This remains one of the best pieces of short fiction I’ve ever encountered, and I have trouble imagining ever finding anything that replaces it in my mind. It is existentially terrifying and yet beautiful, it’s clever in even the smallest details, and I will never stop thinking about it.

A friend of mine recently asked whether I had a list of books “that have been particularly impactful or interesting,” especially in the realm of spirituality and religion—and suggested that if I didn’t already have such a list, I could put one together for one of my next blog posts. It took me a while to actually put the list together, but it’s ended up being a really interesting exercise. Of the forty books that I’ve picked, some have been more influential than others. There’s also a bias toward the recent, and I haven’t shied away from the idiosyncracies of my reading habits (that is, there are plenty of comics and plenty of French books on the list—not to mention at least one French-language comic). Nonetheless, I hope this is helpful to other folks looking for a book to read in these domains!

I’ve read this short novella at least four times already, but I received a physical copy for Christmas and couldn’t help but give it another read. Despite being existentially horrifying, it’s one of my favorite books of all time. The protagonist is a Mormon man who dies and wakes up to his surprise in hell. This hell is specifically promised to be finite, but it’s a vast kind of finite: It’s a Borges-inspired library that consists of every possible book (as if written by monkeys on typewriters), and once you find the book that tells your life story, you get out of hell. It turns out, though, that this library is mind-bogglingly huge, so you could live billions of lifetimes before finding your book. The point of the book is to problematize eternity: If a “finite” hell is this awful, how much worse is an eternal hell? Heck, even an eternal heaven doesn’t necessarily sound great when you’re done with the book. For such a depressing premise, though, it’s so well done—and leaves so much to think about.

Steven Peck’s “A Short Stay in Hell” gets better each time I read it.