The Northern Caves

by nostalgebraist

An online message board devoted to a cult fantasy author wrestles with his baffling final book.

Words: 51,787

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Mystery, Fantasy, Contemporary

174 pages, ebook

First published October 23, 2015

Reviews

[Drew Perron · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Northern Caves is a story about art, about fandom, about mental illness, about idols with feet of clay, and about how you deal when your entire worldview is kicked out from under you. It's a fully online work, and does a lot of neat tricks with the medium that would be hard to convert to an offline format; for those curious, it's archived at http://archiveofourown.org/works/3659... - though I must warn you, it deals with really heavy stuff, including suicide, drug abuse, and deep exploration of disturbed mental states, which may be triggering for those with anxiety or depression. More specific opinions under the spoiler...

First off, it gets fandom culture and especially forum fandom culture of the early '00s spot-on. I was there, and ladies, gents and distinguished guests, I have never seen anything that Gets It to this degree. I was there, and this is how it was - from the constant back-and-forth to the weirdos who butt in wherever they feel like to the positive transformational fancreators.

Furthermore, I've rarely seen anything that puts across the feeling of this kind of truly iconoclastic fiction; the works of a writer that's not only ignoring the common wisdom and the trends, but ignoring consensus reality altogether, putting out art based entirely on what's happening in the cosmos inside their head. It's a visceral thing, not at all coherent, but here, it's placed perfectly as part of a highly coherent narrative. The mental agility required to go from writing about a dreamlike science-fiction encounter with W and the Solenoid Entity to writing about logical scaffolds and human pettiness is immense, and admired.

Furthermore, Salby's mental state (and Chen's, later on) make perfect sense in light of this. The feeling that you, and you alone, have ahold of the single understanding that's necessary to see the world as it truly is, can be both powerful and toxic. (Especially if you really do have ahold of something true that isn't acknowledged in the culture.)

I don't really understand people's complaints about the ending. Yes, it's not executed as well as it might have been - you can tell that the struggle with these heavy ideas and this complex structure got wearying by the end - but thematically and in terms of character arcs, it makes absolute sense. The triple suicide is weird enough to fit in both the world of the separation and the world of consensus reality, with ample room for doubt and ambiguity on the part of forum members, the public, and the Spelunk!04 participants. It makes sense, and it works a lot better than any of the Spelunkateers' deaths would have.

If I have any real critiques, they'd focus more on pacing and tone. But those are the kind of things that are easy to lose track of in a serial work (don't I know).

Overall, a good, thought-provoking read, if intense and, in spots, difficult. Recommended to anyone interested in fandom history and weird fiction.

[Jack Lyell · Rating 4 out of 5]

jesus christ

terribly let down by the ending, i was being fucking throttled forward until i hit the end like a brick. it feels to some extent like the author gave up which is a real shame because this is honestly some of the best eldritch writing i've read in a while. i'm going to give it a friendly "if annihilation was about internet forum culture" as a review but also warn that the last few chapters' lack of resolution is not the "deeply chilling" type of no resolution but the "i feel like this doesn't make sense in universe" type of no resolution

im only harping on this as much as i am bc prior to this i was actively feverish, physically shaking, for several hours straight while reading this book. in a way maybe it's a good thing it doesn't stick the ending because this story honestly is fully capable of giving you panic attacks/derealization and that's definitely a compliment but sir i was high on the juice

like if you'd kiss your homies at the the cursed reading of the 3600 page novel written by cult classic author clearly showing signs of delusion

[wasteland baby · Rating 4 out of 5]

a really interesting work of metafiction that somehow combines early 2000s fandom wank, moral philosophy and Lovecraftian horror. i think you'll probably know whether The Northern Caves is for you by this description alone! 3.75, rounded up for the incredibly faithful rendering of early aughts forum-based niche fandom.

[Valerie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt somewhat let down by this, like I had spent all this time tediously piecing through the forum threads about a non-existent, incoherent book, only for it not to end up much of anywhere. I never like stories with incoherent or stream-of-consciousness dialogue/narration, but I was hoping it would have more of a payoff.

