifying, somewhat, but not only bleak. It is also a story about what we keep searching for, what we miss, what we dismiss, and how we survive when our frameworks collapse. It left me thinking less about hell as punishment and more about the human hunger for the definitive life: the book, the answer, the meaning that would finally explain us.

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