A deeply unsettling setting that left me equal parts disturbed and depressed by the end.
However…
The previous horror I linked to was someone recounting what they remembered of an improv RPG one-shot.
The Sick Lands is objectively put together far better, better hits stuff that disturbs me and avoids things I’m pretty meh about (IN SPACE is science is more of an uphill battle for mysterious horror) and has a real conclusion…and yet, overall is less satisfying.
It does do many things right. The idea of studying something where studying just doesn’t work is always great, since that’s an attack on the very way we interact with reality, and doubly so when doing the whole corruptive radioactive cancer thing to you for getting near it.
And the idea that something that appears to be actively malevolent toward all forms of life is slowly expanding? Yes, I do prefer my apocalypses to be all-encompassing.
At first it seems a bit contrived that the experienced researchers are leaving before completing the training of the newbie, but soon you realize there’s really no such distinction. No one has any idea what’s going on. There’s many references to studying and research, but people seem to just be picking things up, describing them, and hoping really hard that if people do that long enough they’ll be able to figure something out. The longer things go on, the clearer it is that things are so screwed up people don’t even realize how badly they’re failing to accomplish anything.
And, of course, there’s the hallucinogenic/dreamworld aspects of it, which is all the stronger for happening in a setting where you’ve been told you have to be scrupulously careful and particularly on guard for warning signs you’ve been infected by whatever the corruption/malevolence is. If the waking world barely makes sense already, how can you tell what’s real and what isn’t?
The problems are twofold.
One is that the story could use an edit – I’m not sure if it was made up as the author went along or just that they struggle with pacing, but it does plod a bit. It’s also designed as a diary but it doesn’t take long to forget this and leave out explanations of how the character could be updating, plus it lacks the stylistic flourishes of a diary, even just stuff like “Something awful happened, not up to explaining, maybe tomorrow.”
The other is that there’s the sense there’s some greater meaning to this, with visions and the character having a great choice to make that’s never clear and something about foxes, but either I’m really obtuse or there isn’t enough to figure out what the author was going for. It reminds me of some of the writing you get in the SCP Foundation.
Here’s how it goes there:
1) Read decent mysterious article that has a very faint suggestion there’s some underlying unifying factor.
2) Read the comments, where people are asking what’s up with that.
3) Creator says that he’s sure people can work it out because he totally put in hints.
4) People make a half dozen stabs in the dark.
5) Creator either a) confirms one b)disappointedly says no actually it’s this c)says no but keeps insisting people guess and no one gets it and it’s been years since the last comment.
6) If a or b, Creator then explains in such a way that it’s clear that there was no possible way to actually know this for certain – that, yes, hints to match their explanation are there, but nothing to rule out the dozens of other possibilities and usually not enough to actually construct the full explanation either.
Whatever’s going on here feels similar. I think if I knew what the author’s full official answer was, it’d fit right in with what was written, but I suspect it’s not possible to work it out from the text.
It’s also possible the author doesn’t actually know, which is a lot worse of a writing blunder.
Either way, the story ends up at an uncomfortable intersection between unfathomable cosmic horror, where it’s okay to not have a clue what’s going on, and a chosen one narrative where multiple forces are communicating and everything hinges on the protagonist’s decision, where there’s obviously something specific happening.
The result is that the end of the world everybody dies conclusion is muddied by the fact we’re told that the outcome of the protagonist’s choice(s?) was that “both sides lost” and I have no idea who those sides are. It seems like the monster people might have been doing horrible things to appease the Sick Land and keep it from expanding rapidly, so they might be one side, but it’s still expanding and doing so faster as time goes on and it’s repeatedly pointed out that no one is actually trying to stop the Sick Lands from expanding, so that can’t be our other side. Maybe it’s monster people vs regular humanity, but if so it’s not clear that the monster people lost and also there’s no sign regular humanity was ever not doomed.
