Given that the patient’s journal was found, and you’ve gone into this building and seen no smoke beast (JJ Abrams probably called it home) and no meat monsters, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is, all the monsters were likely this patient’s delusions, as a troubled mind tried to grapple with real world traumas.

The bad news is this hospital was probably an exceedingly fucked up place, with a bunch of deaths they covered up to avoid being shut down.

The worst news is, this poor person went through all this, feeling lost and abandoned, with his mind turning everything around him into some Silent Hill-esq horror. We’ll never know what really happened, but for this patient the monsters were very real.

Bingo. If no one is buying a series that sends out the wrong impression, not just to the writer, but to their publisher.

Both self-published and publisher-supported writers need sales figures. They’re a barometer of public interest.

If the books aren’t selling then it suggests they’re not popular, which can make a publisher think the writer themselves is bad, or that the story simply isn’t a draw for people, resulting in the withdraw of support.

For a self-published writer it’s often even worse. If the books aren’t selling then it suggests either the story isn’t grabbing people’s attention, or the market for that type of story has declined to the point that it’s no longer worth publishing. In that case the writer may give up on writing, or give up on publishing their story and never bother to share the rest of it with the world.

To get more personal for a moment, I’m a writer myself. I’ve self-published in the past. This isn’t my day job, it doesn’t pay the bills, it is a little side money from doing what I love. Even with it just being something I do for the love of it, actually putting together an ebook to publish is a lot of work. If a book doesn’t sell? I’m not going to go to the effort of making the sequel into an ebook. I need to know there’s readers interested in it if I’m going to go to all the trouble of getting it self-publish ready.

I’m not sure I follow Shadow’s motivation here. He was mad just because Heath was the one he never caught? I was thinking he was in love with Shawna too or something, but after that ending I’m really confused.

You know what always makes me giggle?

When men like that buy what the preacher is selling.

God and “the” Devil weren’t the first, they fought tooth and nail to become the opposite sides of monotheistic scale, and even now that scale isn’t nearly as big as they want their followers to believe.

Hold on to that truth, Fiona. You’ve got the right of it. The balance between order and chaos is important. Beings far older than those two have kept that balance for a long time. And imbecilic entities like them have to keep going and stack the scales in their favor.

Don’t let the sleeper fall into either of their hands. Not the Christ-God and damn sure not Nick. They’ve started enough religious wars, you don’t want to be the catalyst to their latest Cold War becoming a hot one.

There should be, bees are awesome lil buddies, they deserve all the Fuck Yeahs!

This has been my mantra for a long time. Even when life is absolutely shit I keep going, because dammit things on this crazy blue ball are getting interesting and I want to see what happens next!

Right?

Yeah, sure, cops are supposed to respond to all calls, but they’re also supposed to respond to priority calls first. We’re supposed to believe it’s such a quiet night that they were free to rush down to the campus to deal with a couple dudes putting up fliers?

So it is! That’s what I get for reading while half asleep.

Aww, this isn’t bad at all! This is lovely, especially the way it shows that these two immortals really fell HARD.

He just listened to an other lonely man for a full week, letting him bare his soul, and when he left this Brad spent fifty years searching, while our narrator spent that same time wistfully thinking of that one guy he met half a century ago? That’s incredibly sweet and romantic!

EDIT: Fixed a gender misidentify. Never read short stories while half asleep folks, you’ll miss the obvious!

Yikes. This is amazing and horrifying. Love the implication here that he is the one who pulled the trigger, but he was more a weapon of her bloodlust than anything else.

That is… whew. This one is going to stick with me for awhile.

Ooh, I love this. It’s wholesome from John’s perspective but still delightfully wicked from Arix’s, feels like a story that would be almost romantic but with dashes of the demoness deducing what terrible uses she could get out of a fully automated luxury space station, seems like the sort of place you could turn into a brand new kind of hell.

You magnificent fiend, my candle of nostalgia just flared so bright I was almost blinded!

It sure is! As told from Maggie’s eyes; I love it!

See, I think it’s that Steve got hurt, likely by one of the shifters, and probably fell. He cries out to Robert the first for help, but Robert kept running.

The shifter closes in, likely mimicking Robert’s voice, and so Steve cries out to him, pleading for Robert not to leave him behind again, unaware that the thing he was crying out to wasn’t really Robert.

My personal bet is the original two deer that ran from them and then ran back toward them were genuine. We never saw them again after they ran like hell.

They fled humans then realized they were running toward something far worse and went “nope, fuck that!” and doubled back right passed Roberts 1 and 2.

The deer had been seen by the shifter so now it had something to use to approach the Roberts in a form they would be familiar with. From that moment onward the Robs never saw a real deer again, just the shifter messing with them in the form of a deer.

Based on that mimicry I think Robert the First made a terrible sacrifice when he was young.

Once when they were young and foolhardy Robert the first and his friend Steve went out hunting in that same area of the deep woods.

They became the hunted. Tracked, followed, mimicked, taunted until one of them cracked. Robert ran—without Steve. He didn’t have to outrun them, he just had to outrun Steve.

Steve got left behind, and one of those things closed in. Those were probably Steve’s last words, as he heard something approaching him through the deep woods:

“Did you come back for me, Robert? You wouldn’t leave me behind again… would you?”