My Interview With Steven L. Peck
of massive BookTok sensation A Short Stay in Hell
I had the privilege of interviewing Steven L. Peck, author of massive BookTok horror sensation A Short Stay in Hell. I’ve included the first three questions of my interview here, and you can find the rest of it (for free!) on my workplace’s website, linked below!
Steven L. Peck is an evolutionary ecologist and professor of the philosophy of biology. He is the author of two previous novels, including The Scholar of Moab (Torrey House Books, 2011).
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
An ordinary family man, geologist, and 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 recent years, A Short Stay in Hell has had a massive comeback on the horror side of book TikTok (BookTok). How do you feel about all the book’s attention nearly 20 years after publishing it?
It is so surprising to me. It’s taken off very slowly. Every year I sold a couple more, a few more, in the order of tens and twenties, and then about five years ago it started to grow a little bit. And I thought, ‘Oh this is great.’ And then in the last—I guess it’s been about three years—it was picked up on BookTok. And in the last year, it’s been unbelievable. I’m just in a state of shock to be honest. I never expected this. (Laughs) My greatest hope was to be a posthumous author so it would be discovered twenty years after I died, like Moby Dick or Frankenstein, you know, so it was a shock. It really was.
Well, that’s definitely exciting! Getting more into it, what was the initial reception to the book like?
So, it was appreciated right from the beginning. At first I self-published it, and I gave it to friends, or invited them to read it…and I know not everybody loves it, but people who I knew liked it a lot. (Laughs) It slowly took off, and it started finding a following as a cult classic with college students. They were the ones I’d hear from the most often, and every once in a while a horror magazine would pick it up, but it would just cause little blips. So, from the beginning I think it was recognized as a good read, but I just never thought it would be this. It’s just so surprising and so cool. (Laughs) Especially lately.
Can you tell us how this book came to be? What was the inspiration, and at what point did you know you really wanted to write this story?
So, it’s kind of a strange story. I was doing ecology field work in Southeast Asia, and I went to study butterflies in the Tam Dao National Park in Vietnam. And while I was there, I was collecting insects off the floor and I rubbed my eye. There’s a weird bacteria called Burkholderia pseudomallei, and it went into my optic nerve and it climbed into my brain. This is a really strange route, because it usually causes lung disease, but it can affect any organ. It went into my brain, and I went completely insane. And what’s fun is I remember all of this really well. I believed—it was kind of like a psychotic episode—I believed that the world was being run by a Satan-Walmart conglomeration who was trying to clone my kids to turn them into assassins. (Laughs)
So this is kind of elaborate, but it was so, so strange. I had multiple kinds of hallucinations, like visual, hearing, smells, even touching things. I couldn’t tell real people from fake people—I didn’t know there were fake people, but I knew some were under the influence of this place that was running the hospital.
What it did was raise some really strange existential questions in my mind, because not only was I seeing things that weren’t there, I believed them all. Normally, right now, if a purple dragon flew through my room, I wouldn’t say “Oh. There are purple dragons in the world,” I would say “Oh, there’s something wrong with me, I’m seeing things.” That wasn’t my reaction, my reaction was to believe everything that was presented to my mind, and I worried: how do I ever know, since all of our perceptions are through our hearing, our sight?...I was so surprised that I believed everything that was presented when I got better. It was only a week and a half, so it wasn’t very long.
But it raised all these existential questions, like what does it mean that we can’t trust our perceptions? At the same time I read the Jorge Luis Borges story [The Library of Babel], I just kept thinking about that. What would it be like to be in this place? And it dawned on me, it would be Hell. And the next thing I knew this story started to unfold. What if I was there, what would I be, what would I do? And it was written in the period of just a couple of months, but I became as obsessed as anyone. When I write, I tend not to plan very much of the story. I let it unfold. And as it unfolded, I just remember one night in particular I laid there all night thinking, wow, time is really long. And that’s when I started thinking about finding this book. And from there, it just grew and grew into a story that you have now. (Laughs)
That’s fascinating. I really feel that feeling of questioning reality in the book. So I think you transcribed that really well. But that must have been so scary!
Now, I find a lot of humor in it when I tell the story. It’s very funny, it’s demons appearing to me. But the actual insanity was terrifying. I just couldn’t understand how the world had changed so much, how these evil forces had taken control. What allowed the world to become like this? So when I came out of it, I was fairly traumatized by it all. I thought I was really being held captive by demons…But I realized that this was what normal people actually go through when they’re mentally ill and things like that, and it gave me a kind of compassion and appreciation for those who suffer things.
Read the rest of the interview on The Twisted Spine’s website!
Woah how cool Kyrie!! This is such a fun interview, and I’ve been interning with Torrey House Press for a few months so this feels like the meeting of two worlds :)))
Such as very good read as it makes me want to interview some authors and artists for my blog