There’s a story early on about how the world starts off water and then Fox makes sky and Snake makes land and life fills up these places so Fox and Snake order some of it back into the water, and therefore water life hates everything else because it’s cold and dark. Water weirdness recurs in the story and the only non-anomalous life found is sea fish while everything else is warped (come to think of it, why did no one ever try to bring in fish and see if they’re immune?), and the big scary thing he pisses off at the end is in a lake, but it seems like it’s a fight between land/water and land is winning, because the natural state of the Sick Lands is pretty dry and another recurring feature is salt crusted craters vs sea flipping back and forth, with the salt crusted version seeming to be the more standard or stable form while the saltwater version is always more temporary. And, of course, the phrase we hear over and over is that the land hates people and dying of dehydration is a huge threat to explorers. And at the end there’s saltwater pouring in from above and below, which would seem to mean water won, except foxes everywhere so sky won? We’re given three sides in the early story, later told it’s a fight between two, then that two mutually lost and therefore it’s the end of the world, but water winning out would mean the conflict was between sky and land. Plus the old timey explorer fully goes nuts while drinking dark water that’s warm but the story makes it clear the evil water is aligned with cold. (And the anomaly was historically on tundra but is currently warm, as if it’s heating the place.) Also fungus is another big thing in the story, and that doesn’t seem to have to do with any of this. And finally the land seems to specifically hate humans and the expansion seems to have started with prehistoric humans entering the land’s radius, while the story just says that water life hates land and sky life with no reason for it being set off by humans or why only this one area holds all of an apparently universal grudge. Basically the foxes in the ending require that the early story matter, but way too much of the intervening story doesn’t match up well to it.
If it wasn’t objectively true that the protagonist had a whole mysterious destiny thing going on (getting lured toward the center and somehow protected from the deadly effects as part of the choice they’re supposed to make, for the biggest one) it’d be possible to brush off the dreams not making sense as being simply his own madness, and so SUDDENLY FOXES works fine, as does his dream saying the association is water-cold-evil and the other explorer finding warm water that’s evil, or the idea that water life is evil despite how big of a worry dehydration is in the Sick Lands, or the fact fungus keeps coming up for the first half of the story then doesn’t seem to go anywhere, or how it’s not clear how a general creation myth should have anything to do with one specific anomalous spot.
In conclusion, it’s a really creepy idea that ends up just too comprehensible to be satisfying as a pure nightmare ride but not enough to have a proper resolution. If anything, the ending of water coming through the elevator doors to above is creepier without the idea it’s supposed to mean water won and the early story was what was going on and now everything is ocean, because compared to all life on the planet warping into monstrous and agonized forms as it dies, humanity and land life dying out but dolphins and octopi and the rest doing fine is practically cheery. The sharks will miss their pettings but their populations will be able to recover. Things could be significantly worse.
Oh, hey, I know this one. Should read it in full at some point, I’m kinda stuck at the old-timey explorer.
And yeah, I’ve noticed that the story doesn’t really take advantage of the format, it’s more a straightforward story posted in a blog rather than imitation of a blog.
And the dream visions do seem rather unfitting in context of the larger narrative.
The core idea has a great deal of potential, so it’s sad to learn that it lacks proper focus.
The explorer guy is one of the high points – there’s obviously a lot of weirdness going on there but it’s ambiguous how firmly you can draw conclusions from it, since there could also just be a bunch of random chance behind it.
I had much the same experience as you, in that the lack of concrete answers despite concrete clues left me frustrated, but ultimately I really, really enjoyed the ride with this one. I also didn’t feel it suffered from pacing problems quite as badly as you did.
[spoilers]
The interpretation I’m left with is that “both sides” are Land and Sky, with the Sky (fox) being the human side and the Land the monsters’. The part of the story I kept thinking of is how some animals were banned to the sea; perhaps humans are now one of those animals. It seems as though human sacrifice was all that was appeasing the sea, and with the old woman’s tribe gone there was nothing left.
This conflicts with the chosen one part of the narrative though, because instead of the sense that Alex tried and failed, which I think would have been effective, you’re left not knowing what he was supposed to be doing in the first place and if his choices actually had any impact. My feeling is that they did, but that he nor the reader could figure out how or why was really unfulfilling.
[end spoilers]
That said, I’d totally recommend the experience here. I really liked the writing, even if it wasn’t true journal-style, and I liked Alex a lot.
edit: Also: I’m intensely curious as to how much of this was planned out beforehand. It feels too tightly plotted to me to have been written on the fly, but that makes it all the more frustrating that its so opaque. I wish I could find out something about the author.
