For reference, the Amalgam saga is a series of seven blogs written by TheSomnambulist. They have a set order: Prestidigitation, Urban Malefic, The World Through These Eyeholes, Cold and Lonely Days, Metaphysical Fiction (plus companion blog Dawghouse), and No Gods No Masters. This post contains the first four.
Prestidigitation
Prestidigitation is a 23-post blogpasta about Marcinius Trowess, a student who hears things in his sleep. Over the course of the story, the things he hears are analyzed and looked into, dismissed as hallucinations caused by sleep paralysis, and then revealed to be something malevolent that controls him and drives him to homicide.
The story is simple, and the presentation is easy on the eyes and quick to read. Marcinius is presented as an apathetic teenager, his blog set up only for a school assignment, and so TheSomnambulist chose a generic blog template to better get this across. He did a good job with this.
Really, Prestidigitation isn't much. It takes a few minutes to read, the story's really easy to follow, and.. there's nothing wrong with it. There's a lack of punctuation here and there, but that works with Marcinius' nature. What I do particularly like about the story, though, is that it can easily work even outside of the Fear Mythos. There's no explicit mention of Fears (though the forces Marcinius listens to are most likely The Choir); the story is simple enough that anyone could read it. It works very well. It's just.. really simple. But hey, we're just getting started with this saga.
Urban Malefic
At 42 posts, Urban Malefic is much bigger than the first blog, this one being more of a blogella, and the story has a lot more going on. The posts are considerably longer on average, though there's so few line breaks that it can feel like constant walls of text.
The story's about a man named Portnoy Augustus who wakes up trapped in "the City" (The Empty City of the Fear Mythos). Thanks to a bit of science fiction, his thoughts are transcribed onto the blog in a stream-of-consciousness format. Throughout the course of the story, Portnoy explores a large variety of increasingly surreal locations that don't run on the conventional laws of physics. It's revealed to him that he's going through some sort of test that won't be explained (as this would influence the course of the test), and he goes through personal trials involving his past and his issues with isolation. Towards the end, he develops a firm understanding of the physics of the City, even an ability to manipulate his environment, only to find out through a parallel self (it makes sense in the story) that the test the City was coaxing him towards would result in the entire Earth being absorbed into the hellish surreal environments of The Empty City. With this knowledge in mind, Portnoy refuses to comply with further testing, and uses his environment-manipulating abilities to end the blog.
Really, it's a cohesive narrative with a very entertaining narrator. Portnoy's commentary is amusing as hell, which is exactly what the story needs to keep the reader going through the constant walls of text and confusing events. Because as interesting as the plot is, the actual story can be difficult to trudge through. Most of the posts are labelled as nothing more than numbers, and most posts are a big wall with no line breaks, leaving a rather monotonous reading experience. But if you stick to it and focus on reading, Urban Malefic provides a quirky and mind-bending tale.
The World Through These Eyeholes
Even bigger than the last, The World Through These Eyeholes has 98 posts to its name, presenting us with not a blogella but the Amalgam saga's first proper blog. It's about the Faceless Bastard, a man who wears a mask at all times to cover the remains of where his face once was, a man who lives with a flock of birds nesting inside him at all times. The birds (The Convocation of the Fear Mythos) are sentient and give Faceless jobs to do, often jobs that other twisted creatures need doing (the Fears). As Faceless does his jobs, he uncovers a Fear named The Brute who is dormant and trying to rise again, and with the help of The Convocation, Faceless is able to subdue it again.
During this lengthy story, we get to know and learn to love the Faceless Bastard and find out how he got to be this strange figure he is. Honestly, he's one of the most memorable protagonists I've seen in a Fearblog. He has a wit about him that I can only assume means TheSomnambulist has a knack for observational comedy, especially when coupled with Urban Malefic. ThoughEyeholes falls into a similar problem as the previous blog, in that there are an awful lot of walls of text making it daunting to read on. Luckily, this problem appears considerably less as the story goes on.
I don't have many complaints; the story's really well put together for what it's worth. The characters are memorable (The Faceless Bastard appeared in the Fear Mythos RPG, and The Brute's legacy is still being discussed to this day), the way the story connects to Urban Malefic isn't too blatant but is still greatly written, and the story itself is filled with addictive twists and turns to keep you reading.
Cold and Lonely Days
Cold and Lonely Days has 39 posts, presenting a blogella about twelve-year-old Megan Jilees, a girl who becomes a servant to The Cold Boy and whose brother has sharp claws. The story consists of her being taken through a confusing and not-often-explained journey featuring a lot of Fears that hunt her without outright harming her and a mysterious figure named the Muffin Man who helps her find answers.
The thing is, not many answers are given. It's rather frustrating, especially considering the story is told through such an unreliable lens that even simple details are obfuscated. But towards the end, Megan makes the comment that she doesn't want to know the answers because they're unimportant, and this.. well, I feel like that was a great comment to make. It made it clear that this was supposed to be a confusing experience, just like it will have been for Megan. And when viewed like that, I definitely enjoyed this story. Again, TheSomnambulist gives us a memorable character with the Muffin Man. And if the cliffhanger ending is anything to consider, he'll probably see more use in the upcoming blogs.
