A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck – Review

Published: March 16, 2012

Publisher: Strange Violin Editions

Series: NA

Genre: Fiction, Horror

Pages: 110 (Kindle)

Synopsis:

An ordinary family man, geologist, and Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life.

In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.

I’ve been curious about this book for a year or so now and it came up in Kindle deals a few months ago, so I decided to check it out. The synopsis itself is intriguing, as it follows a Mormon man who finds himself in Hell, though it’s not the one he imagined. Rather than fiery torment, he finds himself in a library filled with an incomprehensible number of books. Among them is a grammatically correct, perfect story of his life across multiple volumes and once he finds it he will be free. It sounds preferable to the torment of biblical Hell, right?

This book, despite being a measly 110 pages long, was actually kind of disturbing and I still occasionally think about it weeks later. Soren, our main character, describes a place that doesn’t seem so bad at first. He can order anything he wants to eat, there are places to sleep, and there are even other people so he’s not isolated. He even manages to find a degree of happiness for some years, though humanity finds a way to be rotten and steal it away, perhaps because it is still Hell. The thought of such a Sisyphean task is daunting if you think about it at a surface level, but after reading of this place where you can fall for weeks without hitting the bottom it becomes incomprehensible torture. Why even dream of an end? Anyway, it definitely leaves you thinking and provides a unique, yet still torturous version of Hell that I haven’t seen elsewhere.