Read-alike guide
Books Like A Short Stay in Hell
The horror in Peck’s novella is not the library. It is that you can do the maths on how long the search will take, and the number is real. Eight books that do the same thing, and one that only looks as though it does.
Book Three · The Train Between Worlds
The Forty-Year Passenger
A novel of a lost brother, a vanished mother, and the woman who has been mapping the train since 1981.
The honest overlap is the mapping. Abel Quist has spent fifteen years measuring a train with more carriages than anyone has reached the end of, and, like Soren with his shelves, he has chosen the measuring over the living: he maps, and he does not open doors. Then he finds a surveyor’s mark dated 1981 and learns that Verity Sloane has been mapping the same train for forty-five years, in forty-three notebooks, and that when she ran out of things of her own to spend, she learned to spend other people. Four hundred and eleven of them. One entry is his brother.
Where it lines up with Peck: a structure nobody has bounded, a person who has given his life to bounding it, and the slow question of what a task at that scale does to a decent person. Peck’s answer is cults and a chasm; this book’s is a woman who is never quite a villain and an argument that runs to the last page. The register is cool and exact, closer to Peck than anything else on this site.
Where it does not: there is no theology, no wrong religion and no judgement. Abel is mortal, so there is no eternity, and the train charges in memory rather than time. There is no appendix and no denominator; the book never pretends the train can be computed. And it is not one man alone against a building. It is two people who have both been counting, in a room, disagreeing. If the appendix maths or the Zoroastrian twist were the thing, this will not scratch it.
A standalone novel — new readers can start here
Short answer
For the scale — a finite place too large to be searched — read Borges’s The Library of Babel, which Peck rebuilt, then Graziano’s The Divine Farce, the closest thing to Peck written the same year. For the afterlife and the wrong-religion problem, read Ted Chiang’s Hell Is the Absence of God and Eagleman’s Sum. For another short book with no consolation in it, read Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men or Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. If Peck left you cold and you want the same premise with a heart, The Hike.
What to expect from The Forty-Year Passenger
Set against Peck specifically:
- Same as Peck
- An unmeasurable structure, and a person who has committed his life to measuring it instead of using it.
- Different
- No God, no afterlife, no exit condition, no arithmetic. The cost is memory, paid per door, by a mortal man; and the antagonist is a person, not a building.
- Tone
- Cool and exact; morally argumentative rather than despairing. It ends on a decision, not a continuation.
- Content notes
- Dementia-like forgetting in a sibling, a missing son, exploitation of vulnerable people.
- Formats
- Kindle and paperback. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.
A Short Stay in Hell was self-published in 2009 by a BYU evolutionary biologist, sold quietly for fifteen years, and then in 2026 became the book everyone on your feed was reading in a single evening. Vintage Classics reissued it in May, Ethan Hawke blurbed it, and Peck told his university paper he was “just really surprised, to be honest”. It is 112 pages in the new edition and the audiobook runs two hours forty-three minutes.
The premise is easy to summarise and hard to shake. Soren Johansson, a Mormon geologist, dies of cancer at forty-five and learns that the Zoroastrians had it right. His Hell is a library holding every possible 410-page book. He may leave when he finds the one that tells his own life without a single error. He has a body, a bunk, a cafeteria, other people, and a twenty-four-hour day so that he can count.
What readers want next is rarely more Zoroastrianism. It is usually one of three things: the vertigo of a place that can be measured and still not crossed; the theological question of what any eternity would do to a person; or simply another very short book that offers no way out. These eight are sorted by which of those you are chasing, and the table lower down rates each one for how bleak it actually is and whether it ends.
Start here: which part of Peck do you want back?
The number. I sat there working out how long the search would take and felt sick.
You want the source and the two books that put a body inside a place that size. Read Borges first; it is a short story and you will see exactly what Peck kept. Then The Divine Farce, which shrinks the space to a cell and gets the same effect, and Harpman, which is the same feeling on an empty plain.
The Library of Babel · The Divine Farce · I Who Have Never Known Men
The wrong-religion twist. I keep thinking about what it would mean for eternity to be real and badly designed.