I guess I praise it for creating a believable internet forum subculture, complete with everyone's signatures and so on (taking me back to time on similar forums). And creating the illusion that the Chesscourt books are real. The last few chapters also effectively evoked the feeling you get when you stay up too long.

Ultimately, though, it didn't come to much of a resolution. If the suicides were somehow related to the plot, that was never explained. If they weren't, it seemed like a shaggy dog story. I guess you could interpret it as some kind of morality tale: don't get too deep into fan analysis of BS or you will go crazy and put drugs in your friends' coffee. But I don't think that was intended, nor would it have been a thought-provoking point if it were intended. At times, it seemed to be building up a central mystery around Salby that would be revealed, but it wasn't. In the end, it just seemed like "one damn thing after another".

In summary, the setting and the nostalgia elements were good, but the plot seemed lacking.

[Philipp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly interesting, and what a weird gem to find (free to read here)

You've been to similar places yourself- online forums from more than 10 years ago, where every user had a signature, you wondered why these people could post so much about so little, why they had these never-ending flame-wars, why they were so extremely devoted to the one thing the website was about.

The forum here is about the Chesscourt universe of Leonard Selby, a not-so-famous YA fantasy author who created a world where everything is strictly preordained and stories are mapped out over several books. Except for his last book published before his death, a not straightforward experimental jumble that confused his fans. That book (The Northern Caves), and how the forum tries to make sense of it, is what the story is about - you get forum posts (one poster forever builds up more and more complex theories and constructs to explain, one poster flames, one poster is already not-so-there, and so on), but then the story switches into a long report of one of the users.

That one user hosted a bit of a get-together where the most active posters go through newly discovered notes and diaries by the author and try to make sense of Northern Caves together, even if it takes a collective reading over 60 sleepless hours on Adderall and coffee. Some of the users have their perception of reality shattered, a few unrelated bystanders die mysteriously, people freak out and leave, and the forum dies a slow death by uninterest.

What makes this book so interesting is the structure in forum-posts, and how eerily it captures not only this by-now-gone phpBB forum culture, and how well it captures everyone's mental health going down the drain. There's a bit of PKD here, a bit of House of Leaves, but it stands on its own! I don't understand why this wasn't published by a 'regular' publisher?

[Nikola Š · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept and the format are brilliant. The story and the excerpts had a great atmosphere and I wished the book spent more time on the forums and the book itself. The ending, as I was warned, left me unsatisfied as it is kind of abrupt (not in a way that the story lacked explanation, but that it just seemed like it could be taken further) and the suicides seemed really tacked on. I would have preferred a less feel-good ending with more ambiguity. I liked the last chapter's idea of putting the story into perspective with a time jump and a impartial narrator, but I wish it contained something more then a summary of the already told events.

[Geldar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most disquieting aspect of reading this was that it reminded me how much I want to participate (again) in esoteric online communities, particularly some defunct ones that only now exist in memories and/or archives. I mean, here's a group of people who share an obscure defining characteristic, who are able to forge bonds through it without the awkwardness of actual physical interaction, in a virtual environment where they are represented only by their own words and choices. It satisfies them intellectually and emotionally, but worst of all, they even meet in real life and hit it off. (AND THEN EXTRAORDINARY AND TERRIFYING EVENTS OCCUR, everything changes, and now it's too late to join the cabal). Even I, a severe introvert, cannot help but feel a longing to be included, particularly since I've already observed (less idealized versions of) this in non-fiction, and despite already living a great life. (You think that's enough for me? I also want to have a continuous flow of bizarre, transformative experiences facilitated by the internet and arcane aspects of my identity, dagnabbit.)

But... this is what books are for, innit?

Feelings of notalgia (I'm onto you "nostalgebrist") aside, I found TNC overall a highly-enjoyable, innovatively-formatted work. I agree with everyone saying that the ending was weak, though would add that it's mostly a weakness by comparison to the strength of the rest of the book. I deducted a star for that in my rating, which was difficult to do because I'm a casual reader of the author's blog and have a mild friend-crush on him.

[Emanuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

En njutbar historia skriven i form av utdrag ur olika forumtrådar och andra texter. Kretsar kring fankultur och en helt sublim skräckidé av den lovecraftska "världen är ohygglig"-typen. Extra otäck om du någon gång haft tvångstankar. Minnesvärda karaktärer.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! This was something else! Not what I expected _at all_! And I read it all in one sitting! It was really fun nostalgia trip to the 2000s era phpBB forums! However! Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly not a fun read in places! There’s a disturbing claustrophobic atmosphere here. Anyway. Not sure I can say much more without spoiling it, but I did feel the author didn’t quite manage to stick the ending. Saying that, not sure how else they could have wrapped up!

[X]

DNF @ the end of Ch. 22. There’s something soothingly logical about this kind of conspiracy fiction - internally coherent if, yuh know, not externally coherent in any way - and the experience of reading it can be a sort of nice brain break. There’s enough detail to keep you mentally engaged, while any emotional investment is totally superficial. You don’t learn anything from reading this kind of story, I mean, on an emotional level. (You also don’t learn anything intellectually lol, but I think you can learn emotionally from some fiction in a way that just isn’t present here.)

Idk, I don’t know if there’s a ton of value to ~deeping it~ (imagine this being said while baking in the sun at the Love Island villa) but over the last few years I’ve felt iffier about reading this kind of thing because of the increased prevalence of conspiracy theories irl - like the concept stresses me out in a way it didn’t when I was reading (and trashing) House of Leaves or whatever. It makes this kind of story feel more realistic in a sort of tragic, distressing way, and therefore not super pleasant, or able to really be the kind of mindless distraction it would have been in the past, eg when it was written in 2015.

All of which is to say this seems to be a very good iteration of this kind of thing, but I don’t feel like I have the patience to finish it. Ymmv etc.

[sirui · Rating 5 out of 5]

i kinda regret reading this, but not in a Bad bad way but because it will haunt me (there is no better word for this) but at the same time I know if I didn't read this I would keep on thinking about it anyways

all in all, the northern caves is a powerful piece of metafiction and i recommend you read this at night and don't go to sleep until you've finished it for the optimal experience. (also having read/known homestuck probably)

giving it five stars not because i Like it but because no one else has written anything that makes me feel what i felt when reading this

[Thursday Caustic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in four hours flat, as my kindle dictated. Very predictably endearing to me. Reminded me of Pale Fire (very obvious statement), the Final Fantasy VII House documentary on youtube, and being excited about FNAF fan theories five years ago.

Edited five minutes later:

I also got really, really scared. Granted, I'm a pussy, and it was (is) 4 am, but it was really scary! Not because I expected something very violent, very gory to happen (which I did), but because the cognitohazard stuff reminded me of the creepypastas i used to read with my cousin when younger.

Also also. A great reminder to myself (and the .5 people who'll read this) that webfiction is weird and awesome and right *there*.

[Andrew Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has an interesting premise and it's interestingly told. It's about the members of a web forum who are all fans of a book series, and they're dealing with the fact that the last book in the series doesn't make any sense; it's absolute gibberish. Much of the book is told with excerpts from posts, as well as snippets of the book within a book and from its fictional fanfiction.

Thematically, the book deals with morality and duty in the context of a meaningless world. It's also just a little bit Lovecraftian.

The ending was a little bit of a letdown IMO, for which I've deducted a star.

[RaspberryRoses]

i am completely incapable of rating this rn because i dont know if i loved it or hated it or both. something to come back to.

still, regardless of the actual content - insane to publish a full novel just for free on ao3.

[zeynep · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both times I've read this, it's been at nighttime while I'm in bed, and I get the absolute heebie jeebies over W Tomm exechamp stuff in the first half. I have to wonder if the effect would hold if I were reading in plain daylight...

[Ben Arzate · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engaging and unique horror novel that will very much appeal to literature nerds.

[dănuț]

metafiction🧎🧎🧎

[Eric Herboso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postmodern moral philosophy fiction is somewhat hard to come by, so when I was recommended this story, I immediately found myself reading it in its entirety.

