Internet Horror: Search And Rescue
Welcome to the first installment of a new series (unless I decide not to do any more, in which case it will be the only installment) where I review spooky stories from the internet, starting off with stories posted on the Reddit r/nosleep sub.
I have a tumultuous relationship with nosleep. For a long time I was a pretty big fan of the content there, to the point where I even wrote and posted some stories of my own (a few of which got into consideration for being included in some kind of TV project at one point, although like most such things nothing came of it in the end), but my interest has severely waned due to some cultural shifts in the sub over the last few years.
Nosleep was originally conceived as an “in character” sub-reddit. The stories were written as though they weren’t stories, instead being posts describing real events, similar to the replies you might get in one of those “post your best true paranormal experience” r/askreddit threads except with a much lower threshold in terms of how plausible the stories could be (in the Ask Reddit threads, people will call you out if you make up something too wild, whereas on nosleep the story just has to be something that could have happened without showing up too widely on the news afterwards).
Personally, I really liked this approach. It led to stories that were quick and easy to digest, which is the kind of content I’m usually looking for on the internet. But in the last few years this rule seems to have been abandoned, with more and more stories being written in traditional first-person (and sometimes even third-person) prose format. As well as just not being particularly unique or interesting—the internet is awash in amateur traditional short fiction—this also painfully highlights one of the other advantages of the old format, which is that you don’t need to be a particularly good writer to create a spoof Reddit post, but any deficiencies in grammar, formatting, dialogue or style will be readily apparent when you’re just writing straight fiction.
The story I’m looking at today is from the old school of nosleep, and is often held up as one of the best of that era. I'm a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service, I Have Some Stories To Tell (usually just shortened to “Search and Rescue”) was posted in several parts in 2015 and quickly became one of the most popular multi-part stories on nosleep. It would go on to serve as the basis for the fourth season of Channel Zero, a SyFy original that adapted internet creepypasta, although in the end only the story’s most striking bit of imagery would make it into the series.
As you can probably guess from the title, the story’s author presents himself as a search and rescue officer working at an unnamed US national park, here to anonymously spill the beans on the spooky, unexplained things that go on in the American wilderness, which the park service usually keeps covered up. Fans of both conspiracy theories and people who are wrong all the time will immediately spot the Missing 411 similarities; the author in-character claims to be corroborating Paulides’ work, out-of-character it’s pretty obvious that the stories were directly inspired by Missing 411. So, among other things, Search and Rescue has the honour of being the only halfway worthwhile thing to come from Paulides’ career.
The story is interesting because looking back, it sits at the inflection point where nosleep started to lose its identity. In the wake of Search And Rescue’s success the sub was inundated with stories in a similar format (“I’m a [INSERT PROFESSION], here’s a bunch of creepy things that happened to me and/or my colleagues while working at [JOB]”). The audience quickly protested and the mods instituted a blanket ban on “anthology” stories that consisted of collections of short anecdotes.
I can understand the frustration over cheap copycats, but to my mind this response from both the mods and the users represented a failure to really understand nosleep’s strengths as a fiction platform. The thing is, Search And Rescue’s structure is a perfect match for the nosleep format. The old-school readers that I count myself among went there looking for short, easy reads, not fully fleshed-out novellas with characters and dialogue, and the micro-fiction approach of Search And Rescue is an easy way to deliver that while staying within the bounds of plausibility (a collection of tales from multiple sources is a lot easier to take seriously than dozens of spooky incidents happening to one guy).
Also, one of the complaints you’ll see me make over and over again if I decide to write more of these posts is that nosleep authors frequently stumble when they try to expand their initial story seeds into larger yarns. Search And Rescue mostly eliminates that problem by not requiring any expansion; if a particular idea can only support a single paragraph, then you just drop a single paragraph and move onto the next one.
This story format also plays into one of the other main tenets of nosleep, which is that replies from both users and authors are meant to stay in-character as well. This often amounts to little more than “oh em gee this is 3 spoopy 5 me!”, but the way Search and Rescue was written actively encourages audience participation: since there’s no overarching plot, the author can see which story nuggets people are interested in and “contact their sources” to “ask them for more information” about those topics. This creates an exciting roleplay atmosphere where people feel like they’re actively engaging with the narrative instead of just passively reading it.
The fact that several authors before Search And Rescue came out had written stories in the same vein proves that this was a popular concept for a reason. I think that cutting off that avenue of creativity turned away a lot of people who were interested in writing “traditional” nosleep stories and hastened the big shift in the sub’s culture.
