A Short Stay in Hell
by Steven L. Peck (2009)
Strange Violin Editions (2009)
104 pp
One of my book clubs is reading Steven L. Peck’s 2022 novel Heike’s Void. Before diving into that, I wanted to go back and read Peck’s 2009 novella, A Short Stay in Hell.
In this intriguing, unsettling work, Peck examines the insanity of eternity. His protagonist, Soren Johansson, was a Mormon in life. He believed that after death he would be reunited with his family and live with them forever. Instead, he finds himself confronted by a demon who informs him that the one true religion was Zoroastrianism, and that since he was not of the true religion and would therefore need to spend some time in hell, eternal damnation does not exist. “Hell is for your edification and wisdom. Punishment? Yes. But not forever.”
What, then, is Johansson’s particular hell? It resembles something like Borges’ Library of Babel: a practically (but not actually) infinite library containing every possible book that could be assembled within 410 pages, most of them nothing more than nonsensical arrangements of letters, symbols, and spaces. Somewhere among them is the book of Johansson’s life. Find it, and he will be released from hell, though not from infinite time.
On the one hand, while task is clearly difficult it’s not impossible. If Johansson proceeds one book at a time, it’s inevitable that he will eventually find the right one. But as the total footage of shelves and the number of years grow, beyond anything the mind can reasonably hold, meaning begins to collapse.
Johansson is not alone in this vastness. One of the novella’s strengths lies in its exploration of relationships over time, and what becomes of them when time itself ceases to have any meaningful boundary. What does it mean to consciously exist, with or without another, for a thousand years? How about a million? How about 100 billion, and to know that someday this will all just be a distant memory?
Ultimately this book was one of the most effective explorations of unfettered time I’ve ever read. Is eternity something we truly want, or is it only meaningful because we can never actually grasp it?