I was thoroughly riveted by each successive chapter. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. I especially loved the setting, a series of forum posts from the early 2000s. The setting felt true-to-life; I vividly remember participating in phpBB forums just like this when I was young. And the story performs beautifully in the beginning and middle, continually rising toward a climax that I don't want to talk about in this review, for fear of spoilers.

But I will say that the final chapter hits hardest if you stop and think through the entirety of the story afterward. For me, it took several minutes and a slight reread before I fully integrated the final chapter and its place among the rest of the book.

Despite the glowing recommendation above, there are a few problems with the story that keep it from getting five stars. I'll try to avoid big spoilers, but if you haven't read the book yet, you probably shouldn't read the rest of this review.

The Notes XV - XVI chapters bring a tragedy that seems somewhat out of line with the concept of Mundum; it just doesn't seem to fit. (Mundum is anti-causal, yet causes the event at the restaurant? I understood mundum to necessitate, but not cause, tragedy.) Saying that this story point might not have to fit for postmodern reasons is insufficient in my opinion. Also, that Salby pointedly avoids writing about sex, commenters bring this up specifically, and then nostalgebraist writes in sexual content anyway -- this just seems like the author is playing with the readers. Finally, that last chapter, even though it makes a really good point about the entirety of the story, nevertheless feels deflationary. Sure, it was a brilliant ending in one sense because it made me think, and it brought me around to thinking something very differently than what I was thinking just one chapter prior, but at the same time, it just made me feel bad. While I was reading this story, I got more and more invested, and I feel almost like the author cheated me out of the resolution I wanted. Instead, I got a 'resolution' that made me almost regret the way I thought about previous chapters. This was a good thing, I think -- it is certainly a novel way of reading a story like this, and I'm glad to have been exposed to it -- but I almost feel like I've been rick-rolled. Sure, it's great and fun this time, but if I ever read another book that does this to me again, I think I'll throw it down in disgust.

[Ridley]

This really gave me some feelings that I'm not sure I can articulate. First off, the realism in how the forum posts were structured, from the layouts and timestamp details to the characters' voices and their interactions, blew me away. It was such a perfect vessel for carrying the story. I loved the way fiction as a whole was depicted as intentional and confined from the author's perspective to something wild and organic once it's been planted in the mind of the reader and left to grow.

What I actually found most fascinating was how meta it was. The comments by AO3 users under each chapter felt EXACTLY like the characters' discussions on the Cafe forums, the way people were trying to predict or parse meaning from the text. It was to the extent that I actually wondered if nostalgebraist had gotten some users to make fake comments that directly mirrored the fictitious ones. I've also read some external reviews of this work and they really line up with the in-story reviews of Salby's TNC; people either think it's a pointless waste of time or a profound commentary on fiction/fandom/philosophy/life/the world/etc. Leonard Salby, his books, and his fans aren't real, yet nostalgebraist managed to evoke the exact same reactions and cult following amongst real readers.

I'm not sure how I feel about the story as a standalone entity but the way it became a self-fulfilling ?prophesy (if you could call it that) was incredible. DGITC.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story you read on AO3 is presented as a collection of saved forum threads and the draft of a "report," written by one of the forum users, to explain what went so wrong at an impromptu fan-gathering to discuss the mysterious, gibberish-looking final volume of a (in-universe) fantasy series by a reclusive author.

It rides a fine line between "the horror is cosmic and real" and "this might, like the bunch of Internet nerd characters, be just a big nothing that you're trying to make into a meaningful thing." On that score, I think it could have ended better - there's too much unfocused ambiguity to be satisfied one way or another.

But the author does a very good job of recreating the early-aughts forum culture in a few snapshots, with lots of attention paid to the visual presentation of the threads. That's a definite highlight and not commonly done in any story, I think. The characterization is mostly unfinished - though the main characters do all seem like different people, they don't quite feel fully realized - although this is possibly a consequence of the structure, notes to self and alter-ego forum postings.

