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)

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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.

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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.  

 

Though the book is filled with existential dread, there’s a hopefulness to it, too. A lot of readers I’ve spoken with are moved by that hopefulness, and by Soren’s good nature in the face of despair. What influenced those themes within the book? 

 

I am so glad you saw that. Some people come away very discouraged, but for me, that’s the reaction I wanted to elicit in people. Because the one thing that I really believe is that humans are amazing. They’re amazing because they have overcome so many things, and found solutions to so many problems. And I believe in that. I think that one of the things that makes me optimistic is looking through history—things can be discouraging at times, and this is kind of a hard time right now for a lot of people, and I honestly think that if we’re engaged in things like figuring out the way things work, science, reading, literature, and conversations, all these things can lead us through hard times. I believe in that. And I’m glad it showed up in the book for you! When I saw this question, I thought, yes, this is the right question! Thank you for seeing that. 

 

You wrote this book back in 2009. Would you change any of the story if you were to write it again, today? 

 

I don’t think I would. At some point, when I write, the work decides what it wants to be. And I’m going to speak mystically, but I don’t really mean it mystically, it’s just the way my brain works. But there’s a sense that what it wants to be, I’ve got to let it happen. I know this feeling is not unusual. Back in Ancient Greek literature, they talked about a muse that was the creative agent behind all the things people wrote. That’s not what I believe but it feels a little like that.

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My mode of thinking through stories and books is that I start off with some ideas and I start writing and it starts to unfold, but then the book all of a sudden takes off. It usually happens when I’ve fallen in love with the characters and they become friends and people that I like, even if they’re unlikeable. Some characters don’t do what I was rooting for them to do, like ‘Oh no, don’t do that!’ but I'm still writing it down. (Laughs) ‘Oh I wish you weren’t doing this but I’m writing it.’

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So, if I think about changing it, I’d have to…how do I put this, ask permission from the book? Or does the book feel a lack? I just feel like it’s content being what it is. So I don’t think I would. I think I’d keep it the same.

 

Your work is primarily in science and education. Have you always been interested in writing fiction?

 

I have been. My mom kept a journal of my first five years, and I was writing stories at four years old…I think I always had this creative streak. I wanted to write down my ideas, write down stories. I think this came home in seventh grade. I was mercilessly beat up by a guy after school every day. Not beat up bad, I mean he would chase me home and push me around a little. And I was afraid to go to school. But I had an assignment from the teacher to write a long epic poem. So I wrote this long poem about a weasel. And it was probably the greatest weasel poem ever written. I think it would become the canonical story for weasel culture. (Laughs) Anyway, the teacher liked it so much he had me read it in front of the class. It was probably three typed pages. I read it in class and I looked down and saw the bully in class crying. And my first thought was, ‘I’m a dead man.’ I saw him crying and he saw me seeing him, and I knew that this was going to be a bad day. 

And sure enough he was waiting for me when I got out of school. He grabbed me by the shirt and pushed me against the wall, and he got really silent and he goes, “Peck, that’s the greatest thing you’ve ever done.” (Laughs) And I thought, ‘Poetry has power!’

So I thought this was something I have talent in and something I want to do. I went to graduate school in science, but I was always in writing groups and sharing my work with people, and establishing myself as a writer wanting to get better. So yeah, I can’t think of a time since I was four that I didn’t want to be a writer.

 

I’m glad to hear you kept up with it!

 

And the funny thing is, science is all about data. And I tell my students—and they think I’m being cynical or sarcastic—but I tell them there’s more truth in fiction than in science. But I mean that sincerely, because through fiction we can get some of the greatest ideas that humans have ever thought of. We find in that our deepest fears, our greatest triumphs, our longing for love and our longing for all the things that make us human. And for me, those are the more important truths. I love science. I don’t want to lead the impression that I don’t love science, because I do, but that’s how I feel about fiction. I almost feel like I’m doing better work with fiction than I am with science. 

 

What does your fiction writing process look like? Do you build massive plotlines, or do you write what comes to you in the moment?

