"A Short Stay in Hell" by Steven L. Peck is a short novel, 109 pages, so really a novella.
However it aptly captures the horror and dread of near eternity. The book is hard to spoil since much of its world details are laid out on page 1, but then the main story chapters 2 through 5 really show how these play out and by the end of chapter 5 I needed to watch comedy skits because I was more depressed than after reading George Orwell's 1984.
The Hell described (in short) is one where you need to find the book of your life. The catch is, this is The Library of Babel, meaning every possible book that has been written and can be written is here... so that's A TON OF BOOKS. You are free to search all day, you have free food and places to rest. Can collaborate with others. You are in this Hell as a young, healthy version of yourself. And harm, even death, is reversed by the next morning when you wake up all good again. In fact, you are generally free in this Hell. It's no gulag or dark forest or Infernal circle form Dante's Inferno.
But the sheer scope of the task is near unfathomable. There are so many books and the search becomes pure dread as you cling to a sliver of hope that you will one day find your book so that you can go to the promised Heaven.
How long does the search take? Well... on page 1, the protagonist reveals say the beginning is "so long ago that its horizon is a vanishing point of two Euclidian lines that would be parallel by anyon human measure." And by the end of the prologue, due the Hell's "gift" of a near perfect memory he is able to recall how many days he's been there: 23^439
For those who don't know math too well (like me) the appendix provides some context and clarification. The mentioned number is longer than the existence of the known universe. Of just wandering (near) infinite identical library stacks on (near) infinite floors.
The story goes into detail about the soul crushing nature of this seeminly endless monotony which, I remind the reader, the protagonist remembers every detail of due to that "gift" of perfect memory.
A great little book, very thought provoking, but have some comedy queued up for when you finish.
