Trope Machine Presents: A Thinly Veiled Excuse To Talk About CreepyPasta
"Disappearing into the tree line" can actually be a really healthy response to stress stimuli just fyi
One time when I was fully an adult, like 23 years old, I Was Had by a CreepyPasta. Like 100% thought it was real through about the 10th update. I’m not embarrassed to admit it. When I was 5 I thought I met a real dinosaur at Universal Studios: Orlando. My brain is just capable of making the world a more magical place sometimes due to the gift of just kind of Accepting Whatever It Is Told.
This is how I ended up reading easily 10,000 words from a “park ranger” about weird stories he’d had at his job and was like “woahhhhhhhh.” I still a lot of times think about the staircases in the woods and The Frog Voice and the children disappearing up trees. It’s still a good work of fiction that I honestly often end up comparing actual books to! Like these, for instance.
I love books about The Woods because they’re where the Wilderness meets our borders, it’s where lack of control is allowed to thrive right on top of us, verging on the order we’ve tried to assemble out of wooden two-by-fours. I like books where people underestimate The Woods as a domesticated form of the undomesticable (is this not a word? LET ME COOK).
In God of the Woods, the oddball daughter of the owners of a camp walks off a trail and vanishes entirely, just like her brother Bear did 15 years earlier. But maybe the real woods… is society (I don’t know where I’m going with this one). Honestly, a girl being presented with a pristine, textbook case of 1950s Housewife Derangement and opting for Spooky Woods instead… doesn’t not make sense.
Heartwood gave me the CreepyPasta tingles right off the bat. The book begins from the perspective of the Maine State game warden in charge of finding lost hikers on a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. 98% of missing hikers are found almost immediately, she tells us, and the other 2% are etched into the memories of every warden. When a 42-year-old woman vanishes on an extremely easy leg of the trail, she becomes impossible to find and nobody knows why. The proximity of the search to a mysterious military facility where soldiers are trained to evade capture and withstand torture breeds swarms of Reddit conspiracy theories as our warden remains short on answers and time. We also get chunks out of the journal the missing woman, whose trail name is Sparrow, keeps as she tries desperately to get un-lost.
There aren’t any staircases or mysteriously repeating child voices, but still. Pretty good.