thetruth-atlast.dreamwidth.com
01/08/24
Comments (15,092)
Anonymous So, this essay is ten years old now and I don’t think anyone except internet conspiracy theory fans have looked at it in years. But I was reading it over, and . . . I think Gottie was lying the whole time. I don’t have any proof, and I don’t even know if anyone will read this comment.
But I think Gottie killed Nathan. It just makes so much more sense than Rob’s ineffectual behaviour after the murder. Why did he never dispose of the body in the days after?
If he knew Nathan’s body was upstairs, why would he invite Gottie over and beg her to tell her where Nathan was?
Plus, this is a girl who posts everything she hears online. He must have known what a risk he was taking by inviting her to his house. He knew that she was effiemeral too, at that point. He even called her ‘Effie’. If he knew how badly she wanted revenge on him, why would he bring her into his house?
That’s the behavior of a man who is absolutely desperate to find someone they love. There are too many loose ends. The story is incomplete. The whole case is just too tangled and complicated to see the holes in the narrative.
I don’t believe Nathan would report Rob to the police for money-laundering. Not if he really loved him. Even if they were fighting, and Nathan was angry. So I don’t believe that Rob killed him to keep his secrets, whatever they were. I think he’d have been able to convince Nathan to stay quiet.
Here’s my theory. What if the murder happened when Gottie was inside their house, hiding under the desk in the office?
Gottie told us that she tried to escape out the window with her laptop and Rob’s own laptop. What if Nathan caught her before she could get out? He would have recognised her as the girl scout he’d bought cookies off.
He could have tried to grab her. Maybe she kicked him to the ground – or knocked him away with one of the laptops she was carrying. He could have hit his head on the corner of the desk.
Whatever happened, he hurt his head badly enough that he passed out. He collapsed to the floor, and Gottie panicked. She thought that he was just unconscious, that he would wake up in an hour. She dragged the body over to the office cupboard and hid it inside, to give her a chance to get away before Rob found him. She even locked it, just in case he woke up quickly.
Nathan bled out, unable to get out of the cupboard or call for help. He died, alone and trapped in the dark.
Rob was next seen searching for him on the street a few hours later, frantically calling his name. He barged past some fans, who filmed him. He was already looking for Nathan, even then.
Meanwhile, Gottie must have gone home to write up the next chapter of her essay. She had to have been hoping desperately that Nathan wouldn’t say anything when he woke up. But to her surprise, he never said anything at all. In fact, no one saw him for days.
RBC delayed filming on the show when Rob told them that he’d gone missing. They started searching secretly for him, hoping that he’d just gone driving for a few days. Meanwhile, Rob focused his attention on trying to stop Gottie posting about the money-laundering (leaving fake comments, etc). He didn’t even think to check inside his own house to find Nathan.
As more time went on without a sighting of him, Gottie’s suspicions grew deeper. What if Nathan hadn’t just been unconscious? What if there had been some kind of internal bleeding inside his brain? What if it had been life-threatening?
She told herself that Rob would have found him and got him to the hospital in time, if that was the case. But would he? Had Gottie made his chance of survival worse by locking him in the cupboard?
Days passed, and still Nathan wasn’t seen. Gottie probably started to panic even more. Because Rob was acting like Nathan was missing, not just sick. He was searching for him, according to a conversation which was overheard by a fan – he asked Bradley Saffitz if he’d seen him. He was offering a reward to anyone who found him.
Gottie became convinced that she’d murdered Nathan by accident somehow, and she was going to get arrested. And she’d stupidly posted about being in his house on the night it happened. She knew that as soon as the body was discovered, everyone would connect it with her. So she had to beat them to it – plant a story in their minds, before her readers could get there first. She had to make sure no one thought it was her. They had to think it was Rob instead.
So she made up a story of a fake argument she’d overheard between Rob and Nathan, posting it online alongside that short video of Rob in the street, upset about Nathan disappearing. She never had any proof of this argument.
She rearranged the evidence to make it seem like they were on the brink of breaking up. It must have been so easy to give Rob a motive – he had such a good one already, with the bitcoin illegalities (I believe that was all true. It’s too insane not to be.)
When Nathan still didn’t get in touch, Rob got more desperate. He invited Gottie over to his house to beg her to help uncover where Nathan had gone. Gottie took the chance to check the office. Nathan’s body was still there, where she’d locked him up.
She quickly left, and reported it to the police anonymously, making sure there was clear evidence online that proved Rob had the motive and the means, and that he’d been witnessed fighting with the victim. She did a good job.
One of the things she included was reference to Rob with a golf club. This helped cement her version of events in peoples’ minds: that Rob was a killer, and Gottie was just an innocent bystander.
But remember, Gottie has a motive too. She wanted revenge on Rob for driving her off LiveJournal. She wanted everyone to know at last what he’d done to her, and make sure he was punished for his money-laundering.
A murder was the convenient way to make sure he was punished. Even if he didn’t kill Nathan himself, when a body presented itself, she took the chance to get revenge. She had been desperate for someone to punish Rob for what he did for years.
I don’t know what Gottie is doing these days. She must be nearly thirty. Maybe she hasn’t mentioned Loch & Ness to anyone in years. Maybe she’s managed to make herself forget all of this even happened.
But there’s one person who won’t have forgotten. Rob Hennings is going to be released on parole next year. I’m very interested to find out what he does when he leaves prison. Because I’m pretty sure that somewhere out there, a woman is walking free who should be in jail for murder.
They’re going to tear each other apart.
