From Forums to Publishing: A Chilling Internet Horror Story
BY MAX FORTMAN
To say this book genuinely scared me, would be an understatement. This book made me question the safety of my bedroom and the noises outside my house for a concerning amount of time and yet, I loved every second of it.
The book I’m talking about of course is Stolen Tongues by Felix Blackwell. Stolen Tongues originally started out as a Reddit thread on r/nosleep titled “My romantic cabin getaway with my fiancee isn’t exactly going as planned” that turned into a novel that blew me away. I only read the Reddit thread, and I might buy the novel later but for now I will only be referencing the Reddit thread. If you want a scary story with an interesting premise and even scarier plot, then I can’t recommend this book enough.
Stolen Tongues begins with a couple having a lovely vacation out in the mountains, but it soon turns south when they find a large dream catcher outside and start hearing strange voices in the middle of the night, the voices of dead relatives and strangers chanting. They soon leave the cabin but the main characters fiancee starts acting weird, she talks in her sleep to someone that’s not there, she starts to sleepwalk over to the top of the stairs and motion for someone to come up. Theres’s people walking around outside of their house. Strange mysteries are afoot with the cabin
up in the mountains. All of these strange events are being documented by the main character and continue to be updated as the story goes on.
Throughout this story, there were many things that I had loved but also some things that I didn’t like. For starters, I love how creepy they made the fiancee after she left the cabin. Her behavior was unsetting and genuinely made me scared every time she was mentioned. I didn’t know what she would do next. She had me hooked into the story and helped add to the mystery of the strange occurrences.
One problem that I did have with the story was how they handled native representation and the Native American characters. The Native American characters felt so flat that cardboard would be jealous. The characters fell into the standard architype of “wise shaman” and had no diversity. I could go on and on about how that is extremely harmful to Native Americans, but this is not what this review is about.
I loved the setting of the story and how it reflected how the reader should be feeling. During the day, the mood is calm and almost normal but still eerie. It never fully feels safe. At night, it’s not safe at all. The noises and scary occurrences mostly only happen at night. The setting also does a good job of isolating the characters and putting them in vulnerable positions which makes the story even scarier.
The scenes with the fiancée sleepwalking were some of the most well-crafted and terrifying scenes. The fact that you could never guess what she was doing or what was happening till it was too late was amazing. It always left me guessing and the scares just kept coming.
The ending of the story left much too be desired. It felt super rushed and was scrambling to tie up loose ends while still leaving so many left. It doesn’t have a satisfactory conclusion as to why everything was happening.
Overall, I loved this story. It left me genuinely scared, and the premise of the story was intriguing. I would recommend this story to anyone that’s looking for a good scare and loves reading at night. And if you’ve already read it then don’t forget “Wachu…wachu…wachu…wole my…wole my…”