Putting a rating is hard. At a story level it's probably 2 stars. But it got the "mood" of early-aughts forum culture quite well, so 3 stars. I'll call it 2.5 stars, rounded up or down according to your personal memories of those earlier Internet days.

[Nate Bumber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very late to this train! Read it in a day sometime last month, just discovered it had a Goodreads page. Everyone’s already said pretty much everything worth saying: it nails the tone of the forums and the experience of being in a vivid fandom; the characters are people I feel like I know from my phpBB days; and the ending

was intially very underwhelming, but after reading the podcast epilogue I think it was very satisfying. The only real weakness is that dialogue-only chapter that wraps up the events of Spelunk 04!, which I think just needs one or two more rewrites for the whole story to make a lot more sense.

Would recommend, but as others have warned about the last few chapters, DGITC.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

lot of promise; a few details from the early chapters haunted me enough from the first time i read them (2015) that i decided to finally finish it today. unfortunately the story around the story doesn't lead up to anything as interesting as the fragments of the story itself. just treads water once the group all gets together to actually read tnc, with the seeming slide into madness undercut and arrested by the banality of the circumstances surrounding it (at least a harder drug than speed could have been called for).

[Rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificent metafictional work, rather like a House of Leaves with fandom in place of the House. The characterisation of early-2000s phpBB denizens was wonderfully handled.

[Anem0ne · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuck

[Manuel Del Río Rodríguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a short, weird book, but weird in a good way, and what I needed after the numbing and wearisome volume I had been fighting with all summer. The Northern Caves is a web fiction, a genre that I only discovered and started reading since about a year ago, and it takes it to the formal level, as its construction is articulated as mostly a series of notes and forum posts from a putative online message board devoted to the fantasy author Leonard Salby. Within the fiction, Salby is the author of the fantasy / young adult novel series ‘Chesscourt’, and has left after dying an unpublished, enormous, really puzzling and unfinished last work, The Northern Caves, which baffles the forum’s fandom and starts the plot through the various attempts of a group of readers to decipher its mysteries, culminating in the ominous quasi-convention Spelunk 04!, in which they meet together for what ends up being a non-stop, drug-fueled, collective reading attempt of The Northern Caves with confusing and tragic consequences.

The book is very postmodern (again, this in an adjective that like ‘weird’ I generally do not use with positive connotations, but it has them in this case): it is clever exploration of the new Internet media for telling stories and for structuring them with the corresponding polyphony, hyperlinks and multiple perspective that it affords. It is metafictional. It conveys really a now-defunct world early naughties forum culture. The core idea behind the story, besides the exploration of cultic fandom, goes back to pretty universal but interesting explorations on the topic of ‘forbidden knowledge’ and ‘dangerous books’ whose information can turn people mad, allow them insights into dangerous and unconceivable truths about the world, both or neither, in a way that brings to mind Don Quijote, Chalmer’s The King in Yellow and the wicked tomes of Lovecraftian lore. This is done pretty artistically and effectively, and the book plays with the ambiguity of the narrator(s) and of the story’s trustworthiness.

One reason for liking the story so much, beyond its qualities and entertainment value, is that the topic of books poisoning/illuminating their readers is one that resonates a lot with a bookish nerd like me, and also brings to mind personal intellectual experiences of how narratives, fictional or otherwise, can deeply warp and determine what people think, believe and do (the power of ‘memetics’ comes to mind in this regard).