Chiang’s novelette is the most rigorous thing ever written on that question, and it is much angrier than Peck. Sum is the same thought experiment run forty times in a lighter key.
Hell Is the Absence of God · Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
The form. I want another hundred pages that wrecks me and does not apologise.
The Divine Farce and Ellison are the only two here that go further than Peck in fewer pages. Harpman takes an afternoon rather than an evening and is the one people finish and immediately hand to somebody.
The Divine Farce · I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream · I Who Have Never Known Men
I liked the set-up but found it cold. I want the same premise and to feel all right afterwards.
That is a fair complaint; even admirers say the characters are thin. The Hike is a man on a path he cannot leave, with rules he did not agree to, and it is funny and then unexpectedly kind. If what you want is a hell you can get out of, see the note on Katabasis at the end, and then decide.
Closest: the scale
Three books that make a bounded place feel worse than an infinite one, because a bound means the search is guaranteed to end, and you can calculate when.
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The Library of Babel
Closest match The sourcePeck did not hide the debt, and you should read the original before anything else on this list, partly because it takes twenty minutes and partly because it shows you what he changed. Borges’s library is a stack of hexagonal galleries containing every possible book of 410 pages, forty lines and eighty characters, written in twenty-five symbols. There is no plot. An old librarian explains the building, the sects that formed around it, the pilgrims who went looking for the one book that would vindicate their lives, and the despair when the arithmetic sank in.
What Borges leaves out is a body. His narrator has no hunger, no deadline and no exit condition; the story is a philosophical object, not an ordeal. Peck’s whole contribution was to put a man with a stomach and a task inside it. Read Borges and you will feel the difference immediately, and you will also notice the detail Peck inverted: Borges’s library contains “the true story of your death”. Peck makes you look for the true story of your life.
“The Library is unlimited and cyclical.” final paragraph, Irby translation
- How it ends
- It does not end so much as stop, with the narrator taking a thin comfort from the idea that the building repeats.
- Contains
- Passing references to suicide among the librarians
- Skip if
- You want a story with a person in it; this is an essay wearing a story’s clothes.
Checked against: The Library of Babel, Irby translation (PDF), Mazin Saleem, Solving the Library of Babel (Borges Center, Pittsburgh)
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The Divine Farce
Closest match The cellPublished the same year as Peck, the same length, and the book Goodreads readers most often pair with it once they get past Borges. Graziano is a Princeton neuroscientist, and his afterlife is Peck’s library compressed to the size of a wardrobe: a narrator who calls himself Sage is standing in a concrete cell with two strangers, pressed together, fed by a nectar that drips from the ceiling, for a length of time nobody can count. He names them Rose and Henry after the colour of their voices. Eventually they scrape through the wall, and what is on the other side is a crowd rather than a release.
It is nastier than Peck in the body and warmer in the heart. Peck’s people are interchangeable; Graziano’s three are the entire point, and the book is about what happens to love when there is no room to move and no reason to expect an end. Publishers Weekly called it a grim allegory and it is, but it is also the one book here that shares Peck’s exact trick of making a small, specified space stand in for eternity. Some readers find it a comedy. They are not wrong either.
- How it ends
- Sage gets out, into somewhere with everything he needs and nobody in it, and keeps looking for the other two.
- Contains
- Bodily degradation described closely; Sexual content in confinement; Crowd violence over food
- Skip if
- You need to be able to picture a clean room to sleep after reading.
- Read first
- The Library of Babel
Checked against: Publishers Weekly review (Sep 2009), Wikipedia: The Divine Farce, Bong Bong Books review (Nov 2025)
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I Who Have Never Known Men
Closest match The plainThe top “readers also enjoyed” result for Peck on Goodreads, and for once the algorithm is right. Forty women are held in an underground cage by guards who never speak. One day an alarm sounds, the guards run, and the women walk out onto a plain with almost no seasons and nobody on it. The narrator, the only one young enough never to have known the old world, spends the rest of the book counting: paces, days, heartbeats, bunkers, deaths. The scale here is not a building but an emptiness with no edge, and the horror is the same as Peck’s: you can measure it and the measurement does not help.
