Man finds himself in Zoroastrian hell

"... The one true faith. If you're not a Zoroastrian, I'm afraid you are bound for hell."

The man looked stunned and shocked. "It's not fair."

The demon gave a mirthful laugh. "Well, it was fair when you were sending all the Chinese to Hell who had never heard of Jesus? Wasn't it?"

That's not how Christianity works, and mirthful concierge of hell is also pretty much damning Chinese people according to the rules of Hell and the kinds of books that it contains, but I digress. One of the things which both bothered and pleased me about this book was, on the one hand, its superficiality, it wasn't really as substantive as I would've like and short-cutted its way out of what (for me) would have been fun theophilosophical discussions. After each revelation about the mechanics of Hell, I would always have questions – fair questions, I think, about the implications of that mechanic to the plot and why the characters weren't doing XYZ. I will say that the majority of those questions were answered eventually, usually in short order (it's not a very long book). On the one hand, this made for engaging storytelling (page turning to try to find out if/when they would exploit what I deemed to be a plot-hole in Hell's construction), but also I found it "superficial" in the sense that if I had these questions almost immediately, and the characters have effective-eternity to consider them, why does it take them so long to try any of these things? To this end: the theology is shallow, the math is pop-sci-fi (kudos for the appendix though, I don't think it would have been poor storytelling to walk through the derivation in the narrative itself, but I guess the intended audience wouldn't have been as curious? Idk, ...)

Dead peeps are resurrected into the Borgesian Library of Babel as fit, healthy versions of themselves, tasked with finding the story of their life (intentionally ambiguously defined) in one of the books of random permutations of all standard letters/symbols - in order to be released. From the appendix:

Assuming all the characters on a standard keyboard and that each book (as described in the original story by Jorge Luis Borges) is 410 pages long with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page. So the total number of characters in the book is:

410 x 40 x 30 = 1,312,000

With. about 95 possible characters on a standard keyboard, that implies that the number of possible books is 95^(1,312,000) [>> the 1.58^(80) electrons in the universe].

Assuming that the books are about 1.5 inches thick and take about 1.5 feet to shelve vertically, figuring about 8 shelves 200 feet long and about 100 square feet of living space, the width and breadth of the library (given two shelves, one for each side of the library) is about 7.16^(1,297,369) light-years wide and deep.

We can concluded, then, that the title of the book is ironic!

The rules in hell are very reasonable, in the same vapid sense that the commandments of the Church of Satan are rational:

1 - Please be kind. Treat others as you would like to be treated.

...

5 - IF you are killed you will be restored to life on the following day. Please try to avoid death as much as possible.

...

7 - Lastly, you are here to learn something. Don't try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.

oooo edgy "we have fun here" Hell.

Quickly the group that entered hell around the same time as the hero, Soren, begin to comprehend the rules and wonder aloud "u mean every book that's ever been written is in here?" failing still to comprehend the scale of their damnation. It was implied previously that Soren is not even the author of the book in our hands, just happens to be a book he found which aptly describes his predicament thus far. This becomes significant the more and more we fathom how rare it would be to even find a grammatically correct and complete sentence after millennia of searching.

Our little gang of five typically gathered at kiosk in the morning, where others would have a cup of coffee. I took my first cup ever on this morning. Being a Mormon, I had never even tasted coffee, let alone drunk a whole cupful. How could that matter now? Zoroastrianism had been show true, and I was in a Hell that had no prohibitions against it. Still, it was hard. Lifelong habits are not easily broken. Keeping the Word of Wisdom, as we Mormons called our health code, had always been taken as a sign of my righteousness, my worthiness to attend the holy temple, and to participate fully in the church. Even here in Hell, after a lifetime of keeping the Word of Wisdom, I was having an ugly time deciding whether to try a cup.

This was the first of the things that irked me. Like his lifetime of experience/discipline is of little consequence after a truly short stay in hell: he folds after just like two weeks without any sort of further examination of Hell or his own beliefs. Am I to value the beliefs of someone who demonstrates no capacity for holding to them under duress? After scratching out a snotty little note in my margins, I kept reading Peck addresses my very complaint:

What if this this was just some sort of trial God had arranged to test my backbone? What if this Hell was really all a ruse concocted by God to see what I was made of?

It's almost a substantive examination of belief, but the author reverts back to a mode of storytelling I would expect for a creative writing seminar. Which, to be fair, this may well have started as. It's good at that: riffing on an existing fun story with an added personal twist or something? But it's not super creative within the constraints it sets for itself. It is entertaining to read without being well-written. He continues:

But no, there was something real and final about this Hell.

And I guess we just gotta take him at his word for the sake of progressing with the story.

Fast word a century in Hell to a university ceremony to celebrate the Most Significant Text that had been found in the shelves that year. Left to their own devices, humanity (or maybe just the few dozen folks proximally near enough to Soren and his group? More questions that go unanswered until Peck is willing to subdue our curiosity) had found that year:

Our invocation to the great God of Zoroastrianism will be offered by Professor Donaldson. After her prayer, this year's MST will be read by Dr. Rachel Hasnick. Dr. Carter will introduce the text with an award presented to Stew Sand who found the text three months ago on level minus fifty-six in row five, book forty-eight, in area minus three hundred eighty-eight. There were a number of entries that might have been contenders for the MST, but when this one was found there was no question of theis year's winner.

(The MST is "The bat housed again four leaves of it.")

