UNWINNABLEWEEKLY

ISSUE SEVENTEEN

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Editor in ChiefStu Horvath

Managing EditorOwen R. Smith

Senior EditorSteve Haske

DesignStu Horvath

Contributors

Matt Marrone

Mary Alexandra Agner

Stu Horvath

Gus Mastrapa

UNWINNABLEWEEKLY

ISSUE SEVENTEEN

From the Desk of the EIC

Alex Colville and The Shiningby Matt Marrone

Mining the Narrativeby Mary Alexandra Agner

Inexorableby Stu Horvath

Dungeon Crawler, Part Nineby Gus Mastrapa

Biographies and Illustrations

CONTENTS

From the Desk of the Editor in Chief

Hi there,

October has finally arrived, and with it shorter days, brightly colored trees and a whole lot of spookiness. As a devoted fan of horror, the lead up to Halloween is easily my favorite time of year. Rest assured, you’ll see a lot more attention devoted to all things scary on Unwinnable in the coming weeks.

Last year, I immersed myself in horror movies, books and games in order to write about them daily. I’ve been collected those essays, and a dozen more besides, under the title This Horrific Life for backers of the Unwinnable Weekly Kickstarter. It is almost done and will soon be available for sale for those who missed out on the eBook bundle back in April.

I have a whole lot more on my plate these days, so I don’t know if I can be able to write quite so prolific this year, but that isn’t going to stop me from trying. I have quite the strange assortment of things to share with you, including a series of articles examining John Carpenter’s horror movies, a bizarre mail art conspiracy theory centered on a New Jersey ghost town, seances, ghost

hunting and more than a few great horror videogames. Some of your favorite Unwinnable writers are also turning their pens to the dark side of culture, too.

Finally, I’d like to invite you to tell me a story. Specifically, the story of the scariest thing that has ever happened to you. Seen a ghost? Got locked in an abandoned asylum? I want to know.

The teller of my favorite story will receive a free copy of This Horrific Life, a signed photo print of your choice from my portfolio and a creepy severed doll head. I’ll also run excerpts of other notable tales on the website closer to Halloween (be sure to note in your letter that it is OK to reprint). Send your stories to me via email at stu.horvath@gmail.com!

* * *

Matt Marrone kicks things off this week with a look at Stanley Kubrick’s use of the menacing paintings of Alex Colville in The Shining. He is only a little bit obsessed. I get burned by The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and explain why surprise endings in horror are almost always a bad idea (if you want to play Ethan Carter, do it before you read this essay, naturally). Mary Alexandra Agner lightens things up with some of her narrative rules for playing Minecraft and, finally, Gus Mastrapa delivers up the latest installment of Dungeon Crawler.

Stu Horvath, Kearny, New Jersey

October 1, 2014

Rookie of the Year:

Alex Colville and The Shining

By Matt Marrone

Fuck you, Stanley Kubrick. You’ve turned me into a nut, straight out of Room 237 – an insane documentary that’s not to be missed if you enjoy

wacky fans espousing off-the-wall but often intriguing theories about The Shining.

What started as something I thought of as a fun exercise has become an obsession.

I’ve begun seeing things in The Shining that may or may not be intentional. And more and more, I’m becoming convinced that they are.

It all started in Toronto. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an Alex Colville exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The show blew my mind. Few things get me quite as jazzed as discovering a new artist, at least one that’s new to me. Speaking simplistically, Colville reminded me of a Canadian Edward Hopper. Of course that doesn’t come close to telling the full story. Works like “Horse and Train,” “Traveller” and “Kiss With Honda” – my favorite pieces in the show – have a powerful sense of foreboding and use light to create moods that build on Hopper more than simply emulate him.

Inside the gallery, I moved from painting to painting like I’d never seen art before. Little did I know, I had already been introduced to Colville’s work, if only subconsciously.

