(no subject)

[muladhara]

Well, this is disturbing:

9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9's reddit comments, which form some sort of story (apparently)

I haven't read them all properly, but they're...odd.

I found out about them from this article by Leigh Alexander.

Don't do what I did and read them not long before you go to sleep.

I don't have an appropriate icon for this.

Comments

[selenicdistance]

Looked at the article on the Guardian, already know I'm not checkin' this one out. It'll creep me out way, way too much.

Still, this kind of "could only happen on the internet" story structure is cool.

[darjeeling]

Huh, that's bizarre...

[muladhara]

It is really effin' creepy. I don't blame you for avoiding it. I was in two minds, but I got sucked in by the most recent comment, and subsequently fell into a very weird rabbit hole.

Oh definitely! Especially because out of context (i.e. on all the separate posts) the comments make no sense, only forming a cohesive hole when you see them altogether. I wonder how many users thought it was someone being spammy when they first started.

[muladhara]

Isn't it just.

[dingsi]

Thanks for the link, I read the article and bookmarked both story archives (9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 and The Holders). Sometimes I'm in a mood where I know reading this stuff will give me anxiety, sometimes I know I'll be fine, and currently I'm fine and just got done with 9M9H9E9. Some of the imagery was very creepy and likely to stay with me a bit, but in general I liked it and was kinda sad there wasn't more. Thanks to the narrative format, it was like reading a (disjointed) horror anthology.

Although I kept thinking back to the SCP Foundation and some novels and how this theme of portals/zones that are poisoning or dismembering the human body, and/or altering the laws of physics, is so familiar. One of the [for me] earliest examples I've read was Kathe Koja's "The Cipher" where the portal eventually even appears on the protagonist's body. A more recent example is Jeff VanderMeer's "Annihilation" (which I still have to read) with its Area X. There was Miéville's Bas-Lag series with several death lands, like the Cacotopic Stain and the former city of Suroch - I think the possible effects of one of these was people's limbs and pieces of flesh just disappearing, painlessly, until they were gone completely.

[muladhara]

You're welcome :)

I didn't look at The Holders, but I did read the Russian Sleep Experiment story which was...pretty gross and unsettling, as well (another article I read says that was one of the influences on 9M9H9E9).

I totally get that about the disjointed anthology. Though I kind of like that. I don't think it would work so well had it all been posted in order?

Those stories you mention all sound so unsettling (but at the same time intriguing, because it would be interesting to read them in light of this thing).