This review first appeared on our Substack in October 2025, written by my sister TRex.
Let me tell you about A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck.
What drew me to this particular novella is that the protagonist, Soren, is Mormon. As an ex-Mormon myself, I’m generally fascinated by portrayals of Mormons in the media. As it turns out, the fact that Soren is a Mormon is pretty much irrelevant. That’s the point, actually. The book opens in the office of a demon who is processing new arrivals into hell. Why are any of them there? Because they weren’t Zoroastrians in life. Yep. During processing, hell-bound souls are sorted into hells that will be appropriately torturous to them specifically based on their tastes, life, and personality. Soren was a reader so his hell is a vast library comprised of every possible book. Think about that briefly. Think about what that really means. Every. Possible. Book. Among every possible book is a book that tells Soren’s life story and he has to find the right book to leave hell.
I really enjoyed this book. It was a genuinely upsetting look at the idea of an afterlife. As someone raised with a really strict and structured concept of life after death who then rejected that concept, I really identified with the author’s commentary on the arbitrariness of who gets what kind of afterlife. Not a Zoroastrian? Hell. Never heard of Zoroastrianism? Them’s the breaks, kid. The hell described in the book initially sounds really not bad at all and Soren doesn’t understand the real profundity of his sentence for a long long time. The author draws on feelings and ideas we can all identify with to flesh out the punishment: monotony, futility, overwhelm.
This isn’t horror in the same way The Shining is horror but I’d call it horror nonetheless. Peck makes you imagine what it would be like in this endless library hell. He makes you inhabit the feeling of waking up every day with a perfect memory of every day preceding it stretching back eons, knowing it’ll continue just like that for a forever longer. That’s the horror.
Darker Books 