the northern caves is an original work about a group of online friends trying to discover the hidden meaning behind a children’s book author’s final work. interestingly enough, it was published on the fanfiction site ao3. to get the obvious comparison out of the way, this is kind of like if borges was alive during the era of online fandom. another obvious parallel is house of leaves. a lot of entries are written in the format of a message board which hooked me right away, as i am another lit.salon acolyte of dennis cooper's the sluts.

unfortunately i enjoyed the act of discovering the northern caves more than the story itself. i was never much into online fandom stuff but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment, other than a moment when the author uses the word "fannish" which was a mini jump-scare for me. what did detract from my enjoyment is my distaste for alt-horror “eldritch” style stuff that characterizes a lot of shittily written creepypasta, idk how to describe it better than that. the writing style is so highbrow as to be (intentionally) pretentious at times and it just doesn’t gel very well with the silly supernatural thing attempted with the book.

i was much more hooked into the true psychological meaning of what was happening in the story and wish the kind of deep, soul-sucking depression the story revolves around was brought into the story more instead of the pretentious chaos meant to cloak it.

despite all the fussiness the author has a real knack for writing about depression. i'd go as far as saying this is one of my favorite works about depression for how freakily accurate it is once you can decipher what he's actually talking about. also the story's depiction of how online communities can seem like a place that’s realer than the real world is brilliant and highly relatable. i was a sucker for the psychoanalytical imagery in this story as well, which i would love to get into but it resolved itself in such a funny way i don't want to spoil it.

the author does not stick the landing but i think that's due to the story necessarily collapsing under its own weight. however, the epilogue of the story is very clever, showing how much the internet has deteriorated since the events of the story and, in my eyes, solidifying the protagonists as heroes of a bygone era.

this is a flawed work and is honestly hard to read at times, but i recommend it if you like any of the similar works i mentioned. it's always nice to stumble upon self-published stuff online like this, it reminds me of reading creepypasta on random old blogspot blogs in middle school

The Northern Caves

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