Indeed, the main reason I find my Colville discovery worth sharing – and why I became obsessed with The Shining – is because of a sign that hung in the exhibition, one which my dad fortuitously photographed, allowing me to transcribe it here:

IN STANLEY KUBRICK’S THE SHINING (1980)

Like Alex Colville, British filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was a meticulous planner, carefully arranging the contents of each shot. His famous horror film is permeated by Canadian art, including reproductions of the four Colville paintings you see in this corner. But the filmmaker famously remained tight-lipped about his motivations. Was he drawn to Colville’s animal imagery? The multi-layered quality of the works? Colville’s interest in the darker side of human nature? We can only speculate.

I decided to speculate.Not long after seeing the exhibition, I re-watched The Shining – possibly the

most overly analyzed film in movie history – to get the context for the use of Colville’s works by Kubrick.

Did Colville’s paintings shed any light on The Shining? Or vice versa? I figured it was worth checking out, if only for the thrill of seeing one of the greatest movies of all time from a new vantage point.

Now, I can’t ever turn back.

* * *

Painting: “Woman and Terrier”Time in film (according to the AGO sign): 0:10:57

Jack Torrance has just been told about Delbert Grady, the former Overlook Hotel caretaker who hacked and stacked his wife and two daughters and then “put both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth.” Back home in Boulder, his son Danny’s imaginary friend Tony has told him his father has now gotten the job and is about to call with the news. Sure enough, the phone rings and Jack’s wife Wendy answers.

As Shelley Duvall sits down to speak to Jack Nicholson, Colville’s “Woman and Terrier” is clearly visible along the back wall, above a black and white television set. The painting is of a woman hugging a terrier, her face mostly obscured by the dog’s head, but with the corner of her left eye just visible, peering out. In a recent interview with the Andrew Hunter, who curated the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Colville show, Brian Bethune writes:

There’s “Woman with Terrier” [sic], one of The Shining four, which Colville once jokingly described as “my Madonna and Child; of course in my world the child is a dog.” Colville had “a peculiar idea of dogs,” Hunter adds. “They are sentient but incapable of evil – they can see. People and dogs in his art represent distracted and hyperaware capacity for evil and innocence. The woman’s face, unsurprisingly, is hidden by the terrier. “Colville’s averted faces implicate viewers in his works, make us feel like voyeurs. When someone in a Colville looks directly at the viewer,” Hunter continues, “it’s as though you have interrupted him or her, broken in on a private scene.”

[“Unpacking the real Alex Colville,” Maclean’s, Aug. 22. 2014]

We’ve just had a less-than-subtle bit of foreshadowing as to where this film is going. And there is “Woman and Terrier” along the back wall. The child and the dog of “Madonna and Child” may be switched by Colville, but they’ve been switched back by Kubrick; Danny can sense evil, and he knows it’s coming. At the same time, his mother has seen the signs – and is about to see a whole lot more of them – but is blissfully unaware of the gravity, even as she later embraces her child, screaming, “Wake up, Danny! Wake up!”

Now we’re inside Wendy’s home, and we’re watching her take a private phone call, and a Colville character is peeking at us from the far wall, reminding us we’re simply voyeurs to the great horror that approaches.

Kubrick has set the scene for what a Colville painting means in The Shining.And then the blood comes pouring out of the elevators.

Painting: “Horse and Train”Time in film: 0:14:31

The Torrances seem to have excellent taste in art – though perhaps it’s a bit out of the ordinary.

In a 1957 letter to T.R. MacDonald, the director and curator of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Alex Colville wrote that he was “delighted” that his 1954 painting “Horse and Train” had been bought by the gallery.

“I have always thought it was quite good,” Colville wrote, in his handsome, cursive script, “but realized that few individuals would buy it for hanging in a house (most people seem to consider it exceedingly morbid) ... ”

[The Toronto Star, July 26, 2013]

Danny has just had his vision of the two girls and the cascading blood, and has woken in his bedroom after passing out in front of the bathroom mirror. A pediatrician has been brought in to treat him. After an examination, the

doctor and Wendy walk to the living room, where they discuss Jack’s issues with alcohol, how Jack once dislocated Danny’s arm, and how that seemingly precipitated the first appearance of the mysterious Tony – who lives in Danny’s teeth, Danny says, but hides in his stomach.

