Has anybody here read this? I just finished it yesterday, and want to talk about it a little. It's very short, but it took me three or four days anyway, just because I kept getting distracted.

Spoilers coming up. Go somewhere else if you don't want to read them.

I think the story was some kind of Creepypasta or Reddit thread that evolved over time, or was built incrementally somehow. I'm seing people say different things online, about that, soooo I'm still sorting it out.

Spoilers coming now. Really.

I read almost the entire thing before I really understood what kind of horror story it is. I had it in my mind that it would end up being something like The Institute or Tommyknockers, both by Stephen King. Or possibly something supernatural. Maybe something along the lines of the Mothman... I hought of that possibility several times, especially regarding the Polaroids. There are things going on that are just a little beyond the narrator's circle of awareness... the narrator is supposed to be remembering himself as a child, depicted at various ages. He describes things happen that he doesn't understand at the time, but tries to come up with explanations to help himself understand, usually wrongly. He is supposed to be remembering all the events in the story from some future point. The events are told out of linear order... it's like he's just trying to sort out his own memories, and doesn't know exactly where to start, or how to proceed. You can tell that someone or something is observing or stalking him, but you can't tell who or what it might be. As I said, I had it in my brain for some reason that he was being cultivated or "groomed" by some nefarious organization, for purposes that we may or may not ever learn.

One question I have that isn't a total spoiler, exactly... if you have read it, do you think the person with the bandaged face who co-inhabited Veronica's hospital room was, um, the bad guy? That would make some sense, but I'm not 100% sure.

Another question: do you think the bad guy could have been the narrator's father?!? Is that possible?

What else, what else... um... people generally seem to really like the story, in the comments section under YouTube videos about it, and in Reddits and probably Quora threads. But, I get the sense that a lot of people reading it are kids, or people in their early 20s. I did not understand that, when I started reading it. I had just vaguely heard that it was a good story. What I'm saying is that I can see how people that age would find it particularly powerful and gripping, but all of us here are so desensitized to all kinds of horror that we mostly just kind of take it in stride. The kind of horror that it is is kind of a real world horror, like, it is something that basically could probably happen to someone. People reacting to it in comments threads are probably fairly average, normal people, having an authentically horrified reaction, not hardcore gorehounds or horror fans at all, particularly. So, yah, just think about it in that way, if you have yet to read it.

I'm still mulling the story over. It is certainly disturbing, and horrifying for any empathetic human being, but it isn't exactly what we here might think of when we hear the word horror.

Anybody have any thoughts on any of this?