The part of the story I kept thinking of is how some animals were banned to the sea; perhaps humans are now one of those animals.
Mm, that might work with the idea that if animals take up too much space, they get sent back to the water. The 150,000 years ago bit was back when humans were first expanding, and the people were stuck in the Sick Lands because there were enough people that the woman’s tribe was pushed all the way there. But issues of space don’t seem to matter much in the main story.
Land being the monsters would make sense with how against us it seems, but on the other hand, the land seemed to warp everything but the sea fish, except also they found water animals that were warped too.
He fails one test by having some guy end up in one of the mounds of dirt, which would seem a strong point that it’s the land that’s opposing him.
The foxes do end up in the water at the end…But then, he’s throwing up a snake. Or maybe the snake is part of the corruption.
But why would we be Sky-aligned, anyway? And the sky doesn’t come up much – the only thing I can think of is the rainstorms, which seem to have been mildly negative, his attempt to chart the stars, where he thinks they’re staying the same but when he looks back he realizes they’re different and also he was drawing impossible features, and the part where he tries to keep going straight by using the sun’s position and it doesn’t help. The sky seems to be warped about in proportion to the amount it features.
Oh, and also during the loop bit there’s the part where it all fogs up, which would seem to be cutting things off from the sky. Also the guy doing it has his hand in the ground to make it work, and he dreams they’re a disk in a void…
There was the fact he drew some light in the sky that was huge and then the end has something about a light. But if “both sides” lost, and Water obviously didn’t given the flooding, why does Sky feature prominently in the last line? Arg.
Also, there’s the whole “birdmen” thing, which should be important if it’s about the sky,
It seems as though human sacrifice was all that was appeasing the sea, and with the old woman’s tribe gone there was nothing left.
And that’s another thing! The place down there seems like it’s all warped humans appeasing the sea given they have to kill each other to make the technology work. But somehow the old woman’s tribe and the old woman are the centerpiece, and everything hinges on if she lives or dies. The bad stuff seems to center around her and her son – the fact it took her kid is a big deal and it’s at the same time we learn that the place sometimes sends the people back changed. I had the impression the lake thing might’ve been her warped son, which would explain why the two are tied together, but it doesn’t explain why that would matter in any broader sense. Why is it that only the blood of this one member of the one tribe could appease the sea? And what was up with the fact she was apparently kept alive long past when she should’ve died back then but without any other warping at all? Why does she matter so much?
And what’s up with the animals? We learn there’s forms of stable life in there, and the fact the land apparently doesn’t hate those ones sure seems relevant, but we get almost nothing. There’s the birdmen, of which we only get skulls. There’s the weird snakes, which would fit with Snake=Land except the batch we see all live in the water only, and also things with those heads show up on other life. There’s Mystery Giant-head Whale. There’s the fungus, which shows up over and over but never seems to have a clear place in whatever fight is going on. And there’s the fish, who seem to be normal but no one in the story ever thinks to try researching that. If the whole thing was just supposed to be baffling, it works, the general sense of the story is that all attempts to classify these things are a waste of time, but if the creation story matters, then there’s supposed to be different life alignments.
If the whole thing is just a clusterfuck of all three forms hating each other, maybe that works. Land opposes water, so we keep hearing about how plants are wilting and people are dying of thirst and when the inland seas don’t exist, the craters are bone dry. Water opposes land, so it tries to fill in any holes the land makes…except also there’s those bottomless pits in the cave that are just there. And sky is just fucking about the whole time preventing any navigation from working or people even seeing what’s wrong. Except in that case, how did Sky exhaust itself in the fight enough to be one of the two losers?
Every way I look at it, it doesn’t make sense.
I’m not sure how we got sky-aligned, but the whole thing where he’s drawing how the stars are changing seems to imply it too. Maybe it’s a humans = unnatural ~ from the stars thing? But that’s a pretty big stretch.
That nothing came of the birdmen was one of my biggest annoyances. I thought we were going to find out they were the adapted humans, especially with the line about how some of the native people started changing and the son being kidnapped, but then that never happened.