As they pass through the hallway, there it is on the wall: “Horse and Train” – among Colville’s most recognizable works (I’ve been using it as desktop wallpaper since I returned from Toronto). It’s gray and cloudy; a black horse is galloping down the tracks toward an oncoming train. It’s a gripping painting, inspired by a couplet from an old poem on the futility of maintaining convention in the face of oncoming, violent change. Maybe the horse will veer off the tracks, or maybe the train will find a way to brake in time. The possibility is real, though it doesn’t seem likely.

The conversation between Wendy and the pediatrician makes it clear Jack has issues – issues that are going to surface, in a big way, during five months of seclusion. The horse and train are gathering speed, on what appears to be a collision course.

As if the stubborn horse is allowed to speak through Kubrick’s dialogue, the first words spoken after the painting moves across the screen, from left to right, and then disappears, come from the doctor:

“Mrs. Torrance, I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”Yeah, right.

In the very next scene, Jack, Wendy and Danny are filmed from above, speeding along a mountain road. When they arrive at their destination, the car and the road fade, and the Overlook Hotel slowly materializes over them on screen, an immovable object at the end of their road, the armored train to their galloping horse.

Painting: “Dog, Boy, and St. John River” (mistakenly transposed with “Moon and Cow” at the AGO exhibition)Time in film: 0:58:30

In case you think this is all just a happy coincidence, that a rogue set designer tossed a couple Colvilles in the Torrance’s apartment as an art-school in-joke, try this next one on for size:

As Danny comes around the corner and peers through the door of Room 237 – the first time any of the room’s interior is revealed – the first thing you see inside it is a lighted table lamp and “Dog, Boy, and St. John River.”

This was my first goosebumps moment. In truth, I was expecting to see “Moon and Cow” here, as this is the time in the film the AGO mistakenly marks its appearance, and because Danny is wearing his conspiracy-charged Apollo 11 sweater (if Kubrick had faked the moon landing, Colville’s “Moon and Cow” would have been the final proof, right?). But the placement of “Dog, Boy, and St. John River” could hardly be more perfect. The painting, another

of Colville’s most iconic pieces, depicts a boy, holding a shotgun, looking out over a river with a dog trailing just behind him.

Again, we can’t see the human face. We’re looking at the boy from behind. Nor can we see Danny’s face as he peers through the door – we’re seeing Room 237 from his point of view, almost in the same way we’re seeing St. John River from the boy’s.

Another Colville dog makes its appearance (although he’s obscured by the lamp in the film), and again there is that hint of extrasensory perception. What are the dog and its owner looking at, or for? It could be an innocent hunting trip, but the light and perspective makes it seem there’s something sinister out there, over the large expanse of water in the distance. Or is it just us, creeping up on the boy and the dog through the reeds?

As I paused the film here to take a couple screen shots, two more details jumped out at me, and I nearly had to stop and catch my breath:

1. If Colville believed a dog can sense evil, then perhaps he’s hiding behind the boy at the same time he is following him. The boy is armed with a weapon and, however fearful, is facing whatever is to come next; the dog joins him, but at a distance. Is that the relationship between Danny and Tony – or Danny and his ability to “shine” – as they creep toward the source of the Overlook Hotel’s hidden terror? Is it a coincidence that the boy and dog are at the mouth of a body of water, and Danny and Tony (and later Jack) are about to be attacked

by a naked witch soaking in a bathtub? Or that Kubrick is again reminding movie watchers that they’re indulging in voyeurism as something wicked this way comes?

2. At first I almost thought it was a different Colville work – the boy is on the wrong side of the frame – until I realized the painting is reversed; it’s actually being reflected in a mirror. Kubrick loves to play with mirrors in The Shining – and to fuck with us in the process, refracting Jack several times in mirrors throughout the movie, sometimes showing both Jack in the flesh and his mirrored version in the same shot.

