A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There's no other word I can find to describe the feeling this book evokes aside from dread. This book deals in units of time and space that are completely incomprehensible to the human mind, and their level of incomprehensibility only became more and more clear the further I got into the story. I think that it would be appropriate to describe this book as cosmic horror in its truest sense; it's a book that presents you with an oppressively matter-of-fact Hell that breaks your mind the more you try to comprehend it. It's a setting that has crawled under my skin and I fear may never leave.
I keep finding myself thinking about what it would be like to be in that Hell: what would I do? How would I systematically find my book? How long would it take me to get out? Like the characters in the book, I approached this story arrogantly thinking that I would be able to create a system to sort through the books, that even if it took me billions of trillions of years to find the end of the library, I would, and then it would only be a matter of time before I could find my way out. I realized how naive I was in thinking that right around the same time the main character has a meeting that forces him to recognize the true scope of the place that he's in. I have to commend the author for that - whether or not it was intentional, it was a really powerful moment to come to that realization at the same time as the main character.
And beyond the (not technically) infinite scope of the story's setting, I kept reminding myself of what the main character was told in the opening of the story: that one day in the true afterlife, the main character would look back on his experience as a Short Stay in Hell compared to his eternal afterlife. Infinity really is a funny thing like that, because even though the main character lives out the entire life of our known universe over and over again over the course of this book, the demon's comfort still remains true. In the scope of an infinite life, what are a few googols of years spent in a library? I think this novella broke my brain.
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