I meant to get more use out of my Halloween icons this year

[sholio]

Happy Halloween, flist. :)

As a Halloween treat, here is a link to a story that creeped me out horribly the first time I read it.

http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Canis_Latran's_Jungle_Story

(As the protagonists are soldiers, there is lots of "solder talk" at the link -- profanity and trash talk and whatnot.)

Comments

[veleda_k]

Ooh, that's a good one.

[sholio]

It is SO CREEPY. :D

[rachelmanija]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. The build-up is especially scary.

[sholio]

Yeah, I think it's one of the best pieces of short horror I've read. It just nails that chatty "guy telling you a story" voice to the point where it's hard not to halfway believe in it, and that long slow build is great. aaaaaagh. *shivers*

[monanotlisa]

I don't know; felt it was a bit of a letdown -- I've read far creepier stories, that do haunt me to this day.

That said, I was much younger, and the book was illustrated...still feeling that Angela Sommer-Bodenburg should be dragged in front of a panel of the Society for the Protection of Children. ;)

Ah, here is a translation: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2012626.If_You_Want_to_Scare_Yourself

[sholio]

Possibly it's a matter of what individual people find scary or horrific. This one pushes my creepy-things-in-the-woods and body-horror buttons pretty hard.

[monanotlisa]

Oh, absolutely -- horror and humor both are super-subjective.

Worlds that do not touch mine tend to not scare me that much -- soldiers running in a faraway jungle may be creepy, but not scary or horrific to me; even countryside tales don't tend to faze me beyond a happy little shiver: I spend too little time anywhere but in the city.

Now, give me urban horror tales, especially contemporary and happening to hapless middle-class people...and I'm a wreck.

[sholio]

Oh yes, that makes perfect sense! And I'm much the opposite -- having spent so much time in the woods and living in a rural place, tales of wilderness creepiness get me like nothing else does.

[krait]

Aaah, I'm not much for creepy stories in general, but I like that one!

Oddly, my first thought upon reaching the final line was that the native guide was the mimic-creature. (First in a "weird were-beast of the jungle" way, then in a "got turned into it" way.) Maybe because no mention was made of the creature sounding like anyone but the protagonists, and if it had spent the first day(s) stalking and killing the guide, it would've sounded like him at first? Hmm.

[sholio]

Yeah, I like that story! Though I think it loses a lot of effectiveness (for me at least) after the first reading because most of the creep factor is not knowing what's in the woods or whether the two protagonists are going to make it out alive and unscathed ...

And that's a really interesting possibility! It's certainly within the scope of the story.

[monanotlisa]

Interesting!

Because the mimic creature is described as having taken pig-shape, only with the face of a man, I would think were that effect intended, the face would have started out as the soldier's friend but shifted into the native guide then? But that's just how I would tell the story.