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THE END
This blog will stay online permanently, but it is also being published by Walker Books in August 2024 with the title Last Seen Online. It will feature Gottie’s blog posts, alongside new chapters taking place over a decade later.
If you preorder before 1st August, you can get a goody bag with a signed art postcard by filling out this form.
If you’d like to be notified of future additions to Gottie’s toxic co-dependant misadventures, the easiest way is to sign up for my mailing list.
You can find more about my other books here:
- Green Rising – a Carnegie long-listed climate heist about rebel teen activists with plant magic
- The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker – a queer horror-rom-com about perpetually teenage ghosts
- The Quiet at the End of the World – a queer dystopia about human extinction
- The Loneliest Girl in the Universe – a horror about a girl trapped alone in space
– wren
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< Chapter 27 | Contents page | Goodreads
An Unauthorized Fan Treatise 
Oh my GOD! I am about to start a 3h exam in one minute and choices have been made to read this just before. Plot-twist as the epilogue. Bravo Lauren! That’s genius!
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good luck on the exam!!
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The exam went well, but the first 30 minutes left me hard to concentrate. I had a feeling it wasn’t Rob, but I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong and yes, this was great. Thank you!
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i admit my only sure guess for the past several chapters has been just “not rob”, so this was fun. i’d been so looking forward for the ending, and when i started reading, i burst into laughter and didn’t stop for a long time. full-on grin the whole time, this was very very cool!
god, poor rob tho, right? i’d sooo enjoy a print version too, especially if it would involve some snippets from recording that podcast. good lord. this was a really nice experience and a weekly highlight!
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thank you so much! ❤
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Umm… I saw you were able to delete a comment on one chapter Lauren and I typed in the wrong username. Would it be possible for you to delete it please? Thanks!
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deleted. just wanna say how much i’ve enjoyed your comments as you read! ❤
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This was an absolute bomb as an ending to the story. Wow. The entire thing was gripping from start to finish and now I’m going to read it all over again with this new and fresh perspective on my mind.
Thank you so much for writing this!
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thank you so much!
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HOLY SHIT! Roller coaster from start to finish. I had an inkling about what might have happened but like…. The breakdown at the end floored me! Also I did not know that there was a real comment section else I woulda been live logging my reactions.
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Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I missed the epilogue posting in all the craziness of the world. When the trial was finishing up and rob was still being blamed I was like “but where’s the rest of it? It can’t be rob, like it’s definitely not rob.” And with ch. 28 I was kinda taken aback with Gottie and how remorseless-ish she seemed or maybe like disconnected which felt strange but I was like “no, narrators are to be trusted” but NARRATORS ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED. just the expert way that you made gottie less and less what’s the word REPUTABLE I kept thinking where is this going why would she want us not to trust gottie why would an aspiring journalist, which thrive on the truth, be risking her name by lying so much? And it’s because she had skin in the game, as Effie, as Nathan’s actual killer, oh my god, it’s crazy. I mean she said it herself “nothing on the blog is real” and while I believe that hurting Nathan was an accident, putting him in a cupboard certainly was not, I guess it must’ve been panic but she locked him in there so no she knew what she was doing. Or at least was smart enough to know it wasn’t going to end well. I never could’ve predicted it and at the same time how did I not put it all together. Absolutely amazing and the style just overall was great. The amount of people I’ve gotten to read this just so I can gush about it. What a ride.
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Ahh, I’m so glad you liked it! This is such a lovely reply!
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Right, so I do think that Gottie was lying in her blog, as she said in the trial most of it was made up, but my god!!!! And she did such a good job portraying Rob as a bad person, which only really amped up after she broke into the house (which was incredibly shifty). I’d like to believe Rob killed Nathan, as I do really like Gottie but I don’t believe she’d be above twisting the facts for her own benefit. That said, this is brilliant and thank you so much for writing it!
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I’m so glad you enjoyed it, thank you!!
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Wow. I just finished binge-reading this entire thing. It was absolutely fantastic! The slow, ominous build up of dread over the course of the chapters as you realize that a crime came out of these seemingly benign series of fan wank events, and that someone was MURDERED, is exquisitely and uniquely horrifying.
The comments on each post were one of my favorite parts of your storytelling as well–you somehow managed to capture the audacious toxicity of online posting perfectly. Everyone’s varied opinions were so well-executed. I loved reading the “lmfaoooooooo no you didn’t” comments in response to Gottie breaking and entering, as well as the “you mean you wouldn’t simply ship drugs to an anonymously booked airbnb? pussy” poster and the “here’s my completely incongruous hurt/comfort fix-it RPF fic” user followed by the “what the literal fuck, this is a murderer” user.
Gottie’s underlying motivation of “I can excuse $13,000 in money laundering and forging of legal documents, but bullying ME off of livejournal at age 14 for my fanfiction is where I draw the line!!!!!!!!!!!!” is so…..perfect. It’s so teen tumblr user. Auguugughghghgh….
Finally, the unreliable narration was so well executed! I love that even at the end, post-trial, we’ll never know the full truth. Neither Rob nor Gottie is a good person, and both of them were willing to lie and cover up the truth in order to create a worldview that’s more palatable to their own interests. Both of the suggested endings hold equal truth. (But I personally favor the “locked in a cupboard and couldn’t get out and rotted there in the dark” because jesssssussssssssssssssss chrrrrrisssssstttttt………. that’s nightmarish.)
Thank you so much for creating this! I loved it and will definitely be recommending it to friends. 🙂
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Thank you so much for the lovely long comment! This made my day 😀 I’m glad you liked the open ending too!
