AWKWARD ZOMBIE

there's an old story about a demon who will take on the form of a dead loved one. maybe it has to do with that.

I have imagination, it's just that it seems like a lot of the story devices were thrown in there "just cuz lol".

Like what Oracle said.

A little bit of closure would be nice. Not complete closure (like a paragraph explanation of "He was the monster, lol"), but maybe we see the brother's eyes get all weird, or even the little brother's dead body at the bottom of the well (because the monster killed him and it was just that imagined dream state some people think happens). To me it sounds like lazy storytelling when the whole point of your ending is "use your imagination!" There are ways to make your audience use their imaginations without withholding vital information. The Haunting (1963) did that well when we didn't see the ghosts fucking shit up, but we knew right well they were ghosts. It wasn't just "Oh my God, noises, there shouldn't be noises! We escaped! But what were those noises I just don't know! END".

EDIT: I guess part of it is what Oracle said. I can think of a handful of different ways to provide some kind of closure while/by explaining what the digging bit is about. Maybe he goes out and digs up one of his holes and finds the body of ANOTHER beast, which might elude to what Nach said.

It's called an ambiguous ending. Like the one in Watchmen (the graphic novel) where you don't know whether or not ozymandias's plot is ultimately revealed. The intention is usually to encourage discussion, leave an open ending so the reader can decide for themselves what happened or in the case of a creepy story, to enforce the sense of mystery.

Or like Inception where the movie ends as the top is spinning. There's no secret ending the director and writer know, that was the ending as it was meant to be. To leave you questioning whether he is in the real world or still within the dream.

I guess it was just too short to feel complete then. There was little characterization, and the ending just sort of...happened. It was like most creepy pastas where it's "Here's guy. A peculiar thing just happened to guy. The End." That goes with what was said before though, with the whole "Don't imagine a story with a beginning and an end". Maybe I'm just desensitized to the whole idea of an ambiguous ending since I've both been exposed to it a lot, and just have this natural need to know things.

Also Inception worked because there was that advanced level of characterization. You also knew for sure what the top meant. He's either dreaming or he isn't.In this story it can go in any multitude of directions, the natural one being that the brother is actually the monster in brother form, but they don't really hint at it...like...at all. It can still be any of those other possible endings.

I reread the story since it was some time since I last read it, and I disagree. The ending is pretty clear, some fucked up shit happened. The guy killed his brother and then he came back to haunt him. The precise working of what the double is and what the corpse is is never explained, which is good since it would ruin the sense of mystery in such a short story.

He's either a monster, or he's not, or he's just imagined by his little brother, or maybe the double IS the brother and the one in the well is the monster, or maybe this is just some bad M. Night Shlamalamadingdong movie and they're a 1800's esque town set in the 2000's.

In my mind simpler is better.

I'm pretty sure the double is some sort of monster since normal people don't get shot in the face, thrown down a hole and regenerate a piece of clothing while also staying down the hole at the same time. And there is absolutely nothing hinting that this is a dream or just imagination, so why would you even consider that?

Because this is classic telltale heart storytelling. Guy does something bad to make things go his way only to have it happen where things go horribly wrong. in the case of Poe, it was an incessant ticking. In this case, it's his brother coming "back to life". They couldn't just have the guilt manifest as something you can see as his psychosis because it'd make everyone wonder why there was the bit about a monster.

Well, that's a valid interpretation, like most literary works can have different interpretations. That doesn't mean the story is incomplete or hastened. I feel it got across what it wanted to get across pretty good, considering the short length of the story.

The irony also wasn't lost on me that we just had a discussion on a story meant to spark discussions, even if that discussion was on whether or not it was a good story.

I need to get back into creepypastas but I'll just end up reading the same ones

Help me out guys

http://www.creepypasta.com
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Creepypasta_Wiki
There you go. Just look for newer ones if you already know the old ones.

I've been obsessed with the readings of "Penpal" that MCP did on youtube recently, here's the playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEF956950B0367A0A
They're excerpts from the book by Dathan Auerbach. It's a relatively new release so I've not got it yet, but the readings creeped me out and I love them to bits! They get pretty long, so I wouldn't try and listen to them on the sly.

Just spreading the word~ *insert smile.dog here*

I do so love finding commentary like this, Thank you very much.