The animals were equally frustrating. The part where you find out the so-called eyesockets weren’t actually eyesockets but indentations of different sensory organs seems super significant– perhaps the only way to survive is to completely forgo sight, since the Land fucks with it so badly — but then he never really talks about it again.
The monster at the end really confused me. The whole ending sequence is kind of what makes me wonder if there was any point to it at all, with the fake machines meaning there was actually no inner workings, no rhyme or reason. What was the sacrifice doing? Why did kicking her head in anger the monster and set the apocalypse in motion? Who were the monsters and what were they trying to accomplish? I have the niggling sense that the monsters were once people (were the monsters and the birdmen the same, actually?), especially with all the implication that the one knocking at his window was wearing a tattered hazmat suit, so perhaps they were the remainder of the tribe trying to hold the Sick Land back and with the sacrifice of the old woman, the last magical one, they couldn’t anymore?
I can’t see the creation story being there and not mattering. There’s every narrative sense that it means something and that Alex’s dreams weren’t just dreams. If they were supposed to be psychosis, there’s just not enough indication.
I had the sense at one point that perhaps Alex was subconsciously controlling the Sick Land, with how he never seemed truly affected by it and at the same time was the only one who perceived its changes (plus where he wishes Melanie would die and then she’s immediately attacked by a monster), but as cool as that is it doesn’t really fit with anything else.
I want it to make sense so badly but it there just aren’t enough pieces.
The part where you find out the so-called eyesockets weren’t actually eyesockets but indentations of different sensory organs seems super significant– perhaps the only way to survive is to completely forgo sight, since the Land fucks with it so badly — but then he never really talks about it again.
I thought it has to do with the deep sea life lacking the sun, and there’s that one random anglerfish with glowing lure they find on the ground. But then again, the visions he’s getting appear to be pretty helpful and it’s often only by seeing something he manages to figure something out, which would seem to mean that vision is actually a positive. (Or maybe it’s that vision is helpful so it’s aligned against the place, while the place’s own things lack it.) Oh, also there was the one vision where he was trying to see what the woman was writing but when he got closer he couldn’t see…not sure if that has anything to do with any of it.
And I thought the same thing with the birdmen. I mean, they’re getting called men and we’re told people were around and we know the place warps people, and then…nothing.
I’m almost certain the basement monsters were researchers, since he knows one of the highest level researchers gets hidden in a blanket as if already disfigured then sent down and he speculates she either became one or was a sacrifice, then he never sees them attack anyone but each other which leaves becoming. But they’re not described in any way that’d match up with the birdmen idea. Or the sea life.
And whale skulls would actually look kind of birdlike…but that’s never actually brought up, and also we’re told the birdmen skulls actually look like all sorts of things so it’s not totally clear if they even are birdlike really, nor is there any distinction made between life that never left the water vs life that left and returned, like whales (and sea snakes, come to think). And we don’t get any aquatic theme with the mutations.
The whole ending sequence is kind of what makes me wonder if there was any point to it at all, with the fake machines meaning there was actually no inner workings, no rhyme or reason.
But the most annoying thing there is that the machines are following relatively clear rules! They’re powered by the mal, which is human-hating, which means you activate them by getting a bunch of human monsters and killing each other and then the final one drapes the organs on top. Okay, magic, but it made total sense as magic and was possibly the most comprehensible bit of all the weirdness. And yet as you say, the meaning SHOULD BE that nothing makes sense at all and all attempts to search for meaning are useless. If it was just that the “machines” were getting bits shoved in and then turned on, then it’d fit with the rest. Instead of seeing how they activate, the narrator could even try changing the insides around only to find that the whole pick/discard thing the monsters do when making the machines doesn’t seem to have any impact at all because after messing with it the machine still grinds on and we never learn why or if there even is any reason and there’s even the possibility it’s all just a shared hallucination.
I’m almost certain the basement monsters were researchers
Me too, but there are some bridging details missing, I think. Even a passing mention that one of them was in a blanket would have confirmed it without being obvious. I think the research, as it was, was actually turning humans into creatures that could understand and survive, which is horrible in a way, but the only choice seeing as how they had no damned idea how to stop the expansion.
