A Short Stay in Hell
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Steven L. Peck on A Short Stay in Hell
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A bacterium, a Borges story, and one unanswerable questionThe book’s origin is not a thought experiment. Peck contracted a bacterial brain infection called Burkholderia pseudomallei during ecology fieldwork in Vietnam, and it sent him into ten days of complete psychosis. He was convinced, without a flicker of doubt, that a Satan-Walmart consortium was trying to clone his children. The infection cleared. The question it left behind did not: how does a person know, from the inside, that what they believe is real?
What it did was raise some really strange existential questions in my mind, because not only was I seeing things that weren’t there, I believed them all. Normally, right now, if a purple dragon flew through my room, I wouldn’t say ‘Oh. There are purple dragons in the world,’ I would say ‘Oh, there’s something wrong with me, I’m seeing things.’ That wasn’t my reaction, my reaction was to believe everything that was presented to my mind.
While he was still living with that question, he read Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” a story that imagines an infinite library containing every book that could possibly be written. The two experiences found each other.
At the same time I read the Jorge Luis Borges story, I just kept thinking about that. What would it be like to be in this place? And it dawned on me, it would be Hell.
That collision of a medical crisis and a piece of Argentine fiction became the book’s premise: a man dies and wakes in a hell built from the Library of Babel, sentenced to stay until he finds the one book that tells his life story.
How he wrote it
No outline, one sleepless night, and an openly stolen settingThe novella was written in a couple of months, without a plan. Peck’s method is to follow the story rather than chart it, and in this case that meant lying awake one night until the scale of what he was writing became physically disorienting.
When I write, I tend not to plan very much of the story. I let it unfold. And as it unfolded, I just remember one night in particular I laid there all night thinking, wow, time is really long. And that’s when I started thinking about finding this book.
That sleeplessness was not a dramatist’s trick. Writing through eternity’s arithmetic hit him before his readers ever got the chance to feel it.
The book actually shocked and disturbed me, because I’d never really thought about eternity before. As its dimensions begin to unfold, sometimes I would lie in bed and have to sort of hold onto the bed to keep from falling into the depths that seemed about to overwhelm me. As you say, we talk pretty glibly about ‘eternity’ as if it were just a simple concept, but it terrifies me.
The debt to Borges was not something Peck tried to disguise or launder. He built the acknowledgment into the story’s architecture: a sign posted on the wall of hell, repeated every few hundred meters, tells every arriving soul exactly where the setting came from. When readers on Goodreads later accused him of plagiarism, he was genuinely baffled.
Of course, that it says explicitly on the sign placed on the wall in Hell (repeated every few hundred meters), ‘Welcome to Hell! This Hell is based upon a short story by Jorge Luis Borges from your world called “The Library of Babel”. Here you will find all the books that can possibly be written,’ should have been a hint that my borrowing was intentional.
Borges was not the only literary ancestor he named. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, a series of fantasy novels set inside a decaying castle of labyrinthine scale, also shaped how he thought about the library as an inhabitable space.
if you twist Castle Gormenghast under the right topological transformations, you might find my Library of Babel.
Peck initially self-published the novella and circulated it among friends. His stated ambition at the time: to be discovered posthumously, like Melville. The BookTok readership that arrived years later was not part of any plan.
What he wants us to sit with
The question that outlasts the storyPeck visited a prison book club after the novella found its wider audience. The question he said the book poses is short enough to fit on a notecard: “But what if I’m wrong?” He sees that question as generative rather than corrosive, something that opens people toward each other rather than shutting belief down. He had put the same idea at greater length in an interview.
For me, putting yourself in the position of someone whose expectations are completely blown away allows a bit of humility. And allows a kind of double reflection on our assumptions and expectations. I think it’s healthy for any faith.
The psychosis that started the book also changed what he wanted to give readers emotionally. Coming out of the infection, he understood for the first time what mental illness feels like from the inside, and that understanding became part of what the novella carries.
I realized that this was what normal people actually go through when they’re mentally ill and things like that, and it gave me a kind of compassion and appreciation for those who suffer things.
The book finished, he sat in a Sunday School class and heard someone say “Families can be together forever.” His internal response, as he later described it to a book club: “You don’t know what forever means!” Writing through eternity had changed what a phrase he had spent his whole adult life inside could still do to him.