It is better written than Peck and colder. There is no religion, no explanation, and no moment where the book admits that what it is describing is unbearable. If Soren’s thin characterisation bothered you, this is the fix; if the thing you liked about Peck was that he at least tells you the rules, be warned that Harpman never does.
- How it ends
- She is, as far as she knows, the last person alive, and the account ends where her life will; nothing is explained.
- Contains
- Mass death; Assisted suicide; Terminal illness
- Skip if
- You want to know why; this book regards the question as beside the point.
Checked against: Wikipedia: I Who Have Never Known Men, Tar Vol on review (Nov 2024), Penguin UK, Vintage Classics edition
Borges’s library versus Peck’s: the maths
Nobody who recommends Borges alongside Peck says what Peck actually changed, so here it is. The book is identical. Both libraries hold every possible volume of 410 pages, forty lines to the page, eighty characters to the line: 1,312,000 characters per book. What Peck changed is the alphabet. Borges uses twenty-five symbols (twenty-two letters, the comma, the full stop and the space; no capitals, no digits). Peck’s library is written in ninety-five: upper and lower case, digits, and punctuation.
That one change is enormous. Borges’s library contains 25 to the power 1,312,000 books, which is roughly 2 followed by 1,834,097 zeros. Peck’s contains 95 to the same power: roughly 2 followed by 2,594,773 zeros. The ratio between them is itself a number with 760,677 digits. Peck’s appendix works out that shelving every book, with a hundred square feet of living space per soul, needs a library on the order of 10 to the power 1,297,369 light-years wide and deep. The observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across, which is a number with eleven digits.
The point that both writers insist on, and that gets lost when people call the library “infinite”, is that it is finite. Borges says so in as many words: the number of books is “extremely vast” but “not infinite”. The search will end. One reader who ran the numbers for the Vintage edition put the expected search time, reading one book every ten and a half seconds for sixteen hours a day, at 10 to the power 2,594,766 years, give or take. Peck told the BYU paper that the book is about what infinity means “because it becomes very apparent that it’s a lot longer than we figure”. That is the whole novella in a sentence: not endlessness, but an end you can compute and never reach.
Strong: the eternity and the theology
Three books for the reader whose takeaway was not the shelving but the sentence: what does a badly designed afterlife do to the person serving it?
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Hell Is the Absence of God
Strong match The wrong afterlifeA novelette collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, and the most rigorous piece of fiction ever written about a universe where the afterlife is verifiably real and verifiably unfair. Angels visit the earth like weather systems; each visitation heals a few people and kills a few others; the souls of the dead can be seen ascending or falling. Neil Fisk’s wife dies in the collateral damage of one such visit and goes to Heaven. He does not love God and never has, and the only way to see her again is to start.
Chiang, who has said he has never found a satisfactory answer to the problem of innocent suffering, builds the story like a proof, and the last page is the QED. Where Peck’s theology is a joke with a long tail (the Zoroastrians were right; nobody could have known), Chiang’s is a machine that does exactly what it says. The same collection contains “Tower of Babylon”, in which miners tunnel through the vault of heaven, if you want the infinite-structure story to go with it.
- How it ends
- Neil gets exactly what he asked for and it is the cruellest thing in the book; the final claim is that this is not an injustice.
- Contains
- Bereavement; Disability and its miraculous removal, treated coldly; Religious despair
- Skip if
- You need a story to leave open the possibility that the universe is kind.
Checked against: Wikipedia: Hell Is the Absence of God, Lorehaven analysis, part 2 (with Chiang’s 2002 interview remarks)
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Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Strong match The thought experimentsForty afterlives, each two or three pages, each mutually exclusive, by a neuroscientist who published it the same year Peck published his. In one, God is the size of a microbe and has no idea you exist. In the title story you relive your life with the moments grouped by kind, so that you sleep for thirty years in one block. In “Metamorphosis” you wait in a lobby until the last person on earth who remembers you forgets, at which point you are called through. None of them is a punishment exactly; all of them are, if you sit with them long enough, which is precisely what Peck makes Soren do with one of them for a few thousand years.