I went back to see if there was any narrative connection between the birdmen and the monsters, but there just isn’t, even though logically I feel like they must be on and the same. The point of the bizarre animals coupled with normal sea life could just be there to show that the new world was going to be hospitable to the sea but require extreme adaptation for other creatures.
The point of the bizarre animals coupled with normal sea life could just be there to show that the new world was going to be hospitable to the sea but require extreme adaptation for other creatures.
Another issue is that the monsters didn’t seem to have any particularly sea based adaptations. The mal just doing random shit to the test subjects is okay because sure, it just hates us and the researchers were clearly not accomplishing anything, but the monsters do seem to be successfully mal-aligned and yet the description of them is clear as mud and what little vague description we get is that they’re humanoid with “large” heads but nothing about stretching that could be the birdmen (and the fact the character knows about the birdmen creatures means they should’ve mentioned it) “skittering” which is about as far from water creature implication as you could get, and claws, which some sea life has but generally dull and generally because they spend time on land. There’s also no mention of them lacking eyes, which was the only concrete thing we learned about the only living and stable form of mal life, and also they’re only active at night despite being underground because that’s how all the monsters work. Then there’s the big thing in the pool, the only description of which is that it’s big. It’d really help to know if it was a sea serpent or whale.
Alex is a really shitty scientist, now that I look at all that. “This will be my legacy! A lot of uselessly vague non-descriptions of unique life, and definitely no attempt whatsoever to mention any recurring features!)
The whole ending sequence is kind of what makes me wonder if there was any point to it at all, with the fake machines meaning there was actually no inner workings, no rhyme or reason.
But that’s the part that proves there’s some underlying logic to it! The monsters undergo some kind of selection process when building the machines, which implies it makes sense to them at least, and the machines do work. The fact that the monsters act perform logical and intelligent actions was one of the things that made it so confusing, to me. They clearly know what’s going on, which means there is something to understand.
Ack, got ninja’d by Farla.
That’s actually a good point. I guess on the heels of the machines being facsimile I was more focused on the absurdity of it, but the truth is everything the creatures do is incredibly purposeful, and it works. There’s one point at which Alex says something like, “They didn’t figure out how to get technology to work in the Land after all,” but that misses that they’ve invented new kinds of technology that do work, which is just as good if not better.
I think you could argue then that Alex’s flaw is that even in the face of the word running on magic instead of science, he remains stubbornly comitted to science and logic. The creatures have learned to adapt, in a horrifying way.
Ugh, this kind of storytelling frustrates me so much. Implying that the mystery is solvable and giving constant clues to that end only to have it amount to nothing is just dishonest. I feel like the story was just jerking me around the whole time. If the story didn’t lead me to believe that I could understand everything if I just tried a little harder then I could enjoy it as “let’s wallow in the incomprehensibility” eldritch horror, but instead it gives us all these clues that end up going nowhere. So frustrating.
This reminds me a bit of an RPG Maker game I played a few years ago called The Way, which had a similarly bizarre setting and all sorts of weird clues that looked like they would amount to something, only for the story to end abruptly with almost none of the mysteries resolved. I don’t know why stories do that.
In fairness, the thickness of the clues makes me think we were intended to put it together. The SCP stuff really convinced me a lot of people think they’re being clear but it’s because they know what weight you’re supposed to give to what pieces and which ones go together.
In this case, my guess is there’s a mix of actual hints and stuff thrown in for creepiness. The author can tell the two apart. We can’t. Also, the author knows what the right metaphor interpretation is. The SUDDENLY FOXES almost certainly is one of those. The foxes to me seem to be becoming dominant, because they’re suddenly everywhere, but perhaps the fact they’re splashing around in the water is due to water winning and everybody becoming water and the fact they just never came up before at all is because the author just forgot to establish them before and the fact they’re not mixed with an even amount of snakes is because the author thought it was more jarring to mention foxes a lot and doesn’t have any deeper meaning. OR, it’s because the foxes were aligned (or not aligned) with the choice to destroy rather than bear the burden, and there’s a line we all missed as throwaway that establishes snakes are about burdens or something.
The SCP stuff really convinced me a lot of people think they’re being clear but it’s because they know what weight you’re supposed to give to what pieces and which ones go together.
Ah yes, that is a frequent problem. See also: NanQuest. At least that author had the decency to explain most of it afterward.
