Salvation is mathematically possible. Eternity is the catch.
A Short Stay in Hell
A man discovers that hell is an infinite library and that finding his own life story is his only way out.
172g
Weighs the same as Sawyer Squeeze + Top Ramen
- Lightweight
- Past Bedtime
- Fiction (novella)
Peck's novella has been terrifying readers since he published it in 2009. A decent, ordinary man dies and finds himself in hell, and it turns out that hell is a library containing every book that could ever possibly be written, and he can leave only when he finds the one book that tells the true story of his life. The math of the library is terrifying, and Peck maps out the scale of eternity with a cold, devastating logic that will haunt you for weeks. A tiny novella that packs a massive existential punch.
Field notes
Peck, an evolutionary ecologist and practicing Mormon, borrowed his hell from Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 story “The Library of Babel,” in which every possible book already exists. The borrowing is explicit: even the signs in Peck's infernal library credit Borges. But Peck introduced a theological problem of his own. Mormonism promises eternal life; what happens when eternity is understood not as an abstraction but as an experience that must actually be endured? Peck has said he spent two months mentally inhabiting his fictional library, frightening himself with its implications.