Steven L. Peck: A Short Stay in Hell - book review

A horrifying, brutal and literal adaptation of one my favorite parables written by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”, which contains all the books of a certain size that can be written - 410 pages long with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page. In simple, statistical terms, that means most of them are full of gibberish and do not contain even one single coherent sentence.

The twist in this novella by Peck is that this Library is a literal Hell that the main character and what seems like millions of other people are sent to by a demon. The only way to get out of this Hell is to find the book that contains your whole life story, described second by second. Based on the math that the author did, the number of possible books is 95 to the power of 1,312,000, “a rather large number when one considers that there are only 1.5 to the power of 80 electrons in our Universe [supposedly]”.

It is already an absurd thought exercise in the original parable by Borges, but I really like what Peck did here with his adaptation. He took the parable and brought into a literal extreme, through the eyes of a main character who has desires, feels pain and cannot psychologically comprehend the vastness of the Hell that he’s been thrown into. The writing style is nothing extraordinary, but the story still intrigued me and horrified me to the bone. Something about literal descriptions of (essentially) eternity in a monotonous Hell is incredibly stupefying to me. Call me basic, I guess. It made me think of those episodes in “Black Mirror” where a character is stuck in a torturous computer simulation for an eternity.

Great read and short enough so I don’t have to spoil it.

Rating: 4/5