What’s SCP, by the way?
http://www.scp-wiki.net/top-rated-pages is a good start. The ones that are top tend to be pretty understandable or handle their mystery in a good way.
Oooh, it’s like Internet X-Files.
I am honestly 100% convinced that’s the problem. The story doesn’t ring any “unplotted” bells for me — in fact, it seems very deliberate. I think the author just didn’t get enough input on clarity pre-publication. I’d love to talk to them about it.
The foxes to me seem to be becoming dominant, because they’re suddenly everywhere
You could also say they’re being forced into a progressively smaller area by the sea/land.
it’s because the foxes were aligned (or not aligned) with the choice to destroy rather than bear the burden
This is one of the biggest points of confusion for me. It seems like Alex chose to bear the burden — even Bob thanks him. But is that burden simply knowledge? After his death, does he come back like Bob and the old woman to guide others? Or did he actually choose to reject the burden and die in ignorance? It’s not clear enough.
I think Alex picked “end everything”, but that decision comes after the dream of taking the fox (so maybe that was just what was supposed to happen, not what did) and from context, it would seem the fox is the burden, because Bob suffers so much bearing it rather than going fuck it so I see no reason he’d be in favor of Alex saying that.
The fox may be death given that a later dream has the fox on Bob’s dead body while the snake is wrapped around a live monster, and that’d fit with how the foxes get to be everywhere while Alex just throws up a single snake down the toilet.
It’s compounded by the fact the fox/snake appears to both be the two fighting sides and the choice to continue vs fuck it everybody dies.
Maybe the two sides were fighting over how to deal with the problem of water? Only…how did they both lose? And if the choices represent the options, then they really didn’t lose, because the choice still gets made, so I guess that doesn’t work.
It’s also possible we’re meant to see Alex as having initially accepted the burden (ie, the fox) but in the end giving up. Though it’s hard to know considering we don’t know what “the burden” technically is.
Well, also because if Alex is taking on the burden, then shouldn’t the old woman’s burden be lifted? And Alex doesn’t seem to hesitate but acts like their purpose is to finally kill the woman, but that just fucks up everything.
Of course, given the mal can destroy your body but keep you alive anyway, maybe the fact Alex is in pieces by the end doesn’t mean they gave up the burden. They are still chronicling events long past the point everyone else is dead…
ALEX BECOMES THE LEADER OF THE MOLE PEOPLE
Seriously though, the recurring theme is that Alex a) can survive the mal better than anyone and b) seems to cause it to react, so I don’t think that he actually died, especially consiering he was terrified and sick but definitely alive at the end. I think it’s more likely he adapted.
“Dear diary, I absolutely must not tell my teammates about this creepy thing I discovered/saw because they’ll freak out/think I am crazy and I’ll be withdrawn from the project, so I guess I’ll just put it on the internet for the whole world to read” is pretty jarring and I think it would be improved by making it a normal paper diary.
Well, nobody reads it, judging by the lack of comments, so I guess the Internet preserves the secrets of Alex.
Because the Sick Land has already contemned the internet through Alex’s computer, no doubt.
You know, it would actually be kinda cool if instead of dream visions Alex was receiving creepy comments from someone claiming to be an ancient woman (asking him how do you the Internet).
That would have been really awesome.
“Lolcats can be trusted. They’re opposed to water. There’s wisdom in what they sayz.”
The author attempted to make this a plot point, but I don’t think it worked at all. Even saying it was a private online journal to start with and then not bringing up the idea that everything he typed was monitored would have been fine IMO.
Ah, I see. I didn’t get to that part since I started reading it after reading this review. I am currently at the diary of the explorer (who is the worstest most terriblest).
Alternatively, it could have been established that people in charge basically have the “what goes in the Sick Land stays in the Sick Land” attitude. It’s established that the interest over the phenomenon is mostly dead as few people believe anything useful can be learned here, and with the generally bizarre nature of everything going on, it wouldn’t be too unbelievable for people in charge to just not look at it too closely and allow the few people who want to go there to handle the matters themselves.
They would be checked for signs of changing and insanity when they prepare to rejoin normal society, but otherwise? “If you go there, it’s your funeral.”