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Hope this comment doesn’t doublepost but me and like half my webnovel/novel-reading mutuals all read this in this in a tiny window of 3 days one after the other, and holy HELL as someone who has been keeping tabs on fandom since 2006 (when I was a young kid myself!) this is UNREAL. I kept going “how does she KNOW” at all the little quirks of like 4 generations of stan culture, including stuff I personally never got too into like Larry conspiracy theorists (celebrity fandom has never ever been my thing). Chillingly accurate.
& The plot writing itself. I’m not actually a fan of thrillers, so it was a novel experience to spend like 20? chapters? With my hand to my mouth going “ohhh NOOOO”, and that slowly getting more intense as the premise (the fandom posts being used as evidence in a murder trial) started to trickle in on top of cringing at the deranged stan behaviour. & it was all so on the NOSE, down to the slash shipper’s antipathy towards female characters (& especially black female characters) that, in the wake of more socially conscious circles, most often manifests as pretending they don’t exist & half-hearted ‘yeahhh, you go girl’ sentiments. Laughed so hard seeing most locals who watch the show prefer…the well-known celebrity and protagonist of the show. Who would have thought!!!! Tiny nuances like this make it feel so much like it could really happen. Like this is the inevitability of fandom.
⬇️ I was livetweeting on private twitter for most of this, but some notable comments I made ⬇️
“Crying at “Rob’s a pussy” there are so many narratives here but the comments are my fav”
“FANFIC TIMELINE FANFIC TIMELINE”
[screenshot of Rainbow Rowell’s Wayward Son on gottie’s amazon wishlist captioned “sobbing”]
“DO YOU THINK MARGO GARCIA UTILIZED GIRL POWER EFFECTIVELY WHEN SHE GOT BRAD DEPORTED”
“SJPERWHOLOCK GONE GIRL”
[not noted here, but around halfway through the story literally everything I said was in caps lock because I was getting so flustered by every single new bit of information]
This epilogue left such an UNBELIEVABLY powerful impression that I’ve been catching myself thinking “superwholock gone girl…” to myself at random hours of the day. The horror, compartmentalized by how much TIME has passed before this final theory pinning down WHY things didn’t come together so neatly. Absolutely flattened me.
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This comment made me SO happy, thank you so much! It’s really nice that the story is still finding its way to new readers. If you use Goodreads, I’d super appreciate if you and your friends leave a review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52260356-an-unauthorised-fan-treatise
“superwholock gone girl” is the best description ever, and all the bits you mentioned were parts I cackled over while I was writing too – so glad they hit you in the throat!!
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I cant be nearly as eloquent as you, so Im just going to say that I just bingeread the whole thing and that the suspense is absolutely brilliant!
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Holy shit. I read this all in one sitting, I couldn’t put it down for a second. I was at the edge of my seat, and WHAT A TWIST. What insanity, and yet, it feels so real, I’ve been in the cogs of a fandom and people do in fact think like this, act like this. I was just willing to accept crazy-fan behavior at face value but the twists throttled me left and right, and the final one gave me total whiplash. Incredibly done! What a fantastic use of a blog-form medium to subtly bend the truth when we don’t know it’s happening. Good to know though, not to mess with fandom girls…
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I’m not convinced there’s no connection between Gottie and Milly Garcia. Gottie knows a lot about publicity stunts, and I feel like Rob knows her better than her story implies he does.
Wow. So many layers of unreliable narrator.
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Okay, looking back, and remember that Rob has the power to fake documentation, is it possible that Gottie has changed her name at some point? Yes this is into crazy-wild theories, so IDK. This is also a tenuous connection, but the Nessie person from the livejournal fandom’s real name is Margaret, which has the same roots as Margot. I feel like a conspiracy theorist trying to find threads in all this mess. This story is a wild ride, I had to gloss over the “RPF” bits even if they aren’t real people because that sort of thing always makes me feel uncomfortable. I did notice how Gottie starts her essay claiming she doesn’t ship the actors, but ends it saying that she does.
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Hugely enjoyed this, and like other comments have said – it’s a fast read when you’re coming at it as a single work, in the best way. I’d adore an audiobook version of this in the style of a Youtube fandom history recap, though honestly that would miss some of the intense scrolling-and-praying action in reading it.
I’m not normally a reader of mysteries, but I am a fan of Gene Wolfe and also fandom drama, so an elaborately amoral and unreliable narrator combined with, well, fandom wank, made for a great hook. Two great tastes going great together.
Also, the podcast ad at the end was the absolute clincher. I’m definitely recommending this to friends who also enjoy fandom drama as a perfect hyperbolization of that world.
Also, #freerob, I was certain Gottie was Effie early on and reasonably sure she must have done the deed from the minute Rob let her into the house and she survived.
Oh, the humor’s great too; there’s something deeply satisfying about seeing Pepe Silvia in the comments here, or the I GUESS guy; spot on and precise, and somewhere between satire and realism.
I’ll have to check out your other works!
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Thank you so much!! I’m so glad it kept your attention!
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I originally intended to read it about a chapter or two a night, and ended up reading it in two sittings, so it did a bit more than keep my attention! The pacing worked really well for me.
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Hello??? This story had me on the edge of my seat the whole time. I got some chills in the last chapter when the last comment was set 4 years in the future, and then again when I saw this one was set in 2038. The “tumbleweeds blowing across an empty desert” atmosphere of this epilogue reminds me of how people today talk about LiveJournal, and really highlights the cyclical nature of this futile internet feud. All I can say is…well done.
