Slenderman, Creepypasta, and Our Stories of Horror

When I was a boy, I loved horror stories.  They were fascinating and terrifying, and I'd lose myself in the reading of them.  Stories of primal ooze and ancient evil, of death and terror in the darkness, of blood and fang and strangled cries?

Oh yeah.  Those books came home by the dozen from my local library, and cost me countless hours of sleep.

There were the hours spent reading furtively at the foot of my bed, as my eyes picked out the tales of terror from the darkness.  Then there were the hours trying to go to sleep, as every creak and susurration of the world around me was interpreted as imminent doom.

Was it the slime that rose from the deep that gurgled under the floorboards?  Was it the horror of something that should have long ago been claimed by death that creaked beneath my bed?  Whichever way, I'd lie there, very awake, very aware of my eight-year-old mortal frailty.

My sons take after their dad, and so they'd read scary stories.  In this new era of instant media, they'd increasingly watch them and read them online.  Which is why the ghost-tales of horror from the site Creepypasta were well known to me, and why the character of Slenderman--a terrible figure who stalks and kills in the woods--was familiar.

These stories were little more than the same tales I'd hear as a boy, ones that took the form of quasi-reality.  "It's been said that..."  "Rumors have it that this might have happened..."  "...And there, stuck in the door of the car, was the hook."

It was nothing more than ghost stories, mixed in with the classical framework for the telling of such tales.  People play along, pretending it's more and more real.  As the story gets passed along, it gets embellished with more personal flourishes, until the boundaries between the real and the story are blurry.  That's the way of good storytelling--around a fire, as the listeners stare wide-eyed into the darkness--has always worked.

Which made this last week's peculiar story from Wisconsin so hard.  Two girls, obsessed with the ghost stories on Creepypasta and Slenderman, stabbing another girl 19 times in the woods.  It was brutal, savage, heartlessly monstrous.  And yet seeing the pictures of the arrest, it's clear: these are girls, not women, not even close.

Here are kids, at that peculiar, awkward, difficult transition between childhood and adulthood.  They've lost themselves in a dark story, abandoning credulity in a strange fever-dream of early adolescence.

Somewhere, something broke in one or both of those girls, and they lost themselves in a story of horror.  It became something they believed they inhabited.

As creatures of narrative, who spin our lives out as a story, that's something that impacts us all.  There are stories we tell so that we can laugh, and so that we can pretend.  Stories help us more deeply understand truth, forcing us beyond a mechanical literalism, demanding that we think, imagine, and grow.   That was my Teacher's method, after all.

But there are also other stories that become so woven into us, repeated over and over again, that we become them.

Our narratives of anger, of hatred, of bitterness and resentment?  Those shape and form us.  Our endless commercialized tales of empty sex and retributive violence?  Those become us.  The stories that rise from our faith that do not build us up in grace, but turn our eyes away from the reality we are helping to shape?  They are equally dangerous.

Stories are not product.  They have power.

It's a difficult truth, and one our culture struggles to grasp.

The Toys We Don't Need

As our seasonal festival of consumerist gorging comes to an end, that big pulse of buybuybuy that pushes the retail industry into the black for the year seems to have worked again.  Our houses are once again overloaded with material possessions that, by and large, we don't actually need but have been convinced we require for our happiness.  There's been a peculiar aspect of the surge of purchasing this year, though, one that is beyond me.

It's the great rush of gun purchases following the Sandy Hook shootings.  You remember that, right?  Yeah, I know, so-five-minutes-ago, but it's still having an effect, eh?  And the most immediate effect has been that assault-style rifles...meaning semi-auto, large magazine firearms that evoke actual combat weaponry...have been roaring off of the racks of gun stores this holiday season.  It's so intense that the profiteers are out in force, as folks pick up semi-auto AR-15s and Kalashnikovs and resell them for a healthy margin.   

That's not unusual for interesting new firearms, like the speculative rush on Keltec's KSG home defense bullpup shotgun over the last year, but this is another thing altogether.  This is actually a familiar trend, as the threat of gun regulation following mass shootings tends to lead to hoarding and panic buying.  It's always seemed a bit odd, but we're an odd people.

What has struck me in this current feeding frenzy is how peculiarly it meshes with another truth known to responsible gun owners.   The appearance of a gun is meaningless.  Oh, calibre matters, as do a range of other factors, particularly magazine capacity.  But in terms of lethality, a rifle is a rifle.  Urban leftists who are oblivious to the nuances between weapons look at all the pseudo-mil-spec farkling and tactical doodaddery, and assume that somehow makes a rifle more lethal.

It does not.  

Case in point: the most lethal soldier in the whole of the blood-soaked horror that was the twentieth century was a Finnish sniper by the name of Simo Hayha.  He used a Finnish version of the Mosin-Nagant hunting rifle...bolt action, five round magazine, iron sights...to kill over five hundred Soviets.   It's a sturdy, reliable, low-rate-of-fire weapon.  That rifle was the most lethal individual firearm in the history of modern warfare.  Lord have mercy.  It is also the kind of weapon that would be utterly unaffected by even the most stringent firearm regulations.

Of course, that's a hunting rifle, and not so handy in close quarters.  But for close quarters combat...the type of staving-off-the-serial-killing-burglar-rapist-Democrat fantasy scenario that sells so many American firearms...there's pretty much nothing better than a scattergun.  In the typical home on a typical quarter acre lot, you'd need nothing more.  And there's no better way to put shot on target than something like the humble but utterly reliable Remington 870, which happens to be...if those who I know who know guns are to be believed...a fine hunting shotgun as well.  Again, unaffected by gun regulation.

So here's what I don't get.  

If...as folks who know guns better than I will invariably tell you whenever a mass shooting happens...there is no functional difference in lethality, why the rush on the tactical semi-auto farkle-guns?   These aren't real military-grade assault rifles.  They just pretend to be.  Why the panic buying of guns that are all about ego and threat-display, but are functionally no better at hunting/defending against invading armies/home-defense than far less showy firearms?

Why? Because they are the toys that we want.  They are toys that appeal powerfully to our egos, and to our fears.  They happen to be lethal toys, sure, but they are more about what they whisper in the ear of their owner.  

"Look at how fearsome I am," they say.  "You're strong and powerful," they say.   "You are a warrior," they lie.  "You could kill anyone who messed with you," they say, mixing a dark truth with the fantasy.  Because like all toys, they are mostly about fantasy.  They are all about the fantasy of war, of violence, and of power.  

And as my dear friend Wayne LaPierre put it recently, "Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?"

Perhaps that's what makes these toys so dangerous.