It cannot be an accident – it is most certainly a conscious choice by Kubrick – that the first thing you see in Room 237, even before you see the key in the door, is the painting of a boy holding a weapon, in mirror image; is it not, later in the film, a boy, holding a knife, who scrawls an oft-spoken word in red lipstick onto a door – a word that’s true meaning isn’t revealed until it is viewed through a mirror?

Painting: “Moon and Cow” (mistakenly transposed with “Dog, Boy, and St. John River” at the AGO exhibition)Time in film: 2:09:32

And now we’re down to the final stretch, a mad dash for survival at the Overlook Hotel.

Jack has slashed through the bathroom door and delivered his “Here’s Johnny!” line and is now in hot pursuit of Danny after axing Dick Halloran.

Wendy, who narrowly escaped the bathroom attack, is rushing upstairs holding the knife she used to slash Jack’s hand. As she makes her way up, she passes several paintings, none more noticeable than Colville’s “Moon and Cow,” which remains in frame for a few short moments; first it’s on her left, then it passes to her right.

And the painting itself? It’s a fucking cow, lying in a pasture, on the right of the frame, looking up at the moon, to his left. It’s a pastoral piece and, though

a well-known one, not as gripping, in my opinion, as some of Colville’s other classics.

Damn you, Kubrick. You had me with “Dog, Boy, and St. John River,” but I couldn’t for the life of me understand your specific Colville choice as it pertains to this scene. Yes, the animal imagery in all the artwork is huge throughout the film, and especially fits here, as Wendy, when she gets to the next flight, sees a man in a dog/bear/pig (take your pick) costume performing fellatio on a tuxedoed party guest/ghost.

But other than that, I was stumped. I left the movie paused on a knife-wielding Wendy, mid-ascent. How is it that the first three paintings, when placed in context, could tell the story of The Shining – from foreshadowing to extrasensory perception to voyeurism and even to specific plot parallels – while the last one dropped the ball so mysteriously? I felt lost.

Still, since I couldn’t help but seeing this project to its conclusion – that is, of me potentially losing my mind – I kept watching, and looking. Looking way too hard. Or just hard enough?

And then there was this:In the climactic scene, mere minutes later, when Jack falls to the snowy

ground in the hedge maze, the final shot you see of him – before his frozen body appears the next morning – is Jack slumped over on the ground. Jack has fallen to the left of the frame, and there’s a bright light in the distance to his right.

Just like “Moon and Cow” – you know, if you were to view the painting through a mirror.

* * *

As for the director and the artist: Stanley Kubrick died in 1999 and Alex Colville died last year.

But as I discovered in Toronto, and then later again in my living room in front of my TV, their work lives and breathes. If you let yourself, you can spend an entire day reading about it, pausing it, rewinding it, screen grabbing it and ultimately seeing whatever you’d like to in it.

Where Kubrick and Colville meet, there is most certainly a spark. Kubrick definitely placed those Colville paintings where they are for a reason. What makes it fascinating is how it seems to make perfect sense, yet remains elusive. The paintings don’t morph into written signs when you pause at the right frame. They remain the same as the paintings I saw on the wall in Toronto, packed with meaning and associations for each person who views them. Kubrick saw them, too, and cooked them into The Shining. All we can do is smell and taste and isolate the ingredients to try to figure out the recipe – even if it takes forever.

There is line toward the end of Room 237 that seems fitting: “There must be a lot of stuff in there that nobody has yet seen. And so people ought to keep watching.”