It is the lightest book on this page and the one most likely to be enjoyed by someone who did not enjoy Peck. Read it as forty seeds, any one of which Peck could have grown into a novella. The Royal Opera House made an opera of it, which tells you the register: elegant, sad, brisk, never cruel.
- How it ends
- It ends forty times, and the endings are the book.
- Skip if
- You want to be trapped somewhere for a hundred pages; Eagleman lets you out every three.
Checked against: Wikipedia: Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, eagleman.com: Sum, Austin Kleon on Sum (2021)
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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Strong match The bleakestThirteen pages, published in a pulp magazine in 1967, and still the reference point for eternity as torture. A supercomputer called AM has ended the world and kept five people alive for a hundred and nine years so that it can hurt them. It has restored them after every injury, as Peck’s library restores Soren after every fall; the difference is that AM is doing it on purpose and Peck’s Hell does not care. The story is one journey across AM’s interior towards a rumour of tinned food, and it is over before you can put it down.
It belongs here as the far end of the scale Peck sits on. Peck’s Hell is indifferent and provides a cafeteria. Ellison’s is attentive and provides nothing. If what you took from Peck was the idea that a bodily eternity is worse than a spiritual one, Ellison got there first, in a tenth of the space, and with a final image that Peck’s fall into the chasm quietly echoes. Ted is also a nastier narrator than Soren by some distance, and whether you are meant to believe his account of the others is an open question.
- How it ends
- No relief of any kind; the title is the last line.
- Contains
- Torture and mutilation; Sexual coercion; Mercy killing; The narrator’s misogyny, which the story may or may not endorse
- Skip if
- You want any flicker of the decency Soren keeps trying to hold on to.
Checked against: Wikipedia: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, LitCharts plot summary
How bleak is it, really
Bleakness on a scale of 1 to 5: 1 consoling; 2 sad but warm; 3 hard, with relief; 4 hard, little relief; 5 no relief offered. “Does it end?” asks whether the character’s situation resolves, not whether the book stops.
| Book | Length | Bleakness | Does it end? |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Short Stay in Hell (Peck) | 112 pages | 4 | No. The search continues. |
| The Library of Babel | A short story | 4 | No. The narrator hopes the building repeats. |
| The Divine Farce | 125 pages | 4 | Partly. He gets out, alone. |
| I Who Have Never Known Men | 208 pages | 4 | Yes. The account ends where her life will. |
| Hell Is the Absence of God | A novelette | 5 | Yes, and the ending is the point. |
| Sum | 107 pages | 2 | Forty times over. |
| I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream | 13 pages | 5 | No. That is the title. |
| The Hike | 288 pages | 2 | Yes, with a twist. |
| Katabasis | 560 pages | 2 | Yes. They leave together. |
Page counts are for the current UK or US paperback where one exists; Peck is the 2026 Vintage Classics edition.
Loose and counterweight: the same premise, warmer
Two books that share Peck’s set-up, a person trapped under rules they did not choose with a stated way out, and go somewhere he refuses to.
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The Hike
Looser match The pathBen, a suburban father, walks into the woods behind a Pennsylvania hotel and onto a path with one rule: do not leave it. What follows is a pulp odyssey of dog-faced killers, a cannibal giantess, a talking crab and two moons, and it is jokey in a way Peck never is. Kirkus compared it to Warren horror comics and meant it as praise. Underneath the jokes it is the same book: a man who wants to get home, a system that will not explain its terms, and a finish line that keeps moving.
It earns its place on this list for the ending, which Kirkus called a Twilight Zone twist and which does something Peck will not do: it reframes the ordeal so that it meant something. If Peck struck you as a brilliant idea attached to a man you could not care about, this is the version where you care about the man and the idea is a bit thinner. Readers who wanted the arithmetic will be irritated by it; readers who wanted to feel something will be fine.
- How it ends
- A twist that reframes the whole journey and lands, unexpectedly, on tenderness.
- Contains
- Pulp violence and body horror; Cannibalism played for laughs
- Skip if
- The thing you loved in Peck was that nothing was explained and nothing was redeemed.
