We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference–all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There is no context for our lives.”
Steven Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell is a horror book without the gore. A man named Soren dies of brain cancer in his 40’s and finds himself confronted by a lesser demon who tells Soren and some others that the only true religion is Zoroastrianism, and as none of them follow that religion (and some any religion at all), they are all being consigned to hell. The demon doles out different types of hell each individual will inhabit. While the background of the demon’s office shows fire and brimstone and people in agony, he confides that they are merely actors and each hell is more finely tailored. Noting that Soren loved to read in his lifetime, the demon sends him to a vast library, in fact, the library Argentinian writer Jorge Borges describes in his short story, “The Library of Babel.”
When Soren arrives he sees endless shelves of books and a sign explaining his mission: to find the book that tells his full life story. Only then could he escape hell. There are others on the different floors of the library sorting through books one after another. The books contain every order of symbols and letters there could ever be, so almost a 100% of them are filled with nonsense. But every once in a great while a fragment of a sentence is found by one of the inhabitants, which stirs their hope.
While the library looks infinite, there is an understanding that it is finite from end to end and top to bottom. However, the sheer number of books and floors makes it unlikely that anyone can find its borders. In the meantime, like the others, Soren scans the books and throws them into a chasm, where the next day they will be reshelved. Every day is renewed to where it was before, so no one can die without being reborn. There is no escape from the cycles.
Initially Soren lives near other people. There are small rooms to sleep in and a special kiosk where they can order any food and drink they like. Soren forms relationships with others, particularly Rachel, with whom he falls deeply in love. Sex exists in this world, but day in and day out life returns to the books and the hope that their life story can be found. In this world, everybody, including Soren, is white and speaks American English. Over time (endless time), Soren realizes that hell is repetition and commonality. He thinks, “Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.”
At one point, a violent group of people terrorize the others, beating them to death only to do it again the next day, when everyone revives. The only choices are to be a victim or a murderer. Cornered by the group, Rachel jumps into the chasm and hurtles down until she disappears from sight. Desperate to find her again, and enraged at the group’s leader, Soren pulls the leader over the side into the chasm where they both fall clutched to one another. They eventually separate and Soren dreams of reaching the bottom to find Rachel.
He manages to swing himself onto a library floor occasionally, but always ends up jumping back into the chasm. He spends eons falling down, overcoming hunger and thirst by stabbing himself in the neck, dying, and then waking up the next day satiated. The journey to the bottom takes light years, and he sees fewer and fewer people as he spends over a billion years falling. When he ultimately reaches the bottom, Rachel is not there. He begins to look at the books trying to find his story, to work his way from the bottom up, trapped in the library with no one else around him, no end in sight, and only billions of years of time ahead of him. He finds a book that tells of his time in Hell, which is the book the reader has in their hands, but not the one recounting his full life.
A Short Stay in Hell is an existential nightmare, although humanity is never quite abandoned. There is love, memory, conversations (when there are people), hope when a sentence is found. Yet it is a horror of eternity, as much as the library seems to have boundaries. But it might as well be infinite, for the time its inhabitants must spend there.