I went down that rabbit hole. I’m looking forward to reading about the next nut who does, too. U

Mining the NarrativeBy Mary Alexandra Agner

I use Minecraft as a sandbox for telling stories. In between survival and creative modes – where there are no wandering monsters – I play a narrative mode:

one where I impose goals within the game that allow me to tell stories.I find Minecraft more satisfying with an element of make-believe. Translating

the repair of a metal sword, say, into the request of a dying com ra de to fix her shattered weapon and vanquish the monster that defeated her. Of course, none of my narratives exist within Minecraft ’s story itself, they are meta stories told on top of the videogame itself. To create situations that lend themselves to storytelling, I impose constraints on my actions within the game. Some of these are restrictions – like my vegetarianism goal. Some are compulsions, like what I call Architect for the Needy.

Vegetarianism is exactly what it sounds like. No pigs, chickens or cows for meals. (Not veganism, though, so chicken eggs and milk are fine.) This makes for some great narrative fun. Your avatar begins as a farmer beating the grass for seeds and tilling the dirt before progressing into an explorer and warrior, but only when you’ve got a reliable food source. You’ll have some good tales to tell when you finally get to a village – irrigating and watching the wheat grow – should any of the villagers stand still long enough for you to buy them a pint.

In a creeper-free world, I consider hunger dropping to zero to mean I lose. This constraint makes starting a new world difficult due to the length of time it takes wheat to grow. Playing the game with vegetarian constraints makes you assess biomes differently: spawning in a roofed forest becomes a boon because you can easily procure the ingredients for mushroom stew.

Poaching from villages is off-limits, until you bring in a railroad line. So I’m not eating twice-baked potato (with sour cream) until I’ve bested some mineshaft spiders or lightened the luxury goods from a number of caves.

Pre-railroad, pumpkin pies are the best way to alleviate hunger. Once, I was

lucky enough to start in a field with some nearby chickens and a river with a stand of reeds. I cooped the chickens, divided and replanted the reeds for sugar and began exploring nearby for pumpkins while my wheat crop grew.

Coming around a cove, I saw a nest of forest pumpkins and headed for them at a run before I saw something moving. Zombies! They climbed out from the crevice bisecting their underground dungeon, undeterred by being on fire, and ambled for me. I had to back off; it was early enough in the game I lacked armor and weapons. Could my inventive farmer connive to circumvent the zombies and reach the pumpkin patch? Would I have to wait until

I was armored and armed enough to defeat them? Knowing not just pumpkin pies but the ability to travel was my reward, it was one of the more satisfying zombie dungeons I’ve ever dispatched,

Travel! New sights, new lands, new faces. I find it impossible not to pity the villagers. They can’t eat pumpkin pie – in fact, their desires almost never include the really wonderful comestibles, combustibles or expensive commercial items in the game. So I invented two narrative goals to improve their quality of life.

After days riding across the desert, searching for towns to link up by rail, I came across what can only be described as a smithy outpost. It had a blacksmith’s shop (and the lava went glop glop), a few fields, one street. No other buildings. There was exactly one villager living there.

The absurdity of a single villager was at first amusing. They were clearly an introvert, living alone to pursue an art or craft. The metal pants in the smithy’s chest led me to believe craft rather than art. I eventually realized the villager was actually frantically lonely. Another narrative goal, Fix ‘Em Up, is to help single villagers home to their nearest villages via train. I went scouting for the nearest village and found one on the opposite side of a mountainous patch of acacia trees.

After sufficient mining, I laid railroad track over the mountain chain (rollercoaster ride!), connecting the smithy outpost to the village. All this work was nothing compared to corralling the villager into an empty mine cart so they could journey to the village and join a new community. I actually had to build a corral around the villager and the mine cart, leaving them the minimum amount of room, attempting to force them to enter the cart. In the end, I had to push the villager into the cart. It was pretty awesome to watch them exit the mine cart, dart towards the nearest villagers and get lost in the crowd.

Then there is Architect for the Needy: a narrative goal that results from the intriguing ways in which the Minecraft ’s terrain-making algorithm enjoys confounding village geography: large hills in the middle of town create cliffs and deadly ends to the streets; desert villages set in lakes, streets underwater. The goal here is simple: improve the layout of the village so all the villagers can enter all the buildings.