But I have to be honest, I didn't enjoy this story as much as the last two. Honestly, reading it gave me a bit of a headache. The confusing nature was great when it was over and I looked back on it, but the actual experience was just.. frustrating. I felt like the posts I was reading didn't matter, since they were told through a perspective I couldn't connect to or often understand. And the blog's colour scheme was fairly monotonous, just blue and white.
So what we have is an interesting story with some details explained and others kept a mystery. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done.
Metaphysical Fiction
Dawghouse
No Gods No Masters
For convenience purposes, I feel it's best to tackle all three in one single review.
Metaphysical Fiction, at 64 posts, is about a man loosely related to the protagonist ofPrestidigitation. This man, Doctor Maless Peyn, is thrusted into a game where he has to defend himself from a majority of Fears. He is able to win, only for The Cold Boy to kill him and then only for The Manufactured Newborn to make him a Thoughtborn, a creature of pure information. He learns how to map his information onto a human brain, thus taking over a body, and he uses his new abilities to help Portnoy (the protagonist of Urban Malefic) avoid the Fears. ..sorta. The plot gets confusing.
Meanwhile, Dawghouse, at 40 posts, is about the Muffin Man from Cold and Lonely Days. He spends the first act of the blog talking about himself and what actually happened in the aforementioned blog, and then he saves his sister and has to go on a series of missions loosely connected to The World Through These Eyeholes. Over the course of these missions, the Muffin Man is introduced to a collection of four eldritch creatures (The Herald, The Envoy, The Emissary, and The End) collectively called The Amalgam. They're a sort of universal.. parasite phenomenon, and they bring with them the end of the world. He is joined by The Dying Man as well as Harold from The World Through These Eyeholes, and as the plot progresses he's joined by Doctor Peyn and Portnoy. Around this point, both these blogs stop and move onto the final one.
Finally, No Gods No Masters, at 27 posts, marks the end of the Amalgam saga. It starts off detailing the Muffin Man's plan to use The Quiet to kill the slender man and weaken the Fears, and then this adapts to become the collective protagonists' new plan to prevent The Amalgam from ending their universe. To put it bluntly, the plan doesn't work (well, it kills the slender man and weakens the Fears, making the situation even worse), and the protagonists run out of ideas only to be confronted by the ambiguous character Jack of All at the last minute who strikes a deal with them. He saves the world, only to then announce he's only saved the world in other timelines; the protagonists are doomed. The saga ends with this.
It's.. a really complicated story. I don't think I can review these blogs without speaking of the Amalgam saga as a whole, so before I do that, let me get a quick complaint out of the way.
Personally, I don't like that these blogs don't stand too well on their own. Dawghouse ends arbitrarily and switches to No Gods No Masters (and hey, let's assume the blog system is meant to be even remotely realistic, how were the first several No Gods posts on Da Dawg's account as early as 2011 when the Da Dawg account was proven, at the start of Dawghouse, to be some random person in 2012?), and there's no reason for Doctor Peyn to stop blogging on Metaphysical Fiction when he does; he's still a part of the story afterward. As individual blogs, these three blogs don't do well. And I don't like that.
Now then! The Amalgam saga is basically a series of blogs about people who are pawns in the Fears' endless games, people who are used as devices in furthering various schemes, people who are played with and tortured for who knows what reasons. Even the people who are able to beat the system and rise above their gods and masters are either pulled back down into the game or, as that ending shows, killed somehow anyway. Everyone dies, nothing matters, life is hell and death is hell. The Amalgam saga, quite simply, is cosmic horror with a witty comedic shell. A sense of "life sucks, so why not enjoy it?"
As for the blogs' appearances, Metaphysical Fiction had a nice white background with a light-blue theme to make it pretty. Dawghouse and No Gods No Masters both shared the same appearance, making me wonder even more what the point of breaking them up into separate blogs was. But all throughout the Amalgam saga, the general consensus on blog appearance seems to be just going with the simplest options. So I don't really feel much to comment on here. There wasn't much to set the blogs apart from every other blog appearance-wise, but I think the stories do that task well enough to compensate.
It's admirably written, for sure. Amusingly complex, affably entertaining, with some really awesome portrayals of Fears. But on the lower side, the blogs suffer from a need for proofreading. Maybe it's just the grammar nazi in me, but reading that much text without all the necessary punctuation starts to give me a headache. And I don't think the blog had enough mileage to match the plot. That is, the pacing was really good for the first few blogs, but around the time ofDawghouse, the plot seemed to move ten times faster than the posts did. Events happened and there wasn't enough pacing to let the reader contemplate the effects of this and feel for the characters. The characters needed more soliloquys, more monologues, more discussion of the plot to break up the constant pace and to make it feel even remotely relatable. Hell, in different ways, the earlier blogs needed more action and less empty posts; the progression from "not enough action" to "more action than one can even focus on" happened much too suddenly.
All in all, TheSomnambulist might want to consider this saga his magnum opus in the Fear Mythos, but I'd love to see him top himself.
[Editor's note: Since the time of this review, TheSomnambulist has published extra material continuing the saga: The Unlikely World, The Abominable Act, and Epilogic (as well as a lot of preliminary material which can be found here). Reviewer DJay recommends all three, in roughly that order, as they provide a satisfying conclusion.]
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