The End of Sorrow Lies, reviewed by DJay32

For reference, The End of Sorrow Lies was written by alliterator and can be found here.

alliterator is arguably the most prolific writer in the Fear Mythos, having been responsible for upwards of thirty-plus blogs alone. The End of Sorrow Lies is one of his shorter blogs, a blogpasta with only thirteen posts. It's about a man named Adam who posts about dreams he's been having.

The first half of the blog consists of regular posts describing a few dreams, with the occasional picture drawn in MSPaint illustrating an element of a mentioned dream. These posts, to be honest, don't really get me into the story. The pictures offer potential for immersion into the story, but they're used so sparingly and about such trivial details (such as mountains and a dancing skeleton, which never come up in the story again) that they really don't do much for me.

The second half of the blog talks about a recurring dream Adam has been having, involving wolves chasing him and tearing into him. Between certain posts are posts with a cryptic message written in, and really, these cryptic messages don't have much place in the story. I'm pretty sure the point of the messages is to convey that there's more to the dreams and that Adam may be descending into madness, but the dreams' significance is obvious because they're the focus of the story and Adam's descent into madness never comes up again. As it stands, they just feel arbitrary.

The actual wolf dreams are certainly described well, though the scariest element of them is that the number of wolves increases with each dream, and that detail isn't mentioned until the very end anyway where it all changes. The final post hints at personal insecurities of Adam's (he dreams of teachers being disappointed in him and his loved ones dying because of him), but he had received so little characterization for the bulk of the blogpasta that this seems to come without precedent, and the story ends shortly after they're mentioned. The final post does reprise the circus dream mentioned earlier, and this was a great choice and really helped the story feel like it was being tied together.

One thing I feel noteworthy is the blog's layout. The background is custom and of a cartoon thought bubble, the blog's colour scheme is creative and pleasant, and the blog's description is surreal and contemplative. It's clear alliterator had put effort into making the blog presentable, and for that I must commend him. The pictures he had drawn for the blog were also a nice touch, with a big sense of minimalism, not that much detail put in.

Another detail worth mentioning is that this blog is one of the first to feature the Fear known as The Grotesque, who is represented by Adam's dreams which lead to his tragic suicide. The blog does fairly well at keeping subtle about The Grotesque's influence, although I'm left with the question of "If the last post really happened, who killed Adam's parents?" It's possible, even probable, that the interpretation of The Grotesque here is one that can have influence on the outside world as well as its subjects' dreams. But still, that's not evident; alliterator could have been a bit clearer about it.

All in all, The End of Sorrow Lies is a pretty blog with some nice experimentation in surrealism and minimalism. But the story itself falls short of its potential, with Adam getting very little characterization until it's too late and the story feeling almost nonexistent until the last post. It feels like this blog existed solely to introduce The Grotesque, who was going to appear in other stories anyway so even that purpose is rather redundant.

Not one of alliterator's better blogs, I'm sorry to say.