With this rule set, I move doors, build stairs and elevate streets (villagers prefer dry toes), performing a sort of extreme landscaping. In one inn half filled by dirt, I created a botanical garden, complete with reference placards. (It was free, yet no one visited.) In another world, I built row houses, complete with common walls, wall art and colored windows to unclump an inseparable group of villagers – which led to a lot of backstory when all 12 of them preferred to squeeze into a duplex (they’d left their previous home in the dead of night due to zombie troubles).

These are three of the most common narrative goals I impose when playing Minecraft, though with a little imagination anyone could come up with countless others, maybe the most obvious being tales that can form around objects villagers want (quests!). All of them make it clear that Minecraft isn’t just a world open to any virtual object you want to build – it’s also open to stories you may want to tell. U

InexorableBy Stu Horvath

Weird fiction, that most heady horror subgenre, doesn’t get much attention in the world of videogames. Like cinema, games seem ill suited to

tackle the unsettling strangeness and mind-bending themes originated by writers like H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James and their colleagues.

Plenty of games wrap themselves in a semblance of the weird. The psycho-symbolism of Silent Hill, the surreal alternate dimension of Oneiros in Clive Barker’s Undying and the hallucinatory isolation of Lone Survivor all bear the marks of the genre’s influence. Dark Corners of the Earth is actually set in the same world as the literary works of Lovecraft while Eternal Darkness takes place in an analogue universe. Yet none of these games actually achieves that sense of cosmic unknowableness that is present in the best weird writing.

I love them, but they are lacking weirdness.

When I heard The Vanishing of Ethan Carter drew its inspiration from weird fiction, though, I filled with hope. Here was a game focused on exploration and atmosphere instead of combat, whose small village was a setting of breathtaking beauty instead of gloomy oppression. The bright sun of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’s perfect autumn afternoon seemed an excellent foil for the darkness that surely lurked beneath the surface.

You take the role of Paul Prospero, a private detective who has come to Red Creek Valley to investigate the titular disappearance. Prospero has some supernatural powers of perception, the particulars of which allow you to reconstruct the crime scenes that make up the majority of the game’s puzzles like a modern day Carnacki.

As you explore, the game slipstreams. Here is the deep vein of the mines haunted by undead miners and here is the stranded space explorer. Here is the hidden laboratory of an alchemist, magically protected by a pact with a duke of hell. Here are the dead bodies of Ethan’s family, left for you to puzzle out the details of their final moments.

There is dread and confusion, but more than anything, there is loneliness. For all the beautiful vistas, the rushing river and the orange and yellow trees aglow with the setting sun, Red Creek Valley is deserted and still. Aside of the haunting score, the only sound is the crunch of gravel beneath your feet. It is a forlorn place.

When you find yourself in front of the smoldering ruins of Vandergriff mansion, you’re braced for crescendo. This is where Ethan disturbed the entity, the Sleeper, which turned his family against him. This is where Ethan returned, to burn out the infection. This is where you have come for revelation.

Then the game abandons all its singular atmospheric work in favor of a cliché twist ending that neatly ties up all the plot threads in about as unhorrific a manner imaginable.

The twist has plagued genre fiction from its earliest days. While there are finely executed examples (the trademark Twilight Zone bombshells, for example, or Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd come to mind), most twists strike me as dishonest narrative devices, deployed at the last minute to cover up the fact that an author has no real idea how to end their story.

Twists in horror predominantly take one of two forms. The first, in which all the supernatural elements of a story are explained away by (usually comically elaborate) mundane means, goes all the way back to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794. More recognizable examples include the Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Hound of the Baskervilles” and just about every episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The last thing I want to learn at the end of a story with an ghoulish astronaut ghost is that Old Farmer Jenkins was responsible – and he would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those kids and their god damned dog.

