The End.
Emma Carpenter drops her e-reader. Like surfacing from a deep dive with aching lungs, she has never been so grateful to see those two words on her paper-white screen.
“Thank God.” She rubs her eyes.
She downloaded this bizarre e-book for ninety-nine cents on her neighbor’s recommendation. The novel’s cover art was featureless black with a white Comic Sans title: Murder Mountain. Sinister but in a lo-fi way, like a VHS snuff tape. For less than the cost of a candy bar, how can you go wrong?
Post-purchase, she’d noticed the subtitle: The Scariest Book You’ll Ever Read.
Uh-oh.
The raving blurb was in quotation marks, to appear quoted from a review or notable person, but there was no attributed source. It was the author’s personal boast.
Uh-oh.
Emma persevered and read on anyway, as the horror novel followed two college coeds backpacking alone in the Appalachian foothills. One is a psych major and the other is a prelaw student studying for the LSAT. They’re more ornaments than people: vain, shrill, stupid, and perhaps the least-convincing lesbians ever written. It’s telling that the most authentic character in the entire book is the serial killer.
Beyond Emma’s usual gripes with the trapped-in-a-remote-place-with-a-scary-person formula (Why is there never a cell signal? Why does no one ever carry a gun? For the love of God, why do they keep splitting up?), the only thing that kept her reading this hundred-thousand-word death march was an interesting artistic choice: from the first page, the novel is narrated entirely from the villain’s first-person point of view. The two women—the characters readers are meant to sympathize with—are only ever described through the killer’s eyes.
Written in the past tense.
One more time: uh-oh.
No surprise, then, that after hours of tedious stalking, the narrator/killer catches Psych alone in her tent and starts to strangle her. Prelaw intervenes to save her, but—instead of picking up the killer’s night vision rifle, which he has carelessly set aside—she chooses to fight him hand to hand like a dumbass. She’s promptly disemboweled and Psych is promoted to Final Girl. Psych also misses the memo to pick up the goddamn gun and instead flees screaming through the forest, stumbling across an abandoned cabin that’s within walking distance but never mentioned until now. Of course the parked truck fails to start. Of course she traps herself in the only room without an exit. Of course he drives home with her head in a duffel bag.
The End.
Thank God for that, at least.
Amazon has the audacity to ask her to rate the book. Out of five stars? One. She makes sure zero isn’t an option. Then she types a brief review—likely better written than all of Murder Mountain—but before clicking Submit, she hesitates.
Why?
She’s unsure. Her finger hovers in a hair-trigger pause. She imagines her own future self desperately warning of something terrible on the horizon, that she’s about to sign her own death warrant and this is her last chance to change course. The e-book is still unrated, so her one-star review will be its first and only. Will the author personally read it?
Something bangs against the window behind her. It’s a strange and fleshy sound, sickening in its heaviness. Her heart jolts in her chest.
She turns but sees only watery sky outside. Acres of yellow beach grass, dewed with rain and rippling in low wind. The rolling whitecaps of the ocean beyond.
A bird.
She’s alone.
A bird flew into the window.
Still, she stands, slips on a raincoat, and checks the backyard. Sure enough, she finds the bird motionless in the sandy flowerbed just below the floor-to-ceiling windows. A frail brown and reddish thing. Eyelids shut, as if asleep.
With cupped hands, Emma sets the bird in a lawn chair on a rumpled blue beach towel. Sometimes, she knows, they’ll stir back to life. Their little brains just have to reboot.
She returns inside.
On her e-reader, she discovers her review of Murder Mountain has already posted. Her index finger must have twitched in surprise. There it is. Her words. One star. Too late now.
So she deletes the novel and tries to forget about the two fictional college students and their lovingly detailed murders. She has countless more e-books to read. The internet is a vast ocean of stories, and troublingly, she’s realizing lately that the book’s quality doesn’t even matter. Superb, mediocre—whatever. It must only be a world sufficiently different from Emma’s, here on this sandy gray coast.
She studies her own words for a moment longer. Was she too harsh on this stranger? For all she knows, this author could be twelve. In fact, that would explain a lot.
Who cares?
Stop looking at it.
