I read two books about Hell recently that were both really, really good.

A Short Stay in Hell – Steven L. Peck

I picked this up on a whim a few weeks ago and absolutely loved it. It’s a horror novel set in Hell, but despite some fairly brutal violence, the actual horror here is made up of a kind of philosophical dread instead of any Satanic sadism.

A Mormon dies and wakes up in Hell to find that his religion was false but that the real god is somewhat lenient in his wrath. The Mormon is doomed to stay in Hell, not for eternity, but only a limited time. The amount of time is determined on how long it takes him to find a specific book in a library.

This doesn’t sound so bad, right? Even the biggest libraries we’ve built wouldn’t take too long to comb over. The difficulty for the protagonist is that he’s not stuck in a university library. He’s stuck in the Library of Babel, the one described in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. This library is very big indeed. It contains every 410 page book that could possibly be composed out of the 95 characters most keyboards can print. When you start thinking about how many books that makes, it becomes quickly apparent the library contains a rather large number of books indeed.

The vastness of that number, which is arbitrarily small when you think about it, is where the horror lies. The notion of existing in any state for half as long as it might take to find the book makes eternal oblivion seem preferable. The living conditions in the library are not generally that bad. The inhabitants there have unlimited food, companions and warm beds. It’s the amount of time that they have to spend like this that messes with your head when you start to think about it. Personally, I think the idea of any form of eternal consciousness seems nightmarish.

This book is short, entertaining and subtly horrifying. I strongly recommend you all read it.

The Divine Farce – Michael S.A. Graziano

After finishing A Short Stay in Hell, goodreads recommended Michael S.A. Graziano’s The Divine Farce. Graziano is another academic. (He’s a neuroscientist, while Peck is an evolutionary biologist.) I had enjoyed Peck’s book so much that I was delighted at the prospect of reading something similar.

Again, I was pleasantly surprised. This is another one about Hell, although here, the characters don’t seem to remember anything about the life that lead them to Hell. The whole plot seemed a bit like an allegory for life. Things start off with the characters trapped together in what seems like an upright coffin. They remain here for untold ages before escaping into a vast cavern filled with other maladjusted freaks. They get separated, and the rest of the story follows one of them as he tries to make sense of his new existence.

This book is also very short, and I don’t feel any need to further discuss the plot. It was very entertaining, and I recommend that you track it down and read it.