This week I returned to Nightmare Magazine to take a look at “Sweet Dreams Are Made of You” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (which, by the way, has to be the coolest author name of all time). You can read it for free here…

I thoroughly enjoyed this short story! It takes the form of media paraphernalia (Wikipedia articles, news reports, TIME articles), interspersed with second person narration. The story centers around a mysterious VR video game called Vore. Me being the creepster I am, I knew that I recognized the word “vore” as having some kind of insidious definition, and how right I was: as per the all-knowing Internet, it’s a fetish involving eating others alive or being eaten alive yourself.

Yup.

As is the tradition with literature about video games, Vore doesn’t stay neatly contained within its code, but haunts players’ dreams. People are going missing, the game’s website and developers have gone dark on the world, and it’s just a fun, scary time all around. It’s been a while since I read any of the Ring books, but I was really reminded of those; they are much more sci-fi horror than the famous movie adaptation.

Anyway, “Sweet Dreams Are Made of You” is a great read for Halloween, and I highly recommend it.