A Short Stay in Hell: The Weight of Eternity & Steven L. Peck

Imagine you are a devout Mormon, a geologist who has spent his life believing in a very specific map of the hereafter—a place of tiered kingdoms, eternal families, and a progression toward godhood. Then, you die of brain cancer at the age of forty-five. You wake up not in the Spirit World you expected, but in a corporate-style office sitting on a squeaky metal folding chair. Across from you sits a demon named Xandern, a "minor functionary" with goat legs, red skin, and a genuine, happy grin who informs you that you are indeed in Hell. But here is the kicker: the reason you are there is that you didn't join the one true religion. And that religion? It isn't Christianity, Islam, or even Mormonism. It’s Zoroastrianism—an ancient faith primarily located in Iran and India that you might have barely heard of.

This is the opening gambit of Steven L. Peck’s novel, 'A Short Stay in Hell,' and it immediately upends every comfort of certain faith. Steven L. Peck introduces us to Soren Johansson, a man whose entire moral and theological framework is shattered in a single interview. You see, the demon Xandern explains that while other religions borrowed bits and pieces from the truth, they didn't get enough right to avoid the waiting room. But there is a silver lining that sounds like a cruel joke: Zoroastrian Hell isn't eternal. It’s meant for edification and correction. The demon even laughs at the human imagination that could invent a God who would burn His children forever, noting that most people wouldn't even treat a neighbor’s barking dog with such cruelty.

The core of the story begins when Soren is sent to his specific version of Hell, which is based on a literary concept by Jorge Luis Borges called "The Library of Babel". Imagine a building that consists of an seemingly endless series of corridors and shelves containing every possible book that can ever be written. The condition for Soren to leave and enter a "glorious heaven" is deceptively simple: he must find the book that describes his own earthly life story, perfectly written without a single error in spelling or grammar.

As we dive into this, you will see that Steven L. Peck isn't just writing a horror story about a big library; he is exploring the crushing weight of the infinite and the fragility of human meaning. This isn't a Hell of fire and brimstone—those are just "make-believe" scenes shown through office windows to get new arrivals to take things seriously. This is a Hell of boredom, repetition, and the realization that in the face of eternity, a human life is an infinitesimal speck. We are going to look at how Soren navigates this space, the relationships he forms, and the terrifying mathematical reality that turns a "short stay" into something that feels like forever.

When the narrator first arrives in the Library, he discovers he is in a perfectly healthy, twenty-five-year-old version of his body. The cancer is gone, his teeth are straight, and he feels better than he has in years. But he quickly learns that this resurrected body isn't the indestructible vessel promised by his Mormon faith; it can still bleed, and it can still feel pain. This physical reality is your first clue that this Hell is a machine designed for a very specific kind of endurance.

The Library itself is a long corridor about twelve feet wide with a railing overlooking a bottomless chasm. Across that span are identical floors stretching up and down as far as the eye can see, all lined with books. Every few hundred yards, there is a "break" in the shelves containing a clock, a digital date readout, a set of rules, and a small room with seven beds. There is also a food kiosk that will provide literally anything you want to eat or drink just by asking.

At first glance, it doesn't seem like Hell. You have shelter, unlimited food, and perfect health. But then you look at the books. Steven L. Peck describes the first book Soren pulls off the shelf: it’s bound in high-quality calfskin with gilded edges, but the text inside is complete gibberish—a random splash of characters and punctuation like "Aj;kLJjppOjnfe7". This is the nature of the Library of Babel. Because it contains every possible combination of letters and symbols, the vast, overwhelming majority of the books are pure nonsense.

A fellow inmate named "Biscuit," who was a homeless schizophrenic on Earth, explains the logic of their prison: somewhere in the library is a book of all A’s, and somewhere else is a book that is the history of your big toe as viewed from the perspective of your shoe. Everything that can be written is here. But finding a coherent sentence, let alone your own life story, is a task that defies human comprehension.

Soren meets others who are just as lost as he is: Elliott, Elliott Callington who now looks like a young man, and Larisa, who died of breast cancer. They form a small "gang," and their early days are defined by a strange optimism. They think they can beat the system. They decide to find the "end" of the library or a "bottom" floor to start a systematic search. Soren, being a geologist and a runner, decides to run down the hallway to find its limit. He runs for three weeks, covering about fourteen hundred miles, and finds absolutely no change—just the same white, English-speaking Americans and the same endless stacks of books.

This homogeneity is one of the more subtle "horror" elements Steven L. Peck introduces. Why are they all white? Why do they all speak English with American accents? Soren starts to wonder if there is no diversity in Hell, or if he is simply trapped in a very specific neighborhood of an unimaginably larger structure. It’s a detail that suggests the Library isn't just a physical space, but a psychological one, perhaps tailored to the limited perspective of the inmates. This realization—that the library might be effectively infinite and utterly uniform—begins to gnaw at the characters' sanity, setting the stage for the deep-seated existential dread that follows.

