Slender Man Review

by Anonymous

Rating: 4/5

An internet meme, a crowd-sourced horror story, a dark figure who bends reality: SLENDERMAN. Lauren Bailey has disappeared. As friends at her exclusive school speculate and the police search for answers, Matt Barker dreams of a trees and a black sky and something drawing closer. Through fragments of journals, articles and online conversations, a figure begins to emerge - a tall, slender figure - and all divisions between fiction and delusion, between nightmare and reality, begin to fall. Gold title Slenderman is one of the internet's most notorious creations - a shadowy figure whose victims disappear or find themselves doing terrible things. A horror movie based on this myth, Slender Man, will release in summer 2018. In 2016, Netflix released a documentary, Beware the Slenderman, exploring the phenomenon. This story, told through a patchwork of online and offline documents and conversations, is the first official book about Slenderman. It will publish in mass-market paperback and collectible hardback editions at the same time.

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I’ve always found the urban myth of Slenderman to be interesting. I remember being in middle school with my friends, looking up Slenderman photos and reading all about him on Creepypasta. He was just always one myth that I found captivating. And I would be lying if I denied also finding him a bit terrifying at times, too. On occasion, he also gave me nightmares back then. The whole “what if he really is real?” scared 13-year-old me.

So when I stumbled across this, I definitely wanted to see what it was about. I read this alongside the true crime novel, Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls, following the teen stabbing.

This fiction book is written in fragments of journal entries, texts, articles, emails, and other online conversations. It was definitely interesting to follow, as we aren’t necessarily shown all the details, only what our main character lets us see on their computer/phone.

It was fascinating to read this alongside the true crime as well, how similar the characters in the fictional story thought of Slenderman to the girls in the real-life case.

This flowed really well! It had me fully entranced, so much so that I stayed up well into the night reading it and only slightly regretting it. I wasn’t able to sleep right away when I finished. Those 13-year-old fears catching up with me again. I was only a little disturbed. It was just creepy to think about. The ending was not at all what I expected. 

If you enjoy urban legends and myths like Slenderman, I highly recommend picking this up!