Prestidigitation, reviewed by Hexillith

[Editor's note: This review was written externally and copied to the Mythos Review by its author.]

Prestidigitation is a blogpasta by TheSomnambulist, and can be read here. Its main Fear is the Choir.

This blog’s protagonist is Marcinius Trowess, who starts blogging in-story as a school project. He begins hearing strange things at night: first skittering noises, then footsteps and slamming doors. He runs away from home when he overhears his parents plotting to kill him, but the Choir continue to manipulate him.

I thought it was interesting how easily Prestidigitation lends itself to an alternate interpretation. The Choir only manifests within the text as sounds and voices heard solely by the protagonist; one might come to the conclusion that Marcinius had simply developed an unusually destructive case of schizophrenia. I’m not sure if this ambiguity was intentional on the part of the author, but I found it intriguing. I also liked the ends to which Prestidigitation uses the Choir – straightforward yet chilling.

I didn’t care for the use of Morse code in the final post. For one, I felt that it was unnecessary to make readers go to the trouble of decoding it, especially in a blog that hadn’t previously used codes or ARG elements. There was also no in-story explanation given as to why Marcinius was suddenly posting in Morse code when he’d never done so before. Also, throughout the blog, commas are practically never used when they should be. It’s possible that this was a stylistic decision made to give Marcinius personality, but I found it distracting (my inner grammar policeman is showing here).

Overall, I have a mixed opinion of Prestidigitation. On the one hand, I liked the way it used the Choir and the ambiguity therein; on the other, many small stylistic issues prevented me from enjoying it fully. I would recommend it to those interested in the Choir, but not to those who find grammatical errors as distracting as I do.