As the years begin to stack up, the inhabitants of the Library develop a desperate, almost pathetic relationship with "meaning." Steven L. Peck recounts how, in the first week, Biscuit finds a book containing the phrase "sack it". This tiny, two-word fragment of coherent English causes a wave of joy and weeping. Because Biscuit carried a green army laundry bag—a sack—for twenty-three years on Earth, he interprets this as a sign that all would be well and that they would search for ten years before finding what they seek.

You should notice the psychological mechanism at play here: the "Texas Sharpshooter" fallacy. When you are surrounded by random noise, you will inevitably find a pattern if you look long enough, and because you are desperate for hope, you will imbue that pattern with cosmic significance. the narrator is skeptical—he thinks it's just a random word—but he sees how much it means to his friends and stays silent.

This search for meaning eventually formalizes into a society. By year 102, a "university" has been established. They have "Professors of Hell Studies" and hold annual meetings to announce the "Most Significant Text" (MST) found that year. One year, the prize-winning text is the sentence: "The bat housed again four leaves of it". The crowd claps politely. They are impressed because it has a subject, a verb, and starts with a capital letter.

But as Soren points out to his friend Rachel, a former literary magazine editor, this "progress" is actually a form of despair. If, after a hundred years of effort by a group of over seventy-five people, the best they can find is a nonsense sentence about a bat and some leaves, the odds of finding a multi-volume autobiography are effectively zero. Rachel says she is sick of the monotony and this university

This is the point where Steven L. Peck moves the story from theological curiosity to existential weight. Soren and Rachel find solace in each other, beginning a relationship that lasts for a thousand years. They spend decades on single games or topics—they once spent fifty years discussing dogs and a few years pretending to be dogs, eating only dog food and sleeping on the floor. When you have forever, you have to invent meaning because the universe (or the Library) refuses to provide it.

They also grapple with the loss of their earthly identities. Soren, the "active Mormon," eventually tries a cup of coffee—his first ever—and describes it as tasting like "crap" and "the most bitter and disappointed taste" he’d ever encountered. Yet, he drinks it. He feels like he’s betraying his past, but that past is increasingly irrelevant in a world where Zoroastrianism is the "truth". He realizes that his morality was tied to a "supporting structure" that turned out to be a myth. This leaves him in a vacuum: how do you decide how to behave when there are no cosmic rules, only an endless hallway of gibberish? This question becomes painfully literal when a new, violent force enters the Library.

For over a millennium, Soren and Rachel live in a state of "monotonous peace," but that peace is shattered by the arrival of a man who calls himself "Dire Dan". Dan claims to be a prophet who has spoken with God, a God who supposedly told him that the inhabitants of Hell must be "scourged" and "smitten" for their sins.

The "Direites" are essentially a cult of torturers who believe that by inflicting maximum pain on others, they are fulfilling God’s will and earning a place in heaven. They hunt in packs, using clubs and spears made from animal bones ordered from the food kiosks. This is a terrifying development because, remember, in this Hell, you cannot truly die. If you are killed, you simply "wake up" the next morning at 6:00 AM, fully healed, ready to be tortured again.

The defining tragedy of Soren’s existence occurs when he and Rachel are cornered by a Direite gang. Rachel, realizing they are about to be captured and subjected to unspeakable suffering, looks at Soren, says "I love you," and jumps over the railing into the bottomless chasm. Soren is held fast and forced to watch her fall until she becomes a tiny dot and "winks out" of his existence.

What follows is a period of systematic horror. Soren is kept as a "slave" and a "morning sacrifice" for thirty-seven days, having his head bashed in every morning as soon as he wakes up. He learns to think in the few seconds of consciousness he has between waking and the next blow. Eventually, he sees an opportunity. When Dire Dan himself is lecturing the prisoners near the railing, Soren lunges and tackles him, launching both of them into the abyss.

Now, this is where Steven L. Peck leans into the unique physics of his Hell. Falling in a vacuum-like chasm for days on end is its own kind of nightmare. Soren and Dan fall for days, drifting apart. Soren experiences extreme thirst and hunger, eventually "dying" of thirst in mid-air only to wake up still falling. He eventually learns to "fly" by using his cotton robe as a wing, and through a series of agonizing attempts that involve breaking almost every bone in his body, he manages to hook himself onto a lower floor and pull himself back into the stacks.

But he is now thousands of miles below where he started, and he is completely alone. The tragedy isn't just that Rachel is gone; it’s the realization that in a library of this size, the chances of ever finding the same person twice are just as low as finding your own book. He has traded a localized Hell of violence for a universal Hell of solitude.