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Thank you so much!! I love the description of tumbleweeds at the end, that’s so exactly it. 😀
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i just read this entire blog in one sitting, so i think i’m justified to say that i don’t think i’ve had this much fun reading a mystery/thriller maybe ever! the dread, the suspense, the complete confusion, the sheer hilarity of some of the in-universe comments (“Support women, gottie!! hack THEIR accounts too!” i’m looking at you). such an ingenious and modern take on mysteries!! and that podcast ad at the end – i laughed very hard.
ps i am a huge fan of ‘The Loneliest Girl in the Universe’ and yet you somehow managed to outdo it. very impressive
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thank you so much! i’m so glad it lived up to The Loneliest Girl too!
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just read this in one sitting, holy shit. holy SHIT. i love epistolary content, and especially meta fannish epistolary stuff, so i knew from the jump i’d enjoy this, but the TWISTS!! you threaded that unreliable narrator needle so well, i kept thinking ‘that doesn’t quite add up is that intentional’ and then it always was. all the little nods to real fandom stuff were delightful, the previous lyra/jayden shipper drama being links to actual HP shipper drama in particular made me cackle, and just. that slow mounting sense of dread. the reveal that it was a murder! for the chapter after that, i have to admit, i was very convinced nathan had killed gottie. which made the epilogue reveal hit even harder!
real true crime squicks me for reasons i’m sure you can guess, but i do love a good mystery, and this has scratched that itch in a way i don’t know if anything else will ever manage. she KILLED HIM and then POSTED THROUGH IT, that’s SO GOOD. and she didn’t even ship them! to think i was mentally commending her on her objectivity the first few chapters. i can already tell this will only be better on the reread. and this is my introduction to your work, so i’m very excited about what else you’ve done!!
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Thank you SO much! I love getting comments like this, I’m so glad everything I tried to do worked for you. 😀
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I just reread this, it was truly one of my top reading experiences of 2019 and revisiting it was a joy. I don’t think I’ll ever have all my questions answered, and I love that about this story. It’s such a fun exercise to try to separate the truth from the lies.
That all being said?! No WAY Rob doesn’t notice the smell of a decomposing corpse in his house. Even if Nathan is only dead in the cupboard for a couple of days, I feel like the scent would be noticeable. And knowing that, how could it be anyone but Rob who did it?
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Thank you so much! I’m working on the novel version right now, which will hopefully answer all your questions 🙂 It’s due out in summer 2023 – you can add it on goodreads here if you need a reminder: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58706120-untitled
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I had the same thought about the smell, grotesque as that is to think about. Obviously lots about the murderer!Rob narrative DOESN’T add up, as the 2038 commenter says… but the idea of him being shacked up with a dead body for two weeks and not noticing also feels far-fetched. 🤔
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This is honstly so good!!! I’m a huge fan of thrillers and this is some top notch stuff. And I’m gonna be honest, I enjoy this better than Gone Girl. (Not saying gone girl is bad in any way, just plot preferences)
I read this all in one sitting bc I can’t bring myself to think about anything else unless the finish reading this.
I see you have something planned for 2023, is it a sequel? Super hyped about it!
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Thank you so much! In spring 2023 an adapted version of this blog will be published by walker books that will have two timelines – gottie’s story and then a sequel set 10 years later!
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Dear Lauren, wow, what a fantastic thriller you have written here, I’m really blown away! Thank you<3 .
You laid out so many breadcrumbs throughout the story which was wrapped up perfectly! I had no clue on what was happening in the firsts chapters, but was just sucked in anyway. And boy, some wild twists along the way, – can't wait to get the book version next year! Such a great "evolution" on Rowell's Fangirl "concept". I love how the story caters specifically to the fandom world – a bit of a niece perhaps? but an epic read for the informed reader. Even though it highlights the backside of that world, it's clearly written with a lot of love – which really made my hearth ache for all the wonderful people, stories, art and love out there in the fandom world. Thanks you for capturing that aspect specifically.
I found you via the heartstopper short story (great by the way!) and just started your newest book on my kindle. Really looking forward to read more from your hands.
Happy new year from Scandinavia.
Birthe
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Thank you so much! I’m really glad all the clues were picked up on 😀 so glad you found me through heartstopper, it’s so nice seeing some new readers come along!
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This was definitely an interesting reading experience. Took me a bit to get into, but then I went through most of it in two days last December.
I don’t think I’ve seen this particular narrative format before, of a blog+ comments, with included references. The closest I remember was a story told through excerpts from blogs, forums, chat logs, and other social media. Which has some similarities, but the strict focus on one blog in this story leads to a strong focus on Gottie’s perspective, with interactions being largely limited to the comments.
I think the blog focus was also important for her ability to function as an unreliable narrator, and lead both the in story audience and the outside readers along the largely fictional sequence of events she designed.
She is the only source of information on her personal investigation story, meaning the commenters can’t counter her claims (except for one instance regarding a hotspot, I think), and that in turn results in a seemingly coherent picture for the readers of the story. Can’t be factchecked if no one else has any opposing facts. Without factchecks, the reputation of the presenter stays relatively clean. (Though of course there is still the stalker-ish behavior and insistence on interpreting things in a way that has the two targets in a relationship, but those point more towards obsessive fan than devious liar.)
So yeah, interesting story that I learned a bit from about perspective. Also about the history of weird fandom drama(?).
Cheers!
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Thank you so much -i really enjoyed experimenting with how far I could push the unreliable narration, so I’m pleased it worked for you!
