Author: Steven L. Peck
Published: March 23, 2012, by Strange Violin Editions
Format: Kindle, 108 Pages
Genre: Fiction
Blurb: As a faithful Mormon, Soren Johansson has always believed he’ll be reunited with his loved ones after death in an eternal hereafter. Then, he dies. Soren wakes to find himself cast by a God he has never heard of into a Hell whose dimensions he can barely grasp: a vast library he can only escape from by finding the book that contains the story of his life.
In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.
My Opinion: I’m not sure what I was expecting when I picked up this novella, but I know it wasn’t this. Steven L. Peck delivers a compact, cerebral gut-punch in just 108 pages, and yet it lingers like something much heavier.
The premise is deceptively simple and deeply unsettling. You live your life as a devout Mormon, die of cancer at 45, and wake up in hell. Not because you were cruel or careless, but because Zoroastrianism turned out to be the one true faith. And now, as penance, you must wander an infinite library until you find the one book that tells the story of your life. Only then can you leave.
It’s a brilliant setup, and the deeper I got into it, the more I wished I were reading it with a book group. There’s so much to unpack: faith, futility, identity, memory, and the terrifying possibility that meaning itself might be a cosmic joke. Hell, in this story, isn’t fire and brimstone. It’s repetition. It’s isolation. It’s the slow erosion of hope in a place where time stretches beyond comprehension.
Peck doesn’t offer a tidy resolution. If you’re looking for a happily ever after, this isn’t it. What you get instead is an existential crisis wrapped in sparse, elegant prose. It’s the kind of book that makes you sit quietly afterward, wondering what you believe and why; and whether belief even matters in the face of infinity.
This novel is uniquely haunting and you will be thinking about it for a long time.
In this haunting existential novella, author, philosopher, and ecologist Steven L. Peck explores a subversive vision of eternity, taking the reader on a journey through the afterlife of a world where everything everyone believed in turns out to be wrong.
My Opinion: I’m not sure what I was expecting when I picked up this novella, but I know it wasn’t this. Steven L. Peck delivers a compact, cerebral gut-punch in just 108 pages, and yet it lingers like something much heavier.
The premise is deceptively simple and deeply unsettling. You live your life as a devout Mormon, die of cancer at 45, and wake up in hell. Not because you were cruel or careless, but because Zoroastrianism turned out to be the one true faith. And now, as penance, you must wander an infinite library until you find the one book that tells the story of your life. Only then can you leave.
It’s a brilliant setup, and the deeper I got into it, the more I wished I were reading it with a book group. There’s so much to unpack: faith, futility, identity, memory, and the terrifying possibility that meaning itself might be a cosmic joke. Hell, in this story, isn’t fire and brimstone. It’s repetition. It’s isolation. It’s the slow erosion of hope in a place where time stretches beyond comprehension.
Peck doesn’t offer a tidy resolution. If you’re looking for a happily ever after, this isn’t it. What you get instead is an existential crisis wrapped in sparse, elegant prose. It’s the kind of book that makes you sit quietly afterward, wondering what you believe and why; and whether belief even matters in the face of infinity.
This novel is uniquely haunting and you will be thinking about it for a long time.
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