If you want to understand the true scale of Soren's predicament, you have to look at the calculations made by a man he meets later named "Master Took". Took is a mathematician who has spent his time in Hell calculating the actual size of the Library. He presents Soren with a reality so bleak it causes mass mourning among the inmates who hear it.

According to Master Took (and Steven L. Peck’s appendix), if a book is 410 pages long with 40 lines of 80 characters per page, there are 1,312,000 character spaces in each volume. With roughly 95 possible characters on a standard keyboard, the total number of possible books is 95 raised to the power of 1,312,000. To put that in perspective, Took notes that our previous universe only had about 10 raised to the 78th power electrons. The number of books in the Library is so much larger than the number of atoms in a universe that the comparison itself is almost meaningless.

Soren asks if there is a bottom to the chasm. Took laughs bitterly and says that if Soren is currently in the "middle" of Hell, he still has 10 raised to the power of 1,297,377 light-years to fall before hitting the bottom. This is the "Great Loss" for Soren—the mathematical proof that he will never find Rachel again. Even if he spent every second of the rest of eternity searching, he would never even scratch the surface of the Library’s contents.

This is the point where the "short stay" mentioned in the title becomes a horrifying irony. The demon Xandern said Hell wasn't eternal, and mathematically, he’s right—there is a finite number of books. But for a human mind, a number that large is functionally infinite. Soren realizes that he could watch trillions of universes be born and die in "Big Bangs," and he would still be in the same hallway, pulling the same nonsense books off the shelf.

This realization leads to a "catatonic numbness". Soren stops thinking, stops perceiving, and becomes "more like a vegetable than a person" for eons as he continues to fall. He eventually starts "suiciding" every morning—waking up and immediately slitting his throat with a bone knife just to skip the day and hope that the next morning brings him closer to the bottom. He does this for what he estimates to be "googols and googols" of years. In the face of a million-order-of-magnitude light-year fall, the only thing left of Soren is the impulse to keep going, even if he doesn't know why.

After eons of falling and "dying" every day, Soren eventually reaches a point where he decides to stop his descent and returns to the stacks. He is profoundly lonely—this far down, he hasn't seen another person in ages. Then, he sees a woman falling past him. He dives after her, catches her, and discovers she is a beautiful woman who has been "suiciding" just like him. Her name is Wand.

They cling to each other with a desperation that only the "lonely and lost damned" can understand. They spend a day together that Soren describes as a "glimpse of what heaven must be like". They come up with a plan to get back into the stacks together by spinning like a "maple seedpod" to generate horizontal momentum.

The attempt works, but it separates them. Wand makes it onto a floor, and Soren falls further, eventually clawing his way onto a floor much lower down. He spends "a score of millennia" climbing back up, calling her name on every floor, but he never finds her. He begins to wonder if she was even real, or if she was just a "dream" or an "illusion" born of his isolation.

This is the final stage of Soren’s transformation. He has lost the ability to care about human relationships. He says that after a billion years with someone, there is nothing left to say, and you eventually just wander apart. The "meaning" he found in Rachel and Wand has faded into an "endless grey nothingness".

The story ends with Soren sitting on a floor, having reached the "bottom" and now moving slowly back up, light-year by light-year. He is currently reading a book—the very book we are reading—which he found on the 23,439th day of his stay. He knows it’s not his actual life story, just a "random possibility" that happens to look like his life. He plans to stick it in the slot anyway, just to see if it changes his fate.

His final thought is a "strange hope" that someone—God, the demon, Ahura Mazda—is watching and will see that he is trying. It’s a tragic, circular ending. He is still searching, still hoping for validation from a God he doesn't understand, in a library that will likely never give him what he seeks. The "short stay" is a lie, but the "trying" is the only thing he has left.

If you're heading into a discussion with a friend about 'A Short Stay in Hell,' you want to move past the "cool library" concept and get into the uncomfortable philosophical questions Steven L. Peck is raising. Here is a playbook for how to frame that conversation.

First, focus on the "Theological Bait-and-Switch." The most striking part of the opening is that Zoroastrianism is the "true" religion. Ask your friend: what does this say about the nature of faith? If a person lives a "good" life (like Soren, who was a good father and husband) but is punished simply for choosing the wrong "label," is that God actually "wise" or "just"? Steven L. Peck uses this to highlight the absurdity of any religion claiming an exclusive path to salvation.

Second, discuss the "Curse of Perfect Memory." Soren mentions that his memory in Hell is "incapable of forgetting even the smallest detail". He calls this the "greatest curse" because he spends thousands of years replaying his earthly life and obsessing over what he could have done differently. This is a great discussion point: is immortality a blessing if you can't forget your mistakes?