 

It’s very, very organic. I don’t make a lot of lists and I don’t do outlines. I always let it grow, in a way. I might start with really vague ideas. I kind of think ‘oh, I’m gonna write a story about this.’ But it’s actually in writing that the story unfolds, and sometimes a new character will appear that I didn’t plan for. They wouldn’t be in my outline. Rather than ignore it, I invite them to come to the book. So what happens is I have to go back and write a lot. New things will appear that will have to be referred to. So my writing is very interactive, in that I don’t have a completed book in mind. In fact, a book I’m writing right now, I claimed it was finished and then as I was reading, I thought, ‘I need two more chapters about this person.’ It just means a lot of re-writing (Laughs) but I don’t mind that. Let it be what it wants to be.

 

Are you ever interested in returning to Soren’s story or the world of A Short Stay in Hell? 

 

That’s a hard question for me. I think about it all the time. I think about what more could be written, but I’ve had too many experiences where an author who completed a book decides to do a sequel. Often it doesn’t work for me as well. If the author intended it to be a three-book series, I don’t feel bad about that. But I think there’s something about the completed work in this book that I just can’t imagine coming back and bettering it. I honestly feel like I’m done. You know, I could write a similar story. People thought they’d like to explore more of the worlds the demon suggested that you could go to, but that doesn’t interest me as much, so I’ve said no, ‘I’ve got new things and I’m going to go with those things.’

 

If you were transported to this Hell, how well would you do? I feel like I would give up and jump into the chasm.

 

(Laughs) Heaven forbid! It’s sort of subtle in the way that it doesn’t seem that bad when you first get there. And then you start to notice that it’s really monotonous. There’s no variety, there’s no diversity, there’s no creativity, there’s no novelty coming into the world—all the things that make it great to be a human being are missing. But I—what would I do? So I’ve had two thoughts. One is more ambitious. I thought, and this was in a conversation with a friend…we started imagining; could you get enough intestines out of the kiosk to create an airship by sewing it all together and filling it with air? (Laughs) And start to travel in a different way? And once you start inventing, it opens new spaces that more can be invented, and I thought ‘I wonder if you just said, no, I’m going to abandon the quest. I won’t even try. It’s too hard, it’s too far away. So let’s see what kind of world we can build just with the stuff we have.’ And I think that would be a lot of fun. Maybe that would be a good book to write for somebody.

 

I have to ask — do Rachel and Soren ever see each other again, even in heaven?

 

So, I don’t know. That’s part of an even larger commitment I have—I have no more information about the world than the reader. And when an author starts deciding, “Oh, but there was this thing in there all along,” I always hate that. I bought into the notion of the death of the author: once the book is done, I’m irrelevant. I think that, though, is a great question, because what’s your opinion? This is the way I feel. Your opinion about that is as valid as mine. You have the same information I have. The trouble is that if I give an opinion, it becomes this sort of authority, you know. So what do you think?

 

That’s true. I mean, it really is so vast but I would like to think that they do have some sort of happily-ever-after, even if that means just finding each other in Hell or finding their books and seeing each other again in heaven. And then spending another eternity together where they’re not, you know, in Hell. (Laughs) That’s what I would like to happen in my head, so I guess knowing that there’s no concrete answer, I can just believe that was what happened.

 

That’s exactly right! And I can ruin the book for people if I give opinions on what happened next or other things. So, I like that! You’re using all the information from the book and so that’s valid. You’ve honored the book with that answer.

 

To close us off, do you have anything you would like to say to the readers or the BookTokers who have kind of had this resurgence of A Short Stay in Hell?

 

I just want to thank them. I want to thank you for promoting it. I want to thank them for bringing it out. I love this story even though I’m the author, I’ll say that. I’m so glad it was discovered by a community of people who like the book. It’s a deep sense of gratitude. Thank you for reading it. Thank you for sharing it with others. It’s a marvelous thing to me that that happened. I’m just — gratitude is my reaction.