(The ban was lifted at some point after I drifted away from the sub, but evidently not soon enough to stop the cultural shift from accelerating)
But enough meta-analysis, how’s the story itself?
Well, you can go read most of it yourself in the time it will take you to get through this review, but in case you don’t feel like doing that: I think it mostly holds up, as long as you’re willing to go along with the nosleep format in the first place. The author won me over by never explaining any of the creepy or supernatural incidents on display, which is an approach to horror I like because as I’ve said many times in the past, 99% of the time horror writers bungle the explanation. Similarly, the apparent conspiracy among the Forest Service to keep this stuff covered up is only ever implied rather than being examined in any sort of detail, which I feel was the right call.
The author shows a knack for powerful, unsettling imagery, such as with the story’s most enduring feature: the discovery of mysterious, free-standing staircases deep in the wilderness (this is the part that made it into Channel Zero). I also liked the story about the dude back-flipping through the woods, which is a good example of something that sounds really goofy on paper but would be extremely creepy if you actually saw it happening.
Speaking as someone who loves a good unsolved disappearance, Search And Rescue takes the Missing 411 inspiration and runs with it, creating cases that are actually as bizarre and unsettling as David Paulides and his fans insist the real 411 cases are…but they might be a little too unsettling, which is where we start getting into Search And Rescue’s weaknesses.
I’ve been saying this for years and will continue to say it, but the primary, fatal flaw of horror is going too far. Any concept, no matter how strong, can go from horrifying to ridiculous if you push it too much, and that line is very easy to cross. The aforementioned back-flipping story manages to balance on the edge of that divide, but other stories don’t. Search And Rescue has the added problem of needing to work within the plausibility confines of nosleep, and some of the individual stories set off the “hang on, there’s no way that really happened” reflex that the sub is supposed to avoid, in addition to crossing that line between scary and silly that horror fiction in general is susceptible to.
The staircase thing is a good example. It was tossed into the first post as a very short “here’s a weird thing that happens sometimes” comment, but the idea was so strange and unique that people started asking more about it, prompting the author to revisit and expand on it in future installments. This started out well, establishing that they’re a known quantity among rangers working in the deep back-country and that new hires are spookily pressured to just stay away and not talk about them, but later installments end up with people trying to go up the stairs and falling down dead with swiss-cheese holes punched through their internal organs, which is where the whole thing started to collapse into absurdity for me.
Leading on from that, one of the other cultural problems that used to be rampant in nosleep stories and the wider creepypasta world (it’s somewhat less of an issue these days) is an over-reliance on extreme gore and “shocking” content, with writers trying to out-edgelord each other to come up with the darkest, most twisted stories they can. The extreme end of this rockets straight past being disturbing or even gross and lands straight in the cringe-zone, where you end up with stuff like “and then the murderers hollowed out my sister’s corpse and shoved their arms up her orifices to use her body as a puppeeeeeet aaaaarrrrrrgghhhh!!!!”
That’s an actual example, by the way.
Search And Rescue isn’t nearly that bad, but you still get stories about children being impaled on trees or otherwise killed in gruesome ways. In addition to being somewhat distasteful, this isn’t in the least bit scary, and it risks making the entire premise hard to take seriously. I’m absolutely willing to go along with the fiction that there are faceless people and “bear men” and blair witches in the woods. Like, have you seen the woods? Of course that stuff is in there, that’s just common sense. But as soon as people’s organs and viscera start flying, my eyes start rolling.
In a way, Search And Rescue was a victim of its own success. Since it was open-ended and lacking in an ongoing narrative it could continue indefinitely, and it essentially did, driven by audience enthusiasm into an ongoing project that ended up being far longer than most serialized nosleep stories. But the longer it continued, the more the inherent weaknesses in the premise became evident, one of which is diminishing returns. There’s only so many “this person died/vanished in the woods and it was really spooky liek woah” stories you can crank out before it starts to become stale, and the relatively low plausibility threshold inherent in the premise meant that there was a hard upper limit on how wild the supernatural occurrences could get.
Still, the series managed to keep things fresh longer than you’d think given those restraints, mostly by hinting at larger-scale events that it would have been stylistically inappropriate to engage with directly. My favourite is probably the anecdote that appears to be the aftermath of some sort of time travel expedition gone awry.
In terms of introductions to the nosleep format, Search And Rescue is going to give you a diluted taste of what’s on offer, for both good and bad. If you find yourself bouncing off of it entirely, then there’s probably no point in digging any further; but if something about it appeals to you, you might want to try reading more stories.