LITTLE SLICES: THE INSOMNOBLOG, reviewed by DJay32

For reference, LITTLE SLICES: THE INSOMNOBLOG was written by Buliwif and can be found here.

LITTLE SLICES was a 39-post blog about Thomas Jameson, a man with insomnia who chronicles his attempts to get a full night's sleep as well as the strange events of his town. He goes through various different sleep techniques, and homeopathic pills seem to work until he begins getting dreams of a faceless man. His local news gives reports of missing children, and Thomas even sees what he thinks are the ghosts of two missing children from fifteen years prior. He also hooks up with a girl he'd been eyeing for a while, and the two of them try to help a friend when her husband disappears entirely, only for the friend to disappear as well. Thomas finds their bodies strung up in the woods and calls the police, only for his girlfriend to disappear as well, whereupon Thomas crafts two makeshift explosives and follows the beast into the woods, where he watches his love interest be dissected. He pulls the pin and sets the forest ablaze, only to survive and post in his blog that the faceless man is still alive and waiting outside his door. The blog ends.

The story's fairly standard Slender Man blog conventions, though it's written creatively enough to stand alone well. Thomas is a believable character with good merits and bad merits, the plot points that happen all happen with precedent, and the Slender Man is written with enough surreal nature to give me goosebumps. The side characters, whenever they come up, are minor enough not to annoy, but still likable enough to care when they disappear. And for what it's worth, this story is just the right length before it starts to get boring! Really, this story checks out on all the elements of a solid blog.

But then the ending is kinda really unnecessary. If the blog had ended on the previous post, it would have been clear that Thomas had died trying to save Steph from the Slender Man, and it would have been subtle enough to give chills. But instead we get a detailed action post with a dissection and with hints of the Slender Man having some inner appearance that the faceless man is just a facade for. There's no hint of what this is, so this claim is utterly meaningless and only served as narm for me. We also get a full shot of tentacles, tentacles which had had no precedent in the story and again only served as narm. Without this last post, the Slender Man is a mysterious horror creature. With the last post, he's a tentacled eldritch abomination who I can rather easily predict the conventions to. Plus, the last post expects us to believe Thomas survived an explosion of 4,000 degrees, only for the entire post to be rendered pointless anyway by the fact that the Slender Man survives. The blog still ends on a faux-ambiguous note of Thomas going out to the Slender Man with a grenade, except now there's no mystery left to any of the plot points.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are blogs that can pull off detailed action posts with the Slender Man well. But they don't do it on the final post after a full blog of realistic horror. The action posts go in the middle so they don't come out of left field.

While I'm criticizing things, I feel the need to bring up the post titled "SLENDER MAN." In this post, Thomas comes back from finding Cynthia and Steve's bodies in the woods, and he decides to look up this faceless being on the internet. He then finds out all the stories of the fictional Slender Man as well as its Something Awful creation. I.. yes, I found this narmy as well. Incredibly. The idea that the protagonist is being pursued by a fictional creature can work, but not when it's only suddenly brought up right at the end of a blog. This reveal needs clues and hints, established motifs! As it stands, it feels more like the blog arbitrarily decided to link itself to the rest of the mythos rather than staying standalone like it had been setting up all this time.

One more criticism, though this one is far more minor! The characters Wednesday and Pugsley were also the source of much narm for me, but I fully admit that this one is entirely just my opinion. Their introduction actually made sense (as much as that's possible with surreal ghost children), and their actions bordered on creepy. They were good characters to include; I just personally hate kids.

Finally, there's the point of the blog's layout. It's a default look, standard, nothing special. But the background provides an unnecessary dissonance from the content. The background is that of a snowy mountain seen through condensated lenses, which of course has nothing to do with the story itself. Yes, this is just a default background, so I suppose it works with Thomas' "Average Guy" personality. But he's not even an average guy; he has distinct quirks and even speaks to the blog as if it's a separate character. I feel the customization was a missed opportunity in this case. Doesn't take any points away, but still missed.

LITTLE SLICES: THE INSOMNOBLOG is a good first blog. Buliwif shows clear understanding of the art of making a story realistic while maintaining creepiness, and even the controversial action bits themselves were written very well. I think he needs to work on his representation of eldritch antagonists, but things like that come with practice. I have much hopes for him, and I can say I enjoyed reading this blog.