Third, lean into the "Sociology of the Infinite." You should point out the "University" and the "Most Significant Text" as examples of how humans try to impose structure on chaos. Even in Hell, people want to be "Professors" and give "Awards". Ask your friend if they think these structures help the inmates stay sane, or if they are just a different form of denial.

Fourth, look at the "Homogeneity Mystery." Soren notices that everyone is white and American. He wonders if there is a "Chinese Hell" or an "Arab Hell" somewhere else. This is a subtle detail that many readers miss. Why would a "universal" library Hell be racially and culturally segregated? Does it imply that Hell is a subjective experience, or is it another level of the "sameness" that defines the punishment?

Finally, talk about the ending. Soren is reading the very book the reader is holding. This meta-fictional twist suggests that the "book of Soren’s life" might be exactly this novella, but because it’s in a library of every possible book, there are versions where he didn't meet Rachel, or where Dire Dan won. Discuss whether the fact that Soren found this book is a sign of progress, or just a cruel statistical inevitability in an infinite timeline.

While 'A Short Stay in Hell' is a work of fiction, it offers some surprisingly practical insights into how we handle time, meaning, and relationships in our own lives. If you're looking for a way to apply Steven L. Peck’s themes to your own "earthly life," here are three ways to think about it.

The first is the concept of "Context as Meaning." Rachel points out that they "can't care about anything" in the Library because all meaning has been "subtracted". They don't know where the food comes from; they have no connection to a larger world. In your life, meaning is often tied to being part of a "context"—a family, a community, a cause. Steven L. Peck shows us that when you remove context, you remove the "why" behind your actions. The takeaway? Invest in the "context" of your life rather than just the "content."

The second is the "Danger of the Idealized Past." Soren and his companions spend an enormous amount of time obsessing over how they died and what they left behind. This focus on the past prevents them from finding peace in the present. You might find yourself doing the same thing—obsessing over a "perfect" version of your youth or a mistake you made years ago. Steven L. Peck illustrates that this mental loop is its own kind of Hell.

The third is "The Fragility of Love." Soren’s relationship with Rachel is the only thing that keeps him sane for many years, but he eventually loses her because of Dire Dan forced her into the chasm. It’s a sobering reminder that the things we value most can be lost in an instant. But rather than being a reason for despair, it’s an argument for the intensity of the "now." Soren says that a brief love can "structure and define the very topology of our consciousness" even after ages pass.

When you sit down with your friend, remember that Steven L. Peck isn't just trying to scare you with big numbers. He is asking what it means to be human in a universe that doesn't care about you. He’s asking if "trying" is enough, even when the task is impossible. It’s a heavy book, but it’s one that forces you to appreciate the "shortness" of your own life, because as Soren shows us, the alternative—a long stay in a library of nonsense—is far more terrifying.

As you wrap up your thinking on 'A Short Stay in Hell,' take a moment to consider the "Appendix" Steven L. Peck provided. He calculates that the Library is roughly 7.16 raised to the power of 1,297,369 light-years wide and deep. It is a physical manifestation of the concept of the "infinite," and it serves as a mirror for Soren’s—and by extension, our—search for identity.

Soren begins his journey as a "Mormon geologist," a man with a very specific set of answers. He ends it as a a seeker named Soren Johansson, someone who has "barely felt at all" for eons. The Library has stripped him of everything—his faith, his family, his relationships, and even his sense of time. All that is left is the "book".

This is the central paradox of the story: to get out of Hell, Soren must find the book that perfectly describes his life. But by the time he finds it, he will have lived so many billions of years in Hell that his "earthly life" will be an infinitesimal fraction of his total existence. The "true" book of his life wouldn't be a short autobiography of a geologist; it would be a trillion-volume epic of falling, searching, and silence.

Steven L. Peck is challenging us to think about what "self" really means. If you are stripped of your context and your history, what is the "core" that remains? For Soren, it is the act of searching. He "labors on" because he has to. He still listens for footsteps; he still builds telescopes out of sheep intestines; he still hopes.

I hope this guide has given you the tools you need for a truly deep-dive discussion. Steven L. Peck’s story is one that stays with you, much like the "vanishing point" Soren stares into for light-years. It’s a reminder that meaning isn't something we find in the universe; it’s something we create in the small spaces between the nonsense.

Thank you for spending this time exploring the depths of the Library with me. I encourage you to take one of these ideas—the idea of creating meaning in chaos, or the value of your present "context"—and see how it changes the way you look at your own "short stay" on Earth. Reflect on the "topology of your consciousness" and the loves that define it. You have a finite amount of time; make sure the book you're writing is one worth finding.