Checked against: Kirkus review (May 2016), The BiblioSanctum review (Aug 2016)
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Katabasis
The counterweight The hell you can leaveThis is the book the shops will put next to Peck, because it came out in August 2025, has Hell in it, and topped the bestseller lists. Two Cambridge doctoral students in magic descend into a Dante-shaped underworld, complete with a Lethe that erases memory and a judge called Yama, to retrieve the advisor whose death they caused. It is a campus novel about academic abuse wearing an underworld as a costume, and the underworld is a place with courts, rules and exits.
That is why it misses. Peck’s Hell has no court, no argument to win and no ally to descend with; the horror is that the system is fair, fully specified and simply larger than a life. Kuang’s Hell is a plot device that gets its heroes where the romance needs them to be. Reviews split hard, from a starred Kirkus to the Washington Post’s “bloated, tedious epic”, and both are describing the same 560 pages. If you want a hell with a way out and a person to hold hands with, it delivers; if you want what Peck did, it will feel like a different genre, because it is.
- How it ends
- They get out, together, and the book wants you to be glad about it.
- Contains
- Sexual assault by an advisor, off-page; Suicide; Academic abuse
- Skip if
- You are here for scale or dread; this has neither and is not trying to.
Checked against: Wikipedia: Katabasis (novel), Kirkus review
Why the obvious recommendations misfire
Every list for this query includes House of Leaves, The Library at Mount Char and Piranesi. All three are good; none of them is doing Peck’s thing.
House of Leaves has a house that is bigger inside than out, and the horror is that the measurement will not stay still. Peck’s horror is the opposite: the measurement is exact, it never changes, and it is simply larger than a human life. Seven hundred pages of typographic games are also the wrong medicine for someone who just loved a hundred pages of plain prose. The Library at Mount Char has a library and a catalogue but is a fantasy of power, apprenticeship and revenge; nobody in it is bored for a thousand years. Piranesi is the nearest miss and the one to read if you want Peck’s vertigo without his despair: a man alone in a building without limit, numbering the halls and logging the tides. But Piranesi loves his house and the house, in its way, loves him back, and the book is a consolation from the first page. It is on the site’s Piranesi guide for that reason and not on this one.
A quieter misfire is Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, which gets recommended because it is short, European and hopeless. It is about duration without scale, a woman sealed behind an invisible barrier with a cow and a dog. It is a great novel about waiting and a poor match for someone who wanted the number.
“It is an exploration of what infinity means, because it becomes very apparent that it’s a lot longer than we figure.”
Where this page’s facts come from
- Penguin UK: A Short Stay in Hell, Vintage Classics (2026) — Page count, publication dates, Ethan Hawke blurb.
- BYU Daily Universe, 20 July 2026 — Peck’s own words on the reissue and on infinity.
- Wikipedia: A Short Stay in Hell — Library specification, publication history, 2021 award.
- Always the Horizon: Review, A Short Stay in Hell (I did the math) — Independent re-derivation of the library’s size and the search time.
- The Mookse and the Gripes review (April 2026) — The best long-form case for the book’s treatment of time.
- Borges, The Library of Babel, Irby translation — The 410/40/80 book, the twenty-five symbols, and the closing line.
FAQ
Which of these is shortest?
Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is thirteen pages; Borges’s The Library of Babel is a short story you can read in twenty minutes; Chiang’s Hell Is the Absence of God is a novelette. Of the standalone books, Sum (107 pages) and The Divine Farce (125) are the only two shorter than Harpman, and both are shorter than or about the same length as Peck.
Is there a good audiobook of A Short Stay in Hell?
How big is the library in A Short Stay in Hell, actually?
Every possible book of 410 pages, forty lines and eighty characters in a ninety-five-character alphabet: 95 to the power 1,312,000 books, roughly 2 followed by 2,594,773 zeros. Peck’s appendix puts the building at about 10 to the power 1,297,369 light-years wide and deep. It is finite. That is the joke.
Is Piranesi like A Short Stay in Hell?
In furniture, yes: one man, an endless building, careful numbering. In feeling, no. Piranesi loves his house and is, most of the time, happy. Read it if you want the vertigo without the dread; it is the warm version.
The biologist’s framing rather than the theologian’s, and the one the book actually delivers on.