Well, most of the story is published through the second, mal-powered laptop, which Alex gets because apparently the people in charge really liked the blog. (And then during the final facility section, after being explicitly told that the blog was known to and read by the administrators, we get the series of posts about WTF WHY IS EVERYONE FULL OF DUMB as if it’s private.)
This is tangential, but is Alex’s sex ever established? I’ve been saying “he” because ‘Alex’ is the name I use when games force me to have a male avatar (being a gender-neutral version of my own name), but now that I think about it I can’t remember that coming up. If not, that’s a neat touch.
Technically no! Though I do think the voice sounds more male.
A paper diary wouldn’t explain how we were reading it.
Here’s an option, though:
Mal is dangerous, and not all researchers make it back. When Alex starts, they’re not expecting to die, but they tell us the official death stats (maybe 1 in 10?). And you can’t publish anything until you leave, so the people who die just sort of vanish with a short explanation to their families that they disappeared/body was found on such and such date. So the diary is a record so there’ll be something of them left just in case.
Alex says that the private diary is set to switch to public after the date they’re scheduled to leave. If they’re still alive, they’ll decide if they want to let that go through, if not, they can’t get in trouble for it. As things get worse, Alex faithfully keeps the record under the idea that they probably are going crazy, but maybe someone sane reading over it can see what’s really going on and will figure out new ways of handling or at least catching the psychological effects of mal. This is only hammered in further at the point Alex realizes that the drawings of the sky were changing and they couldn’t tell.
The publish after death isn’t what’s going on from the reader’s POV, though. The history of the world is obviously not our own.
Now, and this is important – the blog is currently set so no one can comment on it but the author. There’s no need to do so if no one can see it, but obviously on a meta level you don’t want dumb comments.
So let the comments through – but Alex replies to the first few with something along the lines of “ugh, spambots? how are you even finding this? and you’re not even posting a link, it’s just gibberish”. Another post talking about it and how they’ve triple checked the settings and it’s definitely still private. Besides, if anyone could see it, they’d have heard from the people in charge. As the “spam” continues, the settings are changed to prevent anyone from posting.
Alex could also post occasionally in the beginning about how posts aren’t showing up when posted, and the pattern seems to be that lowest mal points have the posts not appear on the blog we’re seeing, which is odd because mal is supposed to mess with technology, right?
The implication being that most of the posts are somehow getting shunted into our universe, and there’s enough interference our world’s comments can’t be understood. The commenters can only watch as things get worse and worse in the parallel reality where Earth contains the Sick Lands. Ideally, throw in some suggestion that this might be the first incursion of mal in our world – maybe wait for some rare to unique weather/astronomic event and have it happening there, with Alex commenting the same day on it, but saying it’s relatively common and seems to be happening more and more.
Man, this story legitimately creeped me out. I was reading it for three days, and I had two pretty sleepless nights. I enjoyed it, but hated how there was absolutely no resolution to ANY of the questions it posed.
I must admit, even if it’s objectively bad writing stories that just don’t make sense are creepy.
I always end up reading this kind of stuff when I’m sick, too, which is just as always a terrible idea.
I think the reason the fungus stopped appearing is because it’s power was broken when Alex lost too many challenges.
When the mist appeared and surrounded him and insane Melanie, Bob protected all three of them through his white mushroom powers. But he also said that he could only protect two for a longer time, and implied that Alex would have to kill Melanie, lest the protection be broken. As time went on, Bob became weaker. Alex doesn’t kill her, then one day rain falls and a monster of the land kills her. I think this was the fourth challenge lost, as the other challenges were also lost after the one of the other five researchers was killed by the land, and one challenge was won after Alex mercy kills a researchers suffering a horrible parasitic infection. Who enacts death matters.
The next time fungus appears, it’s brown and rotting. The next time Bob appears, he’s rotten and infested with insects. The balance shifted against the fungus, which seems to be a power separate from the Sick Lands, and it suffered the consequences of loosing the vicarious struggle through Alex.
Thinking on it further, the idea that it matters who enacts death might also be connected to how Bob died. He committed suicide, and then became a herald for the fungal power. This might be seen as him claiming his life/death for himself, and ‘ascending’ into an actor on the stage.