A Short Stay in Hell
Soren Johansson is a geologist, a husband and a father, and a lifelong Mormon who dies expecting the reunion his faith has promised him. What he gets instead is a minor Zoroastrian divinity, the news that his religion was the wrong one, and a hell built in the shape of a library — a structure vaster than the known universe, bisected by an enormous chasm, shelving every book that 410 pages can possibly contain. Somewhere among them is the volume that recounts his life exactly. Find it, and he is released.
Steven L. Peck takes the premise of Borges's Library of Babel and asks what it would actually be like to live inside one: not for a lifetime but for eons, long enough for the people trapped there to build societies, fall in love, and watch belief and violence take hold among those who cannot permanently die. Peck is an evolutionary biologist at Brigham Young University and, like his protagonist, a practising Latter-day Saint, and the book is unusual in taking both its theology and its arithmetic seriously.
A short, exacting meditation on eternity, on faith meeting a universe indifferent to it, and on the inability of the human mind to hold very large numbers. First published in 2009, it was reissued by Vintage Classics in 2026.
A geologist, husband and father, and a lifelong Mormon. He dies expecting the afterlife his faith promised and is instead consigned to the library, where he spends eons searching for the book of his own life.
A resident of the library who, more than a millennium in, claims a vision from God and founds a cult. His followers, the Direites, begin a campaign of violence against everyone outside it.
A fellow resident of the library and a member of the society's university, which studies the texts its members recover. She and Soren fall in love, and their years together are the one relief the library affords him.
A minor Zoroastrian divinity who processes the newly dead on arrival and explains to Soren how the library works and what he must do to leave it.
Not yet. Film rights were optioned by the American independent filmmaker David Spaltro, who has called the novella "one of the most original and powerfully moving things I've ever read", but as of 2026 no adaptation has been released and no production has been announced. There is an unabridged audiobook edition.
The novella draws heavily on and reinterprets concepts from Mormon theology, particularly the idea of eternal progression and the nature of the afterlife. Readers familiar with Latter-day Saint beliefs will recognize many of the underlying philosophical questions explored.
A Short Stay in Hell is a complete, self-contained novella. While it explores profound philosophical themes, it does not require reading any other works by the author to understand its narrative or concepts.
It is built directly on it. Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 story imagines a near-infinite library containing every possible book; Peck takes that structure and makes it a hell someone has to live in. The parameters differ — Peck's library shelves every possible 410-page book, and his version is bisected by an enormous chasm — and where Borges wrote a few pages of speculation, Peck follows one man through eons inside it. Readers who know the Borges will recognise the architecture immediately, but the novella assumes no familiarity with it.