Look at us, we passed 250 supporters! WOOOOOO!!!! 65% of the way toward our funding goal, and I’m not even halfway done telling you how awesome all of these stories are.
Today’s tale from the ToC is Incursion by RK Duncan, lovely Lovecraftian offering that stuck with those of us at No Shit Central. We all loved this story and refused to let it go.
We got a lot of stories in the No Shit Slushpile that followed the format of a person recounting past events to a listener, following the required line of course. The inherent weakness of stories like that is when it comes to maintaining the stakes, the tension. For example, you know the narrator didn’t get killed by the scary thing they faced, because they’re telling you the story.
Well, Robin put a twist on the format and then knocked it out of the park. The guy with the no shit story is the witness to an otherworldly incursion being interviewed after the fact, and it grips your attention. What happened? How does it work in with what else is going on? What does the interviewer want? The tension remains because the point of the story isn’t even necessarily what happened, but where it’s all going to lead.
I was personally a sucker for the atmosphere of the story, as a dedicated player of Arkham Horror. It has that same sort of feeling, rendered in prose, where it’s a mystery to be solved, a creepy adventure, and you already know that victory is not going to be without its very high price.
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