Candle Cove The Horror
Candle Cove is the latest in a new type of horror called Creepy Pasta. The name “Creepy Pasta” comes from the word ‘copy pasta’, an internet slang term for a block of text that gets copied and pasted from website to forum ad infinitum. This new medium of widely available horror stories struggles to find credibility in the lit world, as most Creepy Pastas suffer from a lack of writing structure and vocabulary. Seeing as how all you need to create a Creepy Pasta is a computer with internet connection. However “Candle Cove” is able to convey a well thought out and believable horror story in as little as three pages.
The Candle cove story opens on a fictional forum known as “Net Nostalgia”. The various users then struggle to piece together memories of the Candle Cove broadcast. As they begin sharing their memories to one another, they began to recall marionette characters like Pirate Percy, a cowardly pirate who manned the Laughingstock, a “living” pirate ship with a horrific mouth across its bow. They were joined on their adventures by a young girl named Janice, who was the esteemed protagonist of the “show”.
While they continue to remember the details of the program, they begin to recall some more sinister figures like the one eyed Horace the Horrible, whose grotesque handlebar mustache sat over a set of uncannily tall teeth, and most unsettling, a skeleton with the most horrific set design and top hat calling himself “The Skin Taker”. The living boat would demand that the frightened Percy would enter said cave by saying, “YOU HAVE TO GO INSIDE,”
The story then reaches a climax as one users “Mike-painter65” visits his ageing mother in the retirement home. Mike proceeds to ask her what she remembers about this terrifying show. Mikes mother then states sweetly “then you would tune the tv to static and juts watch dead air for 30 minutes. you had a big imagination with your little pirate show.”
The main component in any fictional story is relatability and believability. Many children’s show of the past, mistakenly used low budget props as a means of conveying their story. Without ever realizing that their kid show now falls into the uncanny valley. Most Americans can recall something from their childhood that was never meant to be scary, yet still to this day still unnerves them. Candle Cove went above and beyond in setting the scene, by using a forum where presumably there are no perquisites to post. The author then plugs in a cast of characters piecing together a long forgotten kid’s show. The story as a whole is able to unnerve as well as entertain the reader using a wide array of horror tropes, and believable dialogues.
