Talk:Candle Cove/@comment-35417007-20180427010946

Still an excellent story. What makes it so effective is its versimilitude: there could be a forum like this, people would write this way in such a forum, there even could have been a show like this before the details start coming in (which is why I'm not surprised to see people in the comments writing, "Ohmigod! I watched 'Candle Cove'! It's real!").

Straub obviously 'hung out' on a number of forums before writing this, as I recognize this sort of thing, where one person posts, "Do you remember...?" and then other people fill in the blanks. The suspense is masterly.

Is it scary? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder, but it's more well-timed and intelligent, like a "Twilight Zone" episode. It's especially effective how there are logical explanations that could, hypothetically, explain the group memory of "Candle Cove." (The mother's lying, the mother has dementia, they're all misremembering an actual show, the mother's misremembering.) That makes the story doubly effective, as it grounds the tale in reality--but the supernatural explanation is, unusually, that which makes best use of Occam's Razor. An excellent tale all-round, the electronic equivalent of a 'round-the-fire' story told by an itinerant traveller at a pub on a cold winter's night.