One thing that might not come through in this summary is the deep and interesting philosophical overtones the short story has. We ultimately discover through the read that Leonard Salby crafted his fictional worlds as a way of exploring certain philosophical views and for finding fellow travelers along this path. His novels are a way of depicting a sort of moralistic, gnostic wold-view, in which there are two dual worlds at play. There’s the phenomenal world of everyday experience, the ‘sublunar world’. An then there’s a transcendental real, the Mundum, which is bound by strict moral rules that determine things like ‘innate wrongness’ and the moral obligation to match this world to the Higher World’s desires and rules. In a way, Salby’s ideas feel like some sort of atheistic, ethical Platonism, in which morality is inscribed as an eternal, true Law of the transcendental realm with no attached prospects of punishment/reward, as a sort of mandatory fine tuning of This World with The Other that, from the perspective of this world, looks like madness and the path to suicide and death. Narratively, you could say this concept of the Mundum functions as a metaphor for the desire to uncover hidden truths, but it also raises questions about whether such truths can ever be truly understood. As the fans push deeper into the text, they encounter the possibility that the truth of Mundum might be elusive, unknowable, or even meaningless. The search for it becomes a metaphor for the risks of over-interpreting or obsessing over meaning in art and literature, to the point where the search for truth itself becomes destabilizing or dangerous. As the forum post label inadvertently and wisely states: Don’t go into The Northern Caves!

Anyway, a very highly recommendable read. I have to take a look at the author’s other fictions, and hope that in the future, s/he will put them into printed form.

[Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note: if you are the author do not read this review! I really loved your work and my critiques are for myself to keep track of.

I liked this a lot! Nostalgic for the homestuck fandom meta discussions, haven't read House of Leaves yet but this is making me really want to read it. I had a love-hate relationship with not knowing anything at all about Chesscourt and only ever getting a small bit of understanding of it from context. I think it made it really immersive, which was nice! I do think one thing that went over my head was the actual excerpts of TNC and the misspellings (which I could appreciate for how tricky it must've been to write and still have meaning in it, I think I just missed the meaning of most of them bc of the spelling and not really being able to follow it).

I think the twist (spoilers) of Paul experiencing 'the separation' and Mundum as a concept was FASCINATING, and a really cool reveal. I really liked it; however, I think having more hints at Paul's mental state being questionable early on would've made it a more effective shocker, because it kind of feels like it comes out of nowhere. (Piranesi by Susanna Clarke does this way better and is an example of a reveal that I always go back to as the most effective example of a twist where the whole story was leading up to it, in hindsight). Overall really enjoyed the complexity of Mundum even though I think a lot of the precise meaning went over my head. Maybe that's the point, that it is insane ramblings. Either way, it really helped the metafiction aspect and let me feel really like Paul anticipated me as the audience to be (just an outsider, not understanding). And honestly I did really like the ending, to my own surprise, with the podcasters completely missing the point/talking about something entirely unrelated. Thought it was pretty funny.

Overall VERY immersive, love this as an example of metafiction, very effective example of it IMO. Really hooks you. I would read it again, I would recommend it to others, though maybe only to others who would understand the nostalgic factor of early 2000s forum culture. And I will probably look into the author's other works, bc I really liked this!

[sapir]

Very interesting story. Very interesting format. I don't know if, for a horror story, it was horrible enough?

The beginning with all the forum threads was very fun, and as the tension started building up, it definitely creeped me out. And it kept building, and building, and then... Nothing? None of the mystery gets resolved by the last two chapters, but all the tension evaporates. As if nothing of note has really happened. Maybe it's supposed to mirror the in-universe unfinished Northern Caves, or maybe I missed something, but the ending felt almost lazily risk-free.

(Okay, maybe I have one more thing to complain about - the main guy's writing style shifts so dramatically from chapter to chapter it was pretty jarring, and for seemingly no reason? I had expected there to be one by the end but there were none, other than maybe he felt the need to rearrange the material of words on the screen, Salby style.)

Okay, rant over for now. I did enjoy (if that's the right word) a lot of the Mundum worldview descriptions, as they weirdly made a lot of sense even though its applications in reality are nonsensical. As a concept that can symbolize certain real life ways of thought it was very interesting and compelling to read.

The fact that the major event in the story was not a bigger fan convention (like many real world fandom horror stories), but more a gathering of friends, caught me by surprise but ultimately made sense. It made the blending of IRL and online personalities much more pronounced. It also made the tension that much worse (in a good way) as well as the ending (in a bad way).

