The NoSleep “everything here is true” extends to this story, as expected. Feelings that travel with you as you join the author within the narrative. There is a real sense of dread in these pages, from the very first sentence, and that’s another reason why I’m championing this story so much – the story doesn’t seem to want to scare you for the sake of it, it wants you to absorb these feelings of dread and uneasiness. The spire casts its shadow across the whole narrative, but also manages to take a back seat for much of the story. I’m hesitant to write more about the plot here, as it started to take turns I did not expect as I was reading. There’s no question that this is a horror story – the truly creepy climax is still running around my brain now, a couple of weeks after I’d read it – but it’s also a very sad story, and I applaud writers who can write to make the reader feel the sadness coming from the pages without falling over into maudlin schmaltz. I would like to read the official Kindle edition to see if there have been any developments added, but even so, the 2013 NoSleep version felt already very polished. We’re introduced to the protagonist’s friends and acquaintances, and they feel remarkably fleshed out for what I thought might be another old scary story found online. This is what made me enjoy (if that’s the right word) this story so much – the writing felt very mature and the author was able to bring up a huge range of emotions through his writing. In a variety of ways, this story is about the loss of innocence, for both the protagonist and those who surround him. Within the narrative of the suicide, the notes and the spire, we encounter teenage freedoms and first loves, friendships and adventures, as well as the heavy themes of coercion and consent in a millennial teenager’s world. As I’ve said, on the surface it’s a grisly teen crime story, but when the story’s world begins to take shape, the author introduces a whole range of concepts that work incredibly well within this horror-story frame.Īt its heart, I would consider The Spire in the Woods to be a coming-of-age tale. It’s an interesting enough premise, but as I read more and more of the story in fits and starts in various airport lounges and train stations, I found myself getting more and more engrossed – mostly due to how mature I found the writing and how interesting it was to pull the different plot strands together towards a cohesive whole. The unnamed protagonist considers himself something of a ghost-story expert, especially regarding the folklore tradition of his native New England, and he uses this expertise to attempt to unravel the mystery of the suicide and how it could connect to the titular Spire. On the surface, The Spire in the Woods is the story of the author-protagonist’s attempts to make sense of a school-friend’s suicide by analysing the cryptic clues left behind in his suicide notes. Note: this review is of the NoSleep (2013) version. The Spire in the Woods is one of these gems. That said, there are some real gems to be found there – if you’re willing to look. The NoSleep rule of “everything is true here” is something that I find very interesting, and 99% of the time the comments beneath a story will uphold this rule, but ultimately the “everything is real” concept can get kind of tiresome when you’re reading yet another story about The Slenderman or whatever. For those who are not familiar with NoSleep: it’s an online community where all of the stories posted are presented as factual accounts. Generally, my experience with NoSleep has been mixed at best. I don’t know how I ended up saving this or how I’d even heard of it, but I figured if I’d bothered to look it up and then save it to my Instapaper, it might be worth a read. Amongst the archived posts, I found a story called The Spire in the Woods which was posted to the horror-story subreddit NoSleep in 2013. I mostly use read-it-later services to tag articles about history, folklore, horror or literature, but I knew I’d also used Instapaper to save some short stories that had been recommended to me online. Nosleep spire in the woods archive#I recently spent a few hours tidying up my Instapaper archive so I’d have something handy to read when waiting at the airport before we went on holiday. Published: 2017, Kindle (Originally posted on the NoSleep subreddit in 2013) Author: Tony Lunedi (TheBoyInTheClock Reddit)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |