the door is open

[pendamuse]

Once, I read a book called “House Of Leaves” and it was eas­ily one of the scari­est things I’d ever read.

I’m cur­rently work­ing through The Dion­aea House, and it’s the kind of weird house story I absolutely love. It has active links and uses ideas peo­ple have tried many, many times to repli­cate only to come off obvi­ous. A story - a mythol­ogy - like this can’t be forced; it has to grow organ­i­cally and the cre­ator can’t be suck­ered in in by what he or she thinks is his or her own clev­er­ness. I once had a friend that was try­ing to do some­thing sim­i­lar and would get so frus­trated that no one was sup­port­ing him or what he was try­ing to do, mean­ing no one was spread­ing the word about his inor­ganic hoax told through fake news­pa­per clip­pings and web­sites. You can’t force a mod­ern mythol­ogy on a media savvy audience.

When @marblehornets began, the YouTube videos and Twit­ter were more than enough to sus­tain the story. I eagerly looked for­ward to every Entry and then glee­fully dreaded watch­ing because the indi­vid­ual pieces as well as the whole myth just hit me in all of the right places. At some point, some­one popped up that thank every­one for the inter­est in their story and hope­fully they’d be back for another Sea­son! There’s noth­ing worse than hav­ing the light turned on just as the movie is get­ting good, and I sus­pect there must have been a back­lash because I can’t find the reveal  any­where (or it was a hack) and the story con­tin­ues, with the most recent video going up on Pi Day.  For those look­ing to catch up, here’s the Sug­gested Order of Mar­ble Hor­nets (Ongo­ing Slen­der Man story told through tweets and videos, as well as a Com­pre­hen­sive Time­line to catch what you may have missed the first time around.

Back to The Dion­aea House: in read­ing com­ments, I see a lot of com­par­isons to “House of Leaves”, but it’s really not the same. Ten years later, the story of Eric and Mark, and Cam is still out there and it’s still creepy.

Read the story, fol­low the links (still active), and come back and tell me what you think.

Am I miss­ing other well-done internet-based mythologies?

It gives me ideas.



Photo Credit © Creepy Pasta