I'm not rating this story because it's not the kind that can be summarized by X out of Y stars. It's interesting, very engaging, sometimes frustrating, and probably better on a reread. There's a bit from one of the later chapters about only understanding a work of fiction through a state of mind, rather than facts and theories, that resonated with me. I suppose it applies to this work as well.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Popsugar reading challenge: A book by a self-published author

Painfully accurate depiction of message boards from the early 2000s. There’s an strong element of cosmic horror here if that’s what you want to read about, but for me the really creepy part was how it nailed the claustrophobic vibes some of these message boards could get. I miss their dominance greatly and they’re certainly preferable to fan twitter… but it was very easy to get locked in to this one obscure corner of the internet where you have your indecipherable lingo and lots of big name personalities who were lowkey kinda seething at one another. Forums could get especially rancid if it was a book fandom and you were either stuck with a disappointing conclusion (like what happens in this story) or you were waiting around for a long-delayed installment. There’s a reason the bulk of the Msscribe saga happened between Harry Potter books 4 and 5! It was just so easy to develop these obsessive, unhealthy ecosystems together.

It’s not uniquely terrible compared to fandom today. At least back then you were less likely to get doxxed for shipping characters with a big height difference or whatever. But there definitely could be a spooky quality to the Wild West years of the forum era and I think this book really nails it.

I also kinda love how abruptly it ends and we only really find out what Paul went on to do. This is very very common from early aughts internet drama. Sometimes a central figure will go on to cause infamy - see that one dude with the lotr AND Harry Potter cults- but for the most part people just fade away, understandably retreating from the intensity of what they fell in to. And if you’re on the outside it was very common to get a big burst of activity after something crazy happened and then just an abrupt halt as everyone deleted their accounts or locked their livejournals

I really wish I could see the in in universe fandom wank report.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

W: Right. So, like, let’s keep that caveat in mind, and I’m sorry if this is not a perfect summary for first-timers. But, basically, okay … there are these books, a fantasy series, by a guy named Leonard Salby.
D: You might have read a few of them, actually. This stuff was weirdly pervasive for a time in maybe the mid-eighties to early-aughts. I read the first few myself.
W: Yeah, it’s that kind of fantasy series, where it’s – not culturally pervasive like Tolkien or Lewis, but maybe like Terry Brooks, or Piers Anthony. You’d see them in the school library. Other kids would talk about them, if you were a nerdy kid.
D: Right. I mean, Piers Anthony might be an especially relevant comparison – sui generis, certainly not good from a grown-up perspective, but the sort of thing a middle schooler could find comfort in clutching to his chest.
W: So, right, okay, these books have an internet fandom, because everything does.
D: This was around 2002, 2003, 2004? So mostly forum stuff. This was before the tumblr brand of fandom.
W: Yeah, it was the sort of time where things were much less … filtered, and you had a really weird mix of people who had just come together because they happened to like this thing.
D: I think this capsule summary is long enough already.
W: Yeah, yeah, okay. The point is, there were plenty of fandoms like this, hanging around on little phpBB communities, but this one achieved a sort of notoriety for a time around 2004. And that had to do with … well, it’s hard to sum up briefly, but basically, there was a sort of scandal where a bunch of fans got together, stayed up late and took a bunch of drugs, and then were tangentially involved in a mysterious…

[October · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a fascinating and engrossing read. It honestly reminds me of sitting in my corner of the local library as a kid, binge-reading something strange but powerfully immersive that I’d found on the shelves. And of course it also reminds me of the forum days of early-2000s internet fandom, how such unlikely collections of people would end up together, fixated on one specific thing in all their different ways. There are definitely things in this that feel uncomfortable and confusing and even a little cut off, but there’s also such a wonderfully constructed world built into every piece. All the little details of the Salby fiction, the forum arguments and signatures and fandom terminology, the different sources building together into a story. And even the cut-off feeling of it rings true of internet and fandom history, especially from those days. Forum sites that went defunct or got deleted, people trying to explain huge scandals within a specific fandom that require an impossible amount of background info to really grasp all the nuance, scattered bits of websites on the wayback machine, and so on. This story just really struck a chord with me; it was impossible to put down; it was weird and well-executed and sometimes haunting in its authenticity. It’s a lot to puzzle over, and it’s extremely captivating.