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Man, I read this story a couple years ago when it first got published and decided to re-read it this week and I’m still blown away by all of the intricate details, how everything is woven together. I love the open-endedness of the ending, because I feel like we ultimately really don’t know who killed Nathan. There’s strong evidence in Gottie’s favor *and* Rob’s favor, and only the two of them know the truth.
I’d like to propose a wild theory, though! There’s mention of Loch & Ness’s producer owning a pug, and the only picture we see of Gottie has her holding a pug. What if Loch & Ness’s producer is her dad/stepdad? And the producer’s wife is Gottie’s mother? She mentions her sister and her mom, but no dad. And if she found out that Rob was the one who falsified documents that allowed her mother to be screwed over in court, I wouldn’t put it past her to want revenge. She *already* wanted revenge for the effiemeral stuff. I think this would also explain how Gottie had access to all the resources she did. Sure, you can find a lot of stuff on the web, but you can find out so much more if your dad is a big TV producer. In the same vein, I do think she is related to Milly Garcia, and that’s another point in the direction of Gottie getting inside info from somewhere.
Anyway! That’s just my theory, and again, I appreciate how this ending lets the reader draw their own conclusions c: A fantastic work, one of my favorite web novels.
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Thank you! I love this theory 😊
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YES! THE PRODUCER WITH THE PUG! idk how much I believe the other sources of aggrievement; that’s the big one for me. She started the whole thing with dark web experience; it may be how Rob asked for a meeting; he certainly believes she has contacts and the ability to kidnap someone. She 100% left herself anonymous comments urging herself to follow the money so she could play naïve, and I expect they have innocuous IPs. Any number of leading comments could be her as well.
I suppose I shouldn’t mention other connections and suspicions so as not to interferes with the book. Incredible work, the fic parts were so gross, well done!
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I will gift it 😀
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Hello, I just binged this entire thing in a day and it’s really haunting me. In a good way but still
I’m around Gottie’s age when she first wrote that blog and I am in an RPF esque fandom. It surrounds a bunch of people who play Minecraft online and have acted out a story and characters with it. People, including myself, write fanfiction about those characters that sometimes blur the line between fiction about characters and RPF about real people. It is a fandom that is quite toxic and has people who are just as creepy as Gottie if you look for them. I’ve likened it to staring at the void and the void staring back
I had a favorite youtuber on there and have written fanfic about the character he roleplayed as for about two years now. It was the first fanfiction I’ve ever published and this fandom allowed me to make my first online friends who I treasure greatly. His videos and streams provided a lot of comfort to me thanks to him humor.
That Youtuber passed away from cancer in June 2022. He was around 22 and had ten million subscribers on Youtube.
So, in a way, I understand Gottie’s attachment to an actor she didn’t know. Even I didn’t understand just how much a parasocial relationship can effect you until the YouTuber passed away and I was sad for months. I still get sad over it sometimes. I think it’s something a lot of people don’t understand until it happens to them.
Gottie reflects so many people in that fandom, including a little bit of me. I’ve learned over being in it that it’s so so easy to become creepy about someone without even realizing you’re doing it because everyone else supports it. Getting into petty fandom fights and holding grudges over things that really don’t matter that much.
So I want to hate her but I can’t. Because I know what it’s like to get attached to someone you don’t even know, even if I’d never write a blog speculating about their relationships. I have seen so many Gotties and I only feel pity for them as well as the people they talk about.
Basically, this was very very good and such a dark mirror at what RPF fandoms can be if things go very bad. I believe RPF can still be a great outlet for people but it is something you have to be careful about. I had to be careful or else it felt like I’d get warped into someone like Gottie.
I can’t wait for the sequel! My apologies if this is long and incoherent, I just have so many feeling about this work
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hi JC, thank you for this detailed comment. I’m so sorry about your experiences, but really glad you found some solice in the story, and related to it. i’m doing another serialised novel which you can sign up for here: https://laurenjames.substack.com/
i hope you find things a bit easier in the future and have people you can talk to. online grief is so real and valid.
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wow just absolutely wow. this story is amazing. i cant even express in words just how much i love this story, i binged it all in a day with a friend and im still up at 2 am rambling to her about it. i cant agree with Gotties actions but i can definitely empathize with her.
Its almost poetic that Rob who was immune to legal consequences from all the lives hes ruined with his rampant fraud went down for a crime he never committed.
Thank you for writing such a good story.
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thank you so much, katie! I loved reading all your comments today 🙂 i’m doing another serialised novel which you can sign up for here: https://laurenjames.substack.com/
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This story was INSANE. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I would’ve read it in one sitting, except that eventually it was 3 AM and I had to force myself to sleep. Just finished it the next (er, later that same morning, I suppose). I’m still not sure which version of events I believe is true. Thank you for writing and sharing this incredible work!
PS: I wasn’t expecting to see Heartstopper characters in the comments of Gottie’s blog! Nice little Easter egg there to go with the Alice Oseman cameo!
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Thank you! 😀
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A few people on tumblr mentioned this story in the last 24 hours so of course I binged the whole thing this afternoon (while also live tweeting it) and wow. Insane. So good. Such a pitch perfect representation of fandom drama. Like not only Gottie’s blog posts but those comments? Perfection.
I bet Sarah Z of their world did a video essay about the deep dark drama of the loch and ness fandom in 2022 or so.
Personal highlight for me was the comment pepe silvia did it from user macdenclown 😂
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Oh! And the kin drama and fang wives!! Can’t forget them!
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I’ve been loving seeing the tumblr comments roll in! Thank you for sharing!