The other twist is when the entire story is revealed as a dream or some other mental construct. Most famously, this twist was employed in the finale of the

1980s medical drama St. Elsewhere, when audiences learned that the entire show was the imagining of an autistic boy playing with a snow globe containing the hospital. Whether in Lost or Nightmare on Elm Street, this trick is almost always a tiresome waste of the audience’s time that was old when it was employed in The Wizard of Oz (Alice in Wonderland, for instance, used it nearly 80 years earlier). In horror, it is usually employed to return the end of a narrative to a more realistic point or to dismiss all the uncomfortable negative emotions the story stirred up, with little care for the fact that readers of horror rarely want such lurking specters banished at all.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter uses elements of both these surprise endings. After the player solves the final puzzle, the world dissolves to reveal that all game’s events took place in Ethan’s head, in the span of only a few minutes, as he succumbs to exposure to toxic smoke. Prospero – you, the player –doesn’t exist. The supernatural events are symbolic of Ethan’s family and the nature of his relationship with them – it isn’t a monster mask getting pulled off a criminal, but it is close.

The problem with this is that the twist subverts everything that came before. Compare that to two excellent examples of the dream twist, Ambrose Bierce’s classic weird tale An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and the film Jacob’s Ladder.

Both deal with military men who dream of elaborate escapes while (surprise!) teetering on the edge of death. Instead of undermining the reader experience, here the surprise endings drive home the horror.

In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, I went to Red Creek Valley to find a missing boy and exorcize the supernatural force that sought to control him. When I finished the game, I still hadn’t done that. Yes, I can read the trappings of sorcery and dark doings as deeply symbolic of a sad family drama after I have finished the game, but while I am within the game, I have to take them at face value. Revealing them at the last minute to be red herrings defies what I have experienced. It is a betrayal.

The very best horror works to evoke a singular response. Every word, every camera angle, every rumble of the gamepad is in the service of a climax of dread and awe – “The Call of Cthulhu,” Halloween, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Things may not be what they seem, but the tenor of the experience must be internally consistent. Like death, the forces unleashed in a horror story are inexorable. To paraphrase horror writer Laird Barron: you can try to get out of the way, but eventually something is going to get you.

As beautiful and atmospheric as it is, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter strays from its singular horrific purpose. It is, sadly, as Tolkien said, “a good picture in a disfiguring frame.” U

Part Nine

Dungeon CrawlerBy Gus Mastrapa

Previously, in Dungeon

Crawler...

Daisy, an orphan-turned-unwitting-

adventurer found herself lost in the depths of the earth, beset by monsters,

wracked by fever and, perhaps worse of all, lost in the darkness. But a tiny trinket found

in the bottom of a dusty chest could mean our heroine’s luck is changing...

Daisy stepped through the waterfall and saw the cave for the first time. Not long ago, she had awoken in the shadows with

little sense of her surroundings. The single shaft of light that shone down from cascade did more to conceal than it did to reveal. Long, inky shadows had stretched the length of the cavern, leaving huge swaths shrouded in black. The spilling water played tricks even now, distracting with dancing motes and glowing mists.

Yet Daisy, with her newfound ring, saw as well as if in daylight. And the first thing she noticed was her carnivorous companion.

It was clear that Daisy owed her life to the monster cub. It had defended her from countless rats that preyed on her weak, faltering with sight. When she had succumbed to fever, the odd little creature had somehow guided her to safety – and the life-saving waters of this chamber. The beast was no loyal hound, though; when Daisy had awoken, she was sure that it had wandered off.

Now she saw that her guardian had kept watch over her the whole time. Or at least had remained close. In a far corner cloaked in shadow, Daisy could clearly see the monster cub curled in a ball, sleeping soundly.

“Of course,” Daisy thought. The poor, blind beast wouldn’t willingly linger in the light, even light as meager as could be found down here.

