Review: A Short Stay in Hell

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A fascinating short-story! It tells the story of a man sent to hell, through no fault of his own - he simply didn’t follow the True Religion (spoiler alert - it’s none of the major ones!). His version of hell is a gigantic library, in which the word gigantic is a terrible understatement; it contains all the books that were and could be written, including all possible garbled text. The dammed must search the library until they find the book that contains the story of their life. The setting is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babylon, and the book perfectly invokes Borges’s writing and feel. It is interesting, funny, perverse, sad, full of anguish, it makes you think; it’s a really well done work. At times I think the only fault is that it is too short; I want read more about it! But I came to the conclusion that it is exactly as it must be - full of mystery, of unrealized wishes, and of longing. A must-read!

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