I read — mostly during Sacrament meeting — the novella “A Short Stay in Hell,” (Strange Violin Editions) by BYU professor Steven L. Peck. It’s perhaps the oddest book I have read, but it’s also so compelling that you can’t stop reading. That’s a reflection of the human urge to hope that a likable character achieves an impossible task.
But I’m ahead of myself. The plot: Soren, a recently deceased 45-year-old Mormon husband and father who lived in Utah County, finds himself in an office, with other dismayed dead persons, with a sardonic demon with an office window that shows demons throwing the “damned” in a lake of fire. It all turns out to be a practical joke. There is no lake of hell. The demon explains that the true religion is Zoroastrianism, a faith and philosophy from Iran.
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