“You’ve earned a good long nap, friend.” Daisy left her companion to rest while she set about scouting her surroundings. This place truly was a marvel – the ceiling rose hundreds of feet above. The fall itself stopped halted any further exploration on one side. Here and there small colonies of bats clung to the rocks, unmoving in languorous sleep. The cave’s

tiny mouth, where the light pierced blackness, was too high and too slippery

to ever reach. Daisy envied the bats above her, free as they were to fly up and out of this place

at will.The water crashed into a small pool, then meandered

downhill, cutting a downward path. The room’s wet walls narrowed slightly where the ground had eroded. From what

Daisy could see, she could follow the stream for quite a while, but she was not terribly interested in wandering further into the

depths. She was desperate to move up and out.Small passages that cut into the huge cavern were what interested

Daisy. She had been near-unconscious and wracked with fever when she stumbled here. Now the clumsy path she had taken was clear.

One cave opened at the top of an incline. Her tumble down and into the water was obvious, telegraphed in a riot of disturbed rocks and

scattered dirt.There was no way she’d be returning to that forsaken cave. Though

who was to say that the other caves that wove in and out of this place were any better. Far worse fates could be waiting for her down these paths.“At least I will be able to look fate in the eye,” Daisy said to no one. She

marvelled, again, at the ring she was wearing. She didn’t dare even consider the word “magic.” Her short life had given her no reason to believe that there was anything else to this life but pain and disappointment. If the gods were real they gave her no reason to believe in them. Until recently Daisy had encountered nothing even remotely wondrous, but now she held a small miracle, sitting on her hand.

Daisy carefully pulled the ring from her thumb and was immediately wrapped in darkness. She replaced the ring and it was as if someone had thrown open a window. This ring was perhaps the most precious thing Daisy had ever held in her dirty hands. Without it, she’d have been doomed only to wander, blind. Now she could move with purpose. For the first time in ages, perhaps ever, Daisy felt something like hope.

For as long as Daisy could remember things always happened to her. She had lived an entire life reacting. Now she felt she had a say in her fate, a choice. The notion thrilled and terrified her. If she made the wrong decision and chose the wrong cave, she could wind up dead. There were a million ways to die down here. The power to see in the darkness could only do so much for her.

She would have to be smart. A little preparation now could prevent a catastrophe later. Daisy’s first task

was to protect her treasure. The ring had been crafted for a full-grown adult. It hung precariously around her tiny thumb. One wrong move and the circle could slip off, roll into the dirt and be lost forever in the gloom. That would not do.

Daisy set about securing the ring to her person. She unlooped the length of rope that was tied around her waist and stripped out of the ratty sack that passed for her clothing. With her dagger she cut a swath of fabric from the bottom, unraveling a strand of the rope so that she had a strand of tough hemp to work with. With that she intently set to work.

There was no one to see it, but Daisy smiled as she cut and stitched a rudimentary glove and fastened her magic ring fast in its thumb. U

Cover: The Astronauts Alex Colville and The Shining: Paintings by Alex Colville, stills from The Shining courtesy of Warner Bros. Mining the Narrative: Minecraft images courtesy of Mojang Inexorable: Images from The Vanishing of Ethan Carter courtesy of The Astronauts Dungeon Crawler, Part Nine: Chris Martinez

Illustrations:

Matt Marrone is a senior editor at ESPNNewYork.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011, which seems paradoxical until you learn all he does is play GeoDefense over and over again, has a nickname derived from wearing an orange traffic cone on his head and still doesn’t undestand why the @$@$&@@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down an effing hallway. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.

Mary Alexandra Agner writes of dead women, telescopes, and secrets in poetry, prose, and Ada. Her latest science nonfiction is a travelogue of Titan for The Escapist Magazine.

Stu Horvath is the editor in chief of Unwinnable. He reads a lot, drinks whiskey and spends his free time calling up demons. Sometimes, he plays with toys and calls it “photography.” Follow him on Twitter @StuHorvath.

Gus Mastrapa is a hesher who lives in the desert with his wife, son and far too many animals to mention. Dungeon Crawler is a serialized work-in-progress – a YA roguelike “To Build a Fire.” He has left Twitter but, like King Arthur, will return when we need him most.

Chris Martinez was a terrible person. Now he is not so bad and draws more often. Follow him on Twitter @DrakeLake.

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