33 pages 1 hour read

A Short Stay in Hell

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2011

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Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, substance use, and sexual content.

Chapter 2 Summary: “The First Week in Hell”

For the first week, Soren stays with the cohort of people he met on his original floor. It takes a few days for any of them to find a book containing coherent text; Biscuit, the man who knew Borges’s story, eventually discovers two words, “sack it,” wedged in between gibberish. The discovery brings Biscuit to tears, and he begins telling the others about his life. After serving in the Vietnam War, he became unhoused and used a sack to carry his few belongings. He therefore interprets his finding as having an undetermined deeper meaning, though Soren thinks it is simply a random coincidence. As the days progress, Biscuit continues to search for meaning in the random characters he discovers in the “sack it” book, eventually reaching the conclusion that it contains a code that, once deciphered, indicates that the group will be trapped in the library for 10 years.


Soren ponders what the best system for searching the library would be and considers the fact that he has so far only met other white, English-speaking Americans in the library. He wonders whether his wife is also trapped in the library somewhere. Despite all of his confusion and overload, however, he has faith that he truly is experiencing Hell and that one day he will find the book he needs and escape.

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