She decides she’ll walk her golden retriever, Laika, on the beach before the next rainstorm blows in. On her way out, she passes the bird on the lawn chair, still motionless, and she hopes that when she returns, she’ll find the towel empty, the stunned animal alive and free.
She’ll never think about Murder Mountain ever again.
Until two hours later, when she returns inside with salt in her hair and sand in her sneakers, and a red icon in the corner of her web browser informs her that her user review has received a comment.
She feels a faint tug in her stomach. Opinions are like assholes, the saying goes, and the internet has millions of both. But somehow she already knows exactly who commented.
She clicks.
The satellite Wi-Fi chugs briefly before displaying:
Hello Emma86,
Nice to meet you! I’m the author of the acclaimed thriller MURDER MOUNTAIN. Thank you very much for reading my novel. It’s readers like you who make it all possible!
However, I see you didn’t like my book. And that’s OK! But let me ask you: why review it, then? Readers should only post their positive reviews. And you may have nothing at stake here—but I do. Other potential readers will see your 1-star review, and that might discourage them from buying my books, which hurts me financially!
I work hard so someday I can quit my day job and write full time. It’s been my lifelong dream ever since I was a kid. I’m sure you’re a wonderful person in real life, and you wouldn’t wish to attack my financial security, so I was wondering if you could please kindly remove your review?
Best wishes,
H. G. Kane
She reads it twice.
She’s never seen an author comment on an online review of their own book, let alone ask for its removal. This breaks some unwritten rule, right? She reaches to shut her laptop—pulling the screen half down—but something here demands to be answered.
Don’t do it.
Maybe it’s the manufactured cheer, coming from a writer who described the tendons in a woman’s neck “snapping like pale spaghetti strings.” Or maybe it’s the excessive exclamation points, like baby talk.
Don’t respond.
Or maybe it’s the victimhood, the cringy implication that this “author” is entitled to a full-time living from a job without actually being competent at it.
Don’t-don’t-don’t—
She reopens her laptop. Quickly she types:
Hi. Thank you for taking the time to comment on my review. I’m sorry that your book wasn’t for me. But I will respectfully choose to keep my review posted, because this is a forum for readers to share their honest views, positive and negative alike.
She almost adds her own initials but doesn’t. She clicks Submit, this time without pause. Her comment blinks into existence below his.
Done.
The author’s name snags in her mind. H. G. Kane.
It does ring vaguely familiar. Maybe this person engineered their pen persona to sound that way, like a sexy transmutation of H. G. Wells and Stephen King? He or she can’t actually be famous, if Emma herself just posted Murder Mountain’s first and only—
She’s received another comment. Already.
Seriously?
A chill runs down her spine as she reads:
Emma86, with all due respect, I spent 6 months writing MURDER MOUNTAIN. It took you just a few seconds to type that hateful review and tarnish all my hard work. Little sapsuckers like you don’t understand what’s really at stake for me.
I implore you, please take your review down.
Best,
HGK
This one, she can read only once.
I implore you. Does anyone in this century still say that? And little sapsuckers like you—is that an insult? It’s all so brazenly weird.
Keys crunch under her fingers.
Sorry, but my answer is still no. Good luck with your future books.
She considers, before adding:
Also, FYI for your future books, no woman would EVER hike in high heels.
This is getting excruciating. She wonders if other users will read this chain and jump in. What will they think? Whose side will they take?
There are no sides, she reminds herself. Readers should have opinions. Authors shouldn’t comment on them. And the more she rereads this stranger’s words, the more her pulse spikes in her neck. Why should Emma care that this self-proclaimed “writer” spent six months of his or her life producing that literary bowel movement? She spent four hours of hers reading it. They both lost.
She needs air. Again.
She realizes she’s forgotten about the stunned bird outside.
The first raindrops are falling when she returns to check the lawn chair. To her disappointment, the feathered body is still there in the towel. Exactly as she left it. Wiry legs stiffening. Eyes shut. And now, under a crackle of approaching thunder, Emma notices something she missed earlier.
A bead of dried blood between wincing avian eyelids, like a tiny red teardrop.
She returns inside.
On her screen, another message from the author—now tinged with menace.
I won’t ask you again.
Without sitting, she answers.
Good.
Then she shuts her laptop.