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.
Short answer
For the infinite building, read Borges's Labyrinths or House of Leaves. For deep time and the futility of counting, read The Wall or Solaris. For the same dread rendered beautifully instead of bleakly, read Piranesi or Invisible Cities.
A Short Stay in Hell is ninety pages long and does something most enormous novels cannot: it makes an infinity concrete enough to frighten you. A man is assigned to a library holding every possible book, and told he may leave when he finds the one that describes his life. The building is specified precisely — shelves, floors, a cafeteria — so the reader can work out the scale unaided.
What readers usually want next is not more religious satire. It is more of that specific vertigo: a structure too large to be searched, described by someone patiently searching it.
Ten novels of infinite places
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Labyrinths
The infinite building'The Library of Babel' is the origin of Peck's premise and takes fifteen minutes to read. Every subsequent infinite-structure story is a footnote to this collection, and it is worth reading the source before the descendants.
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House of Leaves
The infinite buildingA house that measures larger inside than out, documented by people who each break trying. The nested footnotes and typographic games look like a stunt until the corridor starts growing, at which point the form is the only honest way to render it.
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Piranesi
The catalogueThe same discipline — a narrator numbering halls and logging tides inside a structure with no known limit — rendered as beauty rather than dread. The book to read when Peck has left you cold and you want the warm version.
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Invisible Cities
The infinite buildingFifty-five impossible cities described to Kublai Khan, each one a single idea taken to its limit. No plot, no dread, and the purest available pleasure of architecture as literature.
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Solaris
The futility of countingThe library sequences are the reason this is here: centuries of accumulated human theory about a thinking ocean, all of it useless. The most precise novel ever written about the failure of cataloguing as a way of knowing.
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The Wall
Deep timeNot infinite in space but effectively infinite in duration — a woman writing a record inside a condition with no visible end and no reader. The loneliest book on this list.
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The Unconsoled
The infinite buildingA city whose geography reorganises between scenes, so that a corridor opens onto a location miles away and a journey out returns to where it began. Six hundred pages of a building refusing to let a man arrive.
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The Third Policeman
The futility of countingA courteous narrator, a countryside that disobeys physics, footnotes on a fictional philosopher who calculated everything wrongly, and an ending that reframes the whole book as a closed loop. Peck's theology with better jokes.
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Roadside Picnic
The futility of countingA zone whose rules must be mapped by watching people die learning them. Knowledge is accumulated at exact human cost and still never adds up to understanding.
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The Library at Mount Char
The infinite buildingA library of catalogues where each apprentice is permitted exactly one subject and forbidden the rest. Far more violent than anything else here, and the only book on this list that is genuinely funny about infinity.
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.
Peck's narrator can calculate his sentence. Abel Quist cannot: the train has more carriages than anyone has reached the end of, and after fifteen years of counting he still has no denominator.
Then he finds a surveyor's mark dated 1981, and discovers someone has been mapping it for forty-five years — four hundred and eleven entries, in a neat upright hand, in forty-three cloth-bound notebooks. The scale was never the problem. What she spent to measure it is.
A standalone novel — new readers can start here
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 anyway.
- Different from Peck
- No theology, and no stated terms of release. The cost is paid in memory, per door, forever.
- Tone
- Cool and exact. Morally argumentative rather than despairing.
- Content notes
- Dementia, a sibling who no longer recognises the narrator, exploitation of vulnerable people.
- Reading order
- Book Three, written as a standalone.
- Formats
- Kindle and paperback. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.
FAQ
What should I read after A Short Stay in Hell?
Borges's Labyrinths is the direct ancestor — 'The Library of Babel' is the same premise in fifteen pages. For a novel-length version with the dread replaced by wonder, read Piranesi. For the coldest treatment, Solaris.
Is A Short Stay in Hell based on The Library of Babel?
Are there other books about infinite libraries or buildings?
House of Leaves for a house larger inside than out, The Unconsoled for a city whose geography will not hold still, and Invisible Cities for fifty-five impossible places described one at a time.