Review: 'A Short Stay in Hell' by Steven L. Peck

2/5 stars ⭐

Reading this did feel a little bit like Hell to me!

In my opinion, the main issue with ‘A Short Stay in Hell’ isn’t anything to do with the story itself, it’s that this novella is suffering from its own success. I found it on a list of ‘super-disturbing modern horror’ promising me a wild existentialist ride that would leave me questioning everything I thought I knew about life. Many reviews second this opinion, and if that was their experience then that’s fantastic. The problem is that it sets up unrealistic expectations for prospective readers like myself, leading me to inevitable disappointment.

Anyone who is familiar with the Library of Babel will immediately recognise this novella’s central concept: an endless library containing every book that has ever been or will ever be written. Our main character is Soren, who is tasked with finding the book of his life in order to escape to Heaven. However, an essentially infinite number of books with every conceivable combination of letters is quite obviously going to make this an impossible task, so we know from the start he’s never getting out of here. A pretty standard concept of Hell if you ask me, just with a bit less fire. Because of this, and because the infinite library idea has already been floating around for hundreds of years, I didn’t experience the existentialist horror that others have – it wasn’t giving me anything new or original to be horrified by. 

Peck also made quite a few strange decisions in this story. Firstly, Soren is a Mormon. You might think that going into the afterlife, his Earthly religion is going to be somewhat important to his character and growth, but you would be wrong. Other than feeling a bit conflicted about trying coffee for the first time, Soren’s Mormonism is completely irrelevant. It could have been quite interesting to see the development of a character with such rigid morals and restrictive practices being faced with the reality that everything he believed in was false, and wrestling with his feelings of continued faith, but we don’t really get much of that. It would have been better just to keep Soren as a traditional everyman instead. 

Another very odd choice was that in this version of Hell, everyone is a white American. Why is Hell segregated? If it’s to make the place as dull as possible, why is race and nationality the most important consideration? Surely having women there is counterintuitive to that goal, if that’s the reason. If it’s because this library is so huge that he just hasn’t bumped into anyone from anywhere else, then that makes even less sense. It would surely be worse (and far more likely) to be stuck in a Hell where you’re surrounded by people, but none of them speak your language? A towering library of Babel, perhaps? (Sorry.) Whatever the reason, I probably would have filled in the gaps and made my own assumptions about it if Peck hadn’t continuously drawn so much attention to this fact. He mentions over and over that everyone’s white, everyone’s American, isn’t it so weird there’s no-one else here? Yes, it is weird. And now you’ve mentioned it 500 times I’m starting to think you think it’s weird too. It honestly just made me think that Peck didn’t feel equipped to write characters too far outside his own experience, but he was concerned people would criticise him for it, so he tried to get ahead of it by continuously mentioning it so people would see it as a deliberate choice. It was just very odd the way it kept getting brought up. 

Still, this novella wasn’t all bad! The formation of mini-societies, the development of relationships, violence, all those things that make us human – those parts were by far the most interesting to me. I liked the idea that you can actually die here, even just temporarily, rather than being completely immortal. I wish the human aspect could have been explored more because those dynamics were fascinating. If I hadn’t seen all the hype around this story prior to reading it, maybe I would have given it a higher star rating because I wouldn’t have gone into it with any preconceived ideas, but we’ll never know. This review is a drop in the ocean of positivity towards this novella anyway! If I was Peck I’d be over the moon with its reception. I just wish he had taken some of his ideas further.