Talk:Necrosleep/@comment-1901106-20171010191429

This pasta wasn’t as bad as, say, Nina the Killer, but there are still a lot of problems with it.

First off, Reed Murdock is… just not a very compelling character. His actions paint him as a bobbling idiot who doesn’t recognize obvious occult imagery when it’s staring right in his face and does obviously risky and just plain counter-intuitive things for no other reason than to advance the plot, and yet at the same time he seems to be terrified of really innocuous Pagan imagery. He’s also an unlikable douche who fits every ‘unemployed Internet libertarian’ stereotype like a well-worn leather fedora… and yet at the same time he’s also somehow really, really bland. Really, Twig was a more compelling character than he was, simply because she puts up with an owner who eats her cat food and never actually interacts with her.

For another thing, this pasta is abhorrently paced. We spend easily a third of it watching this guy whine about his miserable life and get into arguments on forums, then a bunch of exposition gets ladled onto us, then everything that got expositioned is never brought up again and Reed slides very rapidly into insanity to the tune of Linkin Park. The supposed ‘police report’ framing device is also a complete failure in clinical tone, with more grammar errors than the supposed college-dropout’s blog and rampant Lovecraft-style editorializing by supposed professionals while key details are omitted.

Finally, the actual ‘scary’ component of the pasta is just a mishmash of random concepts and imagery. We start out with some sort of Stalinist-era Soviet medical experiments, because that‘s never been done before... and Dr. Sergei Brukhoenko, but the way, was a real person and I’m sure that if he were alive today he’d be overjoyed to see his legitimately groundbreaking research into early heart-lung machines being used for shock value and cheap spoox. That randomly transforms into some sort of Satanic or occult operation (“Dr. Hail A. Stan”?? *really*?) with no clear goal or endgame- in fact, I’m not sure how this cult even remains functional given that nobody can survive long enough to give them repeat business. Then Reed starts seeing and hearing things and generally going very melodramatically insane complete with some sort of “lost episode”-style pasta spontaneously appearing… and then finally the big payoff is… Reed turns into a zombie?

The fact that this thing was made Pasta of the Month is an order of magnitude more frightening than anything in the pasta itself.