ICHF: Mr. Stellar

This ICHF was written by Title Known, who you can find at http://titleknown.tumblr.com/.  I may have made a few touch ups and notes here and there, but the bulk of this entry is their work!

 Art by Titleknown.

The creator of this iconic character, The Hungry Reader, is indeed an odd duck, as well as a friend of mine. He’s not fond of the original Star Wars trilogy but one of the few defenders of Metroid: Other M, and he’s a person who’s not fond of horror, and yet he’s written some of the most innovative stuff I’ve seen in the genre.

Namely, the subject of this ICHF hails from The Game Of Mush. It’s an epistolary story, written in the form of a set of rules for this strange game that might seem superficially like the rules of any real life board game. But, as one reads through, there is the dawning realization that this isn’t an ordinary board game. Rather, it’s a sadistic game of abusing; isolating; and ultimately devouring or rendering down to be devoured human beings, played by these unknowable things simply wearing human forms.

There’s never a big reveal, though – it’s all by implication. Further implication appears in the video adaptation (made by the same author) that expands on things in many ways in the form of an unsettling informercial/ And one of the elements it includes is the character above: Mr Stellar.

The character is meant to be representative of a “typical” player, with a somewhat goofy demeanor, but we never get the sense that’s what the players actually, truly look like. Rather, there is a feeling that it’s only a vague representation abstracting a “player,” like a muppet or a rubberhose cartoon character would be of a human being. And we’ll never know the full truth. It’s pure cosmic; mysterious horror.

Which is funny, because he’s mentioned never getting cosmic horror. In response to a prompt coming up with one, he did a joke about how “Maybe Cthulhu’s attached like a male anglerfish to his much larger ‘wife’”

And yet here he did something brilliant with true and pure cosmic horror, a nightmarish glimpse into the unknowable with hints of its nature only given by implication with a larger; terrifying truth we will never know, in the form of something seemingly so similar to a silly board game.

One of the major founders of the French new wave of film was a woman who never watched films and got her start taking film to record a place for a sick friend who couldn’t go. And yet, out of that heterodoxy, a whole movement was inspired. Perhaps we should think the same about horror, taking voices from outside of the genre and letting them in…

Editor’s Note: We needed more Creepypasta monsters in ICHF too.  This Jam is really working out!