Paul Bryant's Reviews > A Short Stay in Hell

A brief, gleefully bleak horror comedy that begins with three pretty funny jokes. Our Mormon protagonist finds himself in a room being administered by an 8 foot demon complete with horns. Demon is trying to figure out which hell he should go to. What? But I shouldn’t be here at all! I’m a good Mormon! I believe in God and Jesus and everything! Demon explains well, kiddo, you picked the wrong religion. The real true religion is Zoroastrianism. Our Mormon is indignant – why was this not made clear? “Bit of bad luck there,” says the demon, in a don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules kind of way.

So anyway, he gets zapped off to one particular Hell and he’s reading the rules on a big helpful board :

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.

And after listing nine rules, it concludes

We hope you enjoy your stay here. We have done all we can to make your stay a pleasant and instructive one.

Kind of counterfactual, you may think. But really this Hell is pretty pleasant, you get to eat delicious food all the time, you get to have your 25 year old body which never gets sick, and wonder of wonders you get to meet people and have sex, should you so desire. What could be so bad about Hell, then?

For the answer, you should read this funny and excruciating little book.

Note : In case you were wondering how many books are in this library of hell, there is an answer. The combination of letters and words are confined to those found on a Roman alphabet keyboard, and include all the punctuation too, alas, so the number is quite high, it’s 95 to the power of 1,312,000 which is way way more than the number of electrons in our present universe.