Talk:The Russian Sleep Experiment/@comment-37811291-20181214054243

Eh... I don't really understand why this one is so well-liked, to be honest. It starts off well enough but it really taxes my suspension of disbelief pretty early and it lost me by the end.

Why did they not die after clawing themselves up as badly as the story says, assuming these are regular people who have just been mentally fucked with by something eldritch? And the way these horribly mangled subjects are able to so effortlessly kill trained and armed soldiers is just ridiculous. Also when it states the researchers were 'scared', it just feels like the story telling the reader what to feel. This is the USSR we're talking about; the country that tested grenades on live prisoners and hooked severed dog heads to artificial hearts to keep them alive.

Plus the supernatural stuff is slipped in as gracefully as a penis into a bowl of pudding at a kid's birthday party, and it just doesn't add anything and if anything detracts from the story.

Unethical medical experiments are scary, people being exposed to shit they shouldn't know about through said experiments are scary, but the way it's handled here is really hokey and feels like lore text from a video game and not a good one.

The gore is just there to be shocking, and it makes the story as a whole feel childish. The actual symptoms of sleep deprivation are quite terrifying by themselves: Memory loss, hallucinations, mood swings, paranoia, and insanity. That can make something a lot more frightening and intelligent than "The prisoners tore their guts out and somehow still didn't keel over because blood and gore is spooky times.

Plus the dialogue of the prisoners near the end was just embarrassing, it didn't read like natural dialogue. It felt like goth-kid poetry or the pre-fight dialogue of a bad JRPG villain. I can't take this story seriously because it's so hokey like this.

The plot hinges on the research staff being stupid and inexplicably powerless to just shoot the crazy subjects, the dialogue is stilted and tries way too hard, becoming ridiculous as a result, and it just drags on substituting shocking imagery for an engaging story.

It just didn't work for me.