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Oh my god Gottie started the blog because she wanted to expose Rob for the fandom drama back in the day but when she stole his laptop she saw he was the one who provided the fake evidence against her mom for the producer mentioned in the last chapter (the pug connection!!)!! And then she framed him for murder in revenge!! So messed up! (Maybe she even looked through the laptop & saw it before she left their house and maybe killing Nathan wasn’t so accidental?? We can’t be sure anything she said was true,maybe she never hid under the desk, maybe she saw the stuff on the laptop and hid by the door instead, and attacked the person coming into the room expecting it to be Rob but it was Nathan instead, and then she had to cover her tracks, and could still get further revenge on Rob at the same time. This theory may be going off the deep end but this girl is crazy, obsessing for years, stalking, breaking and entering, I can totally see her thinking “he’s taken so much from me, he deserves to have everything taken from him too.”)
Thank you for this wild ride! I wish Loch &Ness was real now (minus the murder part obviously) because I want some more Fang/Jayden fanfic lol.
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Excuse me, you’ve blown my mind. I had swallowed the Garcia being a common name bit hook-line-and-sinker thinking it was a red herring (I’ve also received the “ARE YOU RELATED TO LAST NAME” for having a cultural last name and laughed, thinking it was a comment on that). I never put the pug part together. I am dying to read Last Seen Online now, I need to know everything about this family.
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This was such a delicious and wild read– a friend of mine posted a link to it on Instagram earlier today and I read it all in one sitting. I don’t normally comment on things like this, but I’ve been glued to my phone since I started reading, first because I couldn’t put the story down and then because I was sending recommendations to everyone I knew.
You do such a wonderful job of making this feel exactly like real fandom drama, and the creeping horror of what we’re not being told escalates in such a satisfying way. The epilogue is what really got me, though. I’m absolutely itching to read the blogs/podcast timelines side by side, and cannot wait to see how Delilah’s story will recontextualize Gottie’s posts.
Thank you for the great afternoon I spent reading this!
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Found this site on Tumblr and I’ve read the entirety of the novel in two days because I got scared when I read this at night but WOW what an incredible story, as someone who has been online since I was 12 and now 25 I’ve been seeing so many real fandom discourse and dramas, this is like when I watch other fandom’s dramas and wincing from my seat with my popcorns.
Absolutely love how you keep having gottie write things that doesn’t match up with lies she wrote before because it’s hard to remember so much lies she’s made up. And later as the reader we know that she is Effie , but no one (in the comments that are shown) seemed to get it, except the person who commented about her plagiarizing a fic years ago, it was frustrating but not for long because later on someone in the comments DID mention this fact . Incredible timing. Love love love the ending, I’m fully convinced gottie killed Nathan, crazy what could happen if you wronged a person online. I will watch what I say online more from now on. Again, fantastic work!!!
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oh my god, this was amazing. literally the best true-crime-style i’ve ever read. i look forward to your next serialized book!
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Another Tumblr comment rolling in, with a compliment on the unreliable narrator I don’t think I’ve seen yet… the fact that when we got glimpses of Rob that WEREN’T filtered through our unreliable narrator (the public conversation he wouldn’t know was overheard, the livestream during which Gottie was hiding her phone, the offer of a reward, and then as the epilogue points out the alibi he was creating in the comments was totally focused on forgery, not murder) he acted exactly like Nathan was missing.
I did think for a long time that Nathan might be dating BRAD, however… (given the “dragging him out to LA” comment, that he carefully calls him his housemate in interviews, that he changed his mind about getting involved with Rob’s criminal activities in order to keep Brad with him… Plus we find out about Brad’s connection with Nathan’s amicable ex right when we find out she’s a Roban shipper, which made me wonder if the shipping was to help shield Brad and Nathan.)
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I do wonder if Gottie did have more to do with everything. She was definitely trying to get money even before her laptop was stolen, but alas, who knows. That makes sense as to why she stole the phone. She was definitely an obsessed fan too, despite anything else. Great story!
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Literally insane. Loved this. I’m a sucker for unconventional formats and other people’s drama, especially weird fandom drama, so this hit the spot exactly.
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Oh my god. This is incredible. I opened this to read it later but got sucked in immediately. Here I am a few hours later…… my god
Definitely got yourself a new fan from me! Incredible narrator, incredible crafty, sneaky perspective work. augh. I’m gonna be thinking about this all day. Omw to check out your other publications right now!!
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I found this through tumblr and wow this is amazing! Social media is such an interesting way to tell a story and you clearly have a good grasp of how fandom works and interacts with the real actors involved. Gottie feels very real and so does the entire fandom built around L&N, with the shipping of real people, fandom’s tendency to focus on men more then their woman counterparts like Anya, and the stalking and harassment of people being normalized and seen as just “drama” everyone else can gawk at. This is just so wonderfully crafted, you’ve definitely earned yourself a fan.
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just finished reading after finding this on tumblr and WOW! this was very compelling and i went a tad insane reading the giant theories in the comments. amazing work!
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Found this through Tumblr. I love it and I read the whole thing in one sitting. It’s such a love letter to those JournalFen days, and those “photos run through a pencil photoshop filter” was a wank that I held particularly dear to my heart. I also love the working in of more modern fan tropes, like I was thinking “sometimes people stalk people??? to cope???” the whole time Gottie was escalating her stalker game. Masterful. Glorious. I need to re-read immediately.
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I remember finding it really odd when Gottie was insisting that she still liked Rob and didn’t want him punished right after Nathan’s body was found. I also remember finding it weird how he seemed very genuinely distressed about Nathan being missing in the stream.
