Dr Maynard Wills

Video Palace is like a cross between Slenderman creepypasta and The Ring franchise. The legend this time focuses on the enigmatic "Eyeless Man," a being who moves through the airwaves, controls your mind via sound and static, kills you, steals your soul, opens doorways to the Great Stack...and some variation of all the above. I'm not entirely sure. The more that is revealed the more questions we're left with. It's all very ambiguous, and a little creepy.

I liked the structure of the book, framing a series of short stories from different authors with one professor's obsessive search for the truth. The stories are interspersed with notes from the professor detailing the progress of his search, as well as his own descent into madness. The collection appears to be based on a podcast, and everyone involved is writing with such honesty and earnest that it started to mess with my mind (like is there even a Eyeless Man mythos or is it all just made up for this book?).

I've never done hard drugs (great way to start a sentence), but I've always been intrigued by psychedelics, lucid dreaming, thought control experiments, and so forth. Stands to reason those elements of the story were the most interesting to me, and also why my favorite stories were "Ranger Ronin Presents...," "The Inward Eye," and " Ecstatica".

As with all collections, some stories were better than others. At about the halfway point it all started to feel fairly repetitive though, and I began to lose some interest. I did appreciate attempts to portray the Eyeless Man in different ways, but most hit the same basic beats. There's definitely some creepy scenes, but the scares also began to lose their luster. I could see this working well in a visual medium (perhaps a TV show?).

3.5 stars rounded up for Goodreads.… (más)