Talk:Unending Darkness/@comment-7706473-20130921081540

Do you, or have you ever suffered from sleep paralysis..? That or the experiences of severe trauma seem to be heavily drawn from life, and felt very real - that just-shy-of-direct experience feel that tends to creep up the spine and leave the reader nervously looking over their shoulder, chuckling into the darkness just to hear a laugh and prove that they're awake.

I see what you mean about this being concept driven - actually, I reread it twice. The first time, I had mixed feelings about it. The second time, I thought it was *awesome*. Personally, I think that's a pretty good spectrum of  emotion to instill, right there!

First of all - I noticed a lot of similarities between this and classic/old-skool stories about alien abduction. Lights, dullness and numbness, loss of memory - lost time. The greyness of the figure resembles the Greys of pop-culture, right until we see the strangers eyes. I'm still not sure what the stranger was, or even if we truly saw them - and I like that. I eventually settled on the mysterious stranger being some sort of capricious and cruel entity that'd found it's amusement by altering the memories of the narrator, and setting the events somehow into motion...

But there's the very real possibility that it was an admonishing spirit or hallucination, and the narrator had a very interesting garbage day. Ha.

The other thing I really liked is how no matter how hard the narrator struggles or what they do, they're pretty much powerless. I've been thinking a lot about that as something terrifying, recently. It's good, and I like it. Most of all, the way the pasta foreshadows itself is incredibly well-done and very apparent the second time through. Highly enjoyable. Poppies, for unshakeable paralysis.