This epilogue really ties the whole story together for me. Pretty much every discrepancy I noted throughout earlier chapters is resolved by Gottie being the murderer. (If it comes out in the sequel that she’s not and it really was Rob, I will be *very* surprised)
Looking back on the earlier chapters with that context, Gottie is almost Machiavellian in the way she manipulates public perception of her, Rob, and the case as a whole. She’s clearly caught off guard at certain moments – Rob stealing her laptop, the forgeries, probably Nathan’s death – but she recovers nearly seamlessly each time. The stream is a masterstroke, I’d say – it simultaneously places public opinion firmly on her side while also subtly supplying the evidence that she was the culprit all along.
All in all, this is one of the best stories I’ve ever read, flat out. I could tell you took a lot of inspiration from real fandom drama events like the msscribe fiasco, and it really shows. Almost everything in here feels like it could have happened in real life, and the few moments where I did have to suspend disbelief a bit were minor and more technical details than important story elements.
10/10, can’t wait to read the sequel.
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oh man this story was gripping and the ending is haunting me im sure itll keep me up tonight. The thread of not quite rightness while being deluged with footnoted and cited (delighted that the citations actually go somewhere too!) information was very neat. i have to admit i was kind of suckered by gottie/read it so quickly I didn’t take time to think about who really did it but the epilogue sort of ripped the wool from my eyes and made me rethink half the story. I’ll reread it again once I’ve had a chance to digest this first read through. very very cool story and fantastic framing
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I am literally begging everyone I know to read this so that I can talk about it. THE DRAMA!!! I guessed Gottie was Effie like many other people did around chapter 11 but still had no idea who was going to die until filming was delayed!
Honestly, the most impressive part of this for me was that as I read this (in one day!) I frequently forgot that it was fictional. It really felt like I stumbled onto a smaller fandom I hadn’t heard of before. The downside to that is that every once and a while I had to put my laptop down and stress pace because WHAT THE FUCK GOTTIE?!?!?
Anyways, nice job.
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HELLO masterclass in unreliable narrator i’m obsessed with gottie
and the ambiguity still at the end!!! although with all the information it makes the most sense for gottie to be the murderer, it’s still just the personal opinion of an anonymous commenter in the end.
and! i LOVE the podcast ad closing it all up VERY CYCLICAL
it’s 4am lmao
i feel like i want to say so much more but uh it is 4am so given that you’re clearly an internet person i hope you’ll understand what i mean if i just say i’m barking at this story because i cannot form any other coherent thoughts
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Ahhh it was one of my theories!! And I do agree that’s how it went, rob’s reputation was thrashed intentionally for weeks? Months? So everyone would be against him
I’ve always been horrified of penal system and the fact that there’s so many falsely convicted people (and even a true criminal shouldn’t go to prison for half their lifetime… But that’s a completely different conversation). It’s one thing to be convicted of forgery, but it’s a completely another to be convicted of MURDER. And it’s a reputation that’s gonna follow rob ’till the end of his life. Not only his lover was killed but rob also was falsely accused of killing a person he loves!!! So devastating, really. I don’t know how someone keeps on living after something like this. Like man, no one deserves this
Thank you, this is a great story. I’m so sad and horrified now.
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HOLY SHIT. holy shit holy shit holy shit. Excellent use of the unreliable narrator! Gottie admits pretty early on to making up a few things on the blog, like the fake wifi in the coffeeshop, so it shouldn’t be surprising when more and more things turn out to be lies, but I still didn’t expect this twist! (I also just binged the whole story late at night and I’m going to be tired at work tomorrow but it was worth it.)
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loved this as someone who regularly delves into the modern parts of TJLC fandom from an outside perspective. i think this would’ve made an absolutely insane and awesome ARG, especially if your officially published followup includes things like podcast snippets. i’d like to praise the creativity in loch & ness’ existence, too; often i feel like diegetic media is kind of flat, even in stories that revolve around it, but that definitely wasn’t the case here! i would click links and be surprised when they didn’t go anywhere specific and have to remind myself that, oh, right, that’s not a real show. the way you wrote fake fics struck a chord with me in particular as someone who writes real ones that i’d like to think are decent–the way they were clearly based on pre-existing media and existing within that framework is often hard for reproductions to grasp because of how much by nature the fic takes canon for granted and doesn’t need to explain itself, but felt utterly perfect here when written for fake media. does that make sense? great work that i wanted to highlight because i hadn’t seen others mention it as much. i loved your ability to jump from character voice to character voice when it came to the comments, too. fun stuff with a satisfying twist and a deliberately unsatisfying open ending.
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oh. my. GOD. i read this in two sittings (or rather, two lying downs) and i am IN SHOCK. i didnt think there could be another twist AND YET??? i found this through tumblr like a few other people and despite my initial reservations (i’ve never read anything quite like this before, and tumblr recommendations are always to be taken with a grain of salt) and i do not regret it AT ALL. i need to make all my friends read this immediately. this is truly an amazing work of art and i will never be the same. you captured everything about fandom so perfectly, for better or for worse, and i actually had to skip the RPF sections because they just felt too real! you’re such a talented writer and i can’t wait to consume your other works at the speed of light
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Genuinely an excellent read! I found this through a recommendation and i’m so glad i did.