Referents of location in the shelves and the year imply that everyone? entered hell at the same time? Have they all agreed on the numbering system? There's clocks in hell, but they're all just time, no date, so dialogue about "Ah, yes, the MST of '25" makes it seem as though there is an emergent society of hell (sensible enough after 100 years of abiding by kiosks like foragers??). If everyone enters hell at the same time, though, I feel like that would have ominous predestinary implications which are ignored. Maybe Hell makes one incurious. The scope of the emergent society near Soren's group is fleshed out a little bit more just a few pages later:

He mentions that there are visible roving rape gangs across the chasm which divides the two halves of the library. While his side developed a university (which is laughable in and of itself), the opposing side seemed to remain barbarous and uncivilized. Some of the uni folk decide to set out, more out of boredom than anything else? Took em 100 years go get bored of their uni acitvities?

After about a month, we started running into people who hadn't heard of our university. But they were always eager for news from far away. Never any divserity, of course. No old people. No children. No blacks. No Asians. No Hispanics. Just bland, ever-present whites.

Again, troubling implications about why there's rape gangs over there, but not over here on his bland, white side of the library. Eventually a cult spawns on the other side and makes its way over to his side of the library. Dire Dan believes that God appeared to him and commanded him to punish those in Hell, perpetually. "How'd they get across the chasm?" we wonder. We will learn, though. Anyways they bring their raping and torturing with them, and in a hurry we learn a lot about the mechanics of the death/resurrection rules. Sounds like you spawn in wherever you died after the the day resets, so the Direists just spawn camp Soren for a hot minute. He's able to devise a plan over the course of like 37 days worth of 6 second intervals of consciousness before he gets clobbered in the back of the head again. He's primarily worried for the woman he met and fell in love with here in hell. She jumped into the chasm instead of getting caught by the Direists. One Soren escapes, he moves up the food chain from sacrifice to slave. We wonder how, over the course of a thousand years, 100 of which were spent putting together a university, that emergent society or even just Soren and his love interest failed to put together any sort of mapping system or order of the books. How is it that society failed to stratify itself somehow in that massive span of time with literally nothing else to do other than organize themselves, spread out across the floors to 1) organize and 2) prevent total pownage from the gangs... Wondering if there's death in the chasm? More questions that will be answered (there's effectively no bottom, but you'll starve to death falling and then be revived still in free fall. Can bang into the walls but thats about it. So his Rachel is probably capital-F fricked, especially if she's been falling for like 6 weeks while he was dying on repeat).

Soren tackles Dan into the chasm and they kill each other in free fall a couple times.

In the morning we were still falling. I was a little disappointed, because I knew were were traveling down at about a hundred miles an hour, and I hoped that after a day and night we might have hit the bottom. The grave fear that it might be bottomless welled up in me. I suyppose it was that fear that had kept so many of us from jumpin before. I estimated we had traveled fifteen hundred miles and still no bottom.

C.f. Satan fell for nine days before hitting Hell.

Re: annoyance about lack of organization - after falling for a long time and after many failed attempts at throwing himself into the 8-ft gaps between floors on either side of the chasm, Soren finally crash lands and revives somewhere where he's found by a dude far away enough that he'd never heard of the Direists:

"What book have you found?" I asked.

He smiled and pull it out. "I found it on the seven thousand three hundred twnty-second floor down from prime," he said, which meant nothing to me as his prime was clearly not mine. He opened the book to a page he had marked with a napkin and handed it to me. I was stunned. It read,

Breath, comes to me in bursts of joy. Stones retched out bloody worms, worn red with the passing of licking patterns of salt. Why signal we8&xxKJOPOlns;kkk;

Ignoring that last string of characters, we start to think of the Hell as a manifold where there may be local order, but it's so big that ay sort of universal organization quickly becomes pointless. Okay okay. Soren is still perplexed by the sameness of everything this far down:

I had I had a vague hope that the people thousands of miles below the groups I knew would be different from those I already knew (especially the Direites). How delighted I would be to meet someone from Africa or Asia. Someone with a different sotry to tell. The neverending sameness of all those I knew somehow blended with the sameness of this Hell. The same same rooms, the smame railings, the same kiosks, the same bedrooms with the same bathrooms, the same signs, with the same rug, and the endless stacks of books all bound with unerring sameness, seemed to match the saemness iof the people, all white, all American, all died between 1939 and 2043, the same outlooks, the same haircuts, the same maddening habits. Homogeneity everywehre, endlessly stretching into an eternity of monotony.

So again we get some details about the population, but not enough – kind of just left with more questions.

They part ways, and Soren heads up for a few weeks trying to find the other outpost of folks the stranger said he'd passed recently. When he does find them, they're all immensely sad because someone finally calculated how many books there might be in the library. Agian, my sympathy is proportionate only to how long this group of people had been in Hell. If they'd also been down there for thousand(s) of years as had Soren and only just now got around to crunching the numbers, then they're kind of ngmi to begin with.

After wandering aimlessly for "many years" after that without seeing anyone, having given up hope on ever finding Rachel, he sees a body plummeting down the chasm past him and decides to chase after it. It's a her, and he ties himself to her so that they don't get separated when they inevitably fall unconscious during the night cycle. Upon awakening she bursts into tears and they embrace and do free-fall-fornication a couple times before deciding to try to breach back onto the shelves, agreeing to link up once they've both made it in. After finally throwing her body into the gap, he gets over excited and accidentally kills himself a couple times (placing thousands of miles between them each time he spends a day in deceased free-fall). He finally gets back on the stacks, and then races upwards. He doesn't find her.

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