As someone who’s been entrenched in fandom for a while, this really encapsulates a lot of the insanity of fandom drama quite well. The RPF, the tie-in twitter accs, the pretty believable fake show, all of it is incredible. The possible twist at the end is magnificent, along with the implication that Gottie still regularly checked on the site when the whole story was nearly twenty years old… I feel like i’m repeating myself but its just so good, great job!
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holy hell, once i started reading this i couldn’t stop. i came from the tumblr post thats blowing up rn and i am so glad i decided to check it out, this was an amazing read !!! this whole thing really feels like im looking through actual fandom drama, its amazing
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I HATE THIS STORY ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️😭😭😭😭 I really thought I was past all the twists ugh!!!!!!! hahah amazing read but oh my goodness is my brain tired…… congrats on the amazing story writing ability. I need to lie down lol
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I just read all of this in a couple of days and I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I obsessively read everything people could find about MsScribe back in the day, and I was floored the whole time how you made all the different kinds of writing sound so authentic. My friend has some shocked messages of me going “this story has a whole 5+1 fic inside it.” “THIS STORY HAS A WHOLE GQ PROFILE IN IT”
She doesn’t have messages about my theories as I went along because I didn’t want to spoil it and I’m trying to get her to read it (so I don’t have receipts), but I remember reading the evidence document annotations and going “oh shit someone died,” combined with Gottie’s account of stealing the laptop(s), somehow I had this crystallized moment of “Gottie killed someone in that house, there’s something wrong with this girl.” I was so frustrated with the later chapters of Rob’s trial because I was 100% Gottie Did It, but I absolutely love the epilogue and the podcast ad. Absolutely harrowing. Will be rereading after I recover a bit!
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this was lovely!!!! also if this was real i KNOW someone would’ve made a video essay about it and it would’ve slayed
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originally i wasnt going to comment here, as its 5:30 am and i just binged this entire story and am quite tired, but also—i just stayed up til 5:30 am and binged this entire story in one sitting, i think it deserves a nice long comment!
there are a lot of things i think i can say here so im not sure where to start haha! one thing is that it feels very familiar and personal to me as someone who, like a commenter above, is currently in a rpf-adjacent fandom (actually almost the same fandom as the commenter above haha. its a different group of people playing out stories in minecraft.). rpf is something i’ve kind of waffled about and thought a lot about the morality of throughout my years in fandom, and this story really makes you think about it as an issue. not going to go on too much about it because it’s one of those things i could talk about for thousands of words and still not have a definite answer, but the way youve approached it here is very familiar and well-thought out as someone who has spent over half their life in fandom, and i think thats part of what drew me in at first!
talking about the story itself—i loved SO MUCH OF IT. i love stories that drop hints and have you constantly thinking like this one, and i ADORED the interactive aspects, how you could actually see the livejournal pages etc (and even get a little preview of stuff that would be coming up like the fanfic drama!). it almost reminded me of an ARG—very conspiracy-ish and fun. and then the unreliable narrator aspect that’s a given in internet drama adds a whole nother layer thats so so so juicy in this kind of story. i’m definitely going to have to go back and reread now that i know the ending! and even at the end there’s STILL uncertainties and i LOVE that!!! like someone else said, how did rob just not smell a rotting in his house for weeks? a dead body will start to smell after even a few days. and is gottie and the publicist sharing a name really just a red herring, or is there something deeper there? as others have commented, theres a link between the guy who got rob his role and gottie (with it possibly being her dad), is it too far out there to think that she has other relatives in the industry? theres just too many possibilities!! i will be thinking about this for days. imo it’s hard to strike a balance between tying everything up and leaving things open-ended, but you have gotten that balance PERFECTLY here. i’ve seen that this will be expanded on and published and i will DEFINITELY be keeping an eye out, but even on its own this stands incredibly well!
this is a very long comment so i’ll wrap up but i just wanted to praise your incredibly story telling again and congrats on such an amazing feat here. ❤ (also have finished scrolling thru the comments—and i am indeed another commenter from tumblr hahahaha)
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AHHH. wow. honestly the twist with gottie (potentially, allegedly) being the real killer was one i considered but i never considered the timing of it all. too many details for my brain. really fuckin good though. i love how complex the characters, i love how you were able to make them so complex with the limitations of the medium. but MAN she really did ruin those two’s lifes. and well. killed one of them. when you’re correct about your weird rpf ship but then ?? ????? ?????? ????????
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Another reader coming from tumblr. I love seeing how many commenters are posting at 2-5am after binge reading this all in one go, because I am in the same damn boat. I saw it was 30 chapters and still couldn’t put it down for a second.
I am obsessed with this work and I was still getting hit with realizations about all the twists you included just going through the comments (the pug/producer connection!! i cannot believe!!) I am desperate to get the print copy so I can read more about Gottie and Del. From the hypermedia style links and twitter profiles, and the references to real deep cut fandom and inside jokes– I adore this so much and am going to be shoving this in the face of everyone I know. I’m never going to be able to sleep, this is going to rattle around my head for hours. I’ve been struggling to rekindle my love of reading and ability to focus on books but your writing has me excited to look at the rest of your works!! Thank you!
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This was such an addictive, suspenseful read. I think I spent 3 hours reading it last night (and staying up way too late to read it). But wow…that plot twist of an ending!!
I think it shows how amazing you are at writing because Gottie had me fooled in the end. I really did believe that Rob was the killer, but now I’m thinking…yeah, why would he let her in the house if it risked her discovering the body? It only makes sense if she was the murderer.
Wow…just…wow. And the comments, the deranged fan behavior. Just…this is great. It’s like a literary version of a found footage horror film, except you’re not sure what’s “real” and what’s not.
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