The Mushroom Man

So, this is another book I got at the rag store for a quarter, it's by an author nammed Sophie Powell- which is important because there are a LOT of books by this name- and the copywrite page says it was published in 2003. The inside cover also says that it retailed for $23.95 back in ought 3, which is it definately 100% not worth.

This is creepypasta. It claims to be a novel but it's super not, it's a creepypasta, and it's on the level with the writing one would expect from a creepypasta. Now, I get that we as an audience were not accustomed to getting creepypastas for free off the internet back in 03 like we are now, but this is the kind of story that really should be free. It's not that it's bad, it's just that it doesn't care at all.

Ok, so this book, much like the last one I read, Angela's Ashes, just doesn't give a shit about things it considers unimportant, like basic gramatical rules. To the point that it is making me question my sanity. That book was a memoire written by someone raised in Ireland, and this one is set in Wales (thought it says the author was studing at NYU at the time, here in the states) so like... do people in the UK just not give a shit about grammar? Like as a concept? Is giving a shit in following the basic rules that we learned in kindergarten to make a book readable on a basic level an American thing?

When I say 'grammar', I don't mean that she used a semicolon wrong or something, I mean there's one instance of quotation marks in the entire book- and those are American quotation marks, which just raises further questions- despite having the amount of dialogue of a normal book; the book just headhops constantly between it's 11 characters who are all main characters I guess, the Mushroom Man himself is not one of these characters, I mean there are 11 people who we head hop around to, usually every couple of paragraphs; sentence structure is short and choppy and weird and in present tense. The book is horribly written. It's just... it's bad. It's like a creepypasta a kid would write, level writing ability.

Which is awful, because this is a great story being held hostage by a shitty writer. The idea for the story is good, the writing itself is just unreadably bad. So I'll synopse it for you.

This chick Lottie thinks that's she's better than her sister Beth, because Beth went into Agriculture and bought a farm with her husband who did furniture reconstruction, as a carpender. It's not really explained why Charlotte thinks that this is like, a shitty thing to do, at all, she just kind of decides it is because fuck agricutlure and antique restoration, for no reason. We start out the gate real weird. But she hated Beth's husband, for unclear and unspecified reasons, so I think that's why? But Beth invites her to come down after her husband's untimely death, to like, hang out and be a sibling, whatwith her husband dying and all, so Lottie goes, with her kid, Lily.

There's totally a dead bug in a cocoon in the back of this book, I realized when I picked it up to look for those names. I'm not a big bug person, hate them a lot, so I hate that I discovered that. That was not a fun time.

Also, the book sets it up in the beginning as if Beth's husband had literally just died, that was the reason for Lottie's trip, but later the book says he's been dead for two years so I have no idea what that's about, so I'll just let you draw your own conclusions there.

So anyway, Lottie is really not wanting to go, because of her completely unjustified and unexplaiend hatred of farms, so she's telling her daughter, who is like 6, not to get any farm germs on her, because farms are nasty- which is honestly actually a fair point. I live in Appalachia, my aunt had a farm, they are nasty. I'm more worried about ticks than germs, myself, back in '03 before the plague hit, but yeah there's gonna be like, chicken shit and whatnot. But Lottie says it real real bitchy, like she's not talking about normal farm filth, she says not to use their towels because they'll be nasty, like just acting like Beth is a nasty person.

Also, for the duration of this book, I don't think anyone does any farm work whatsoever. I don't remember any.

So they go to the farm and meet Beth's kids, her teenage son and her 11-year old triplet daughters, and her son's girlfriend, and they're all like, "Awww! Little 6-year-old kid!"

Lottie just bitches the whole time, but the kids go outside and play and are totally cool, the teenagers sneak off to have sex, which they do a bit too much for my liking, if I'm being honest, because they're children, so I really don't need to be told about it every time it happens. Also it's real weird because of the offputting writing style, because the simplicity of the style really make you think it's a kid's book- and also how short it is, idk what the word count is but the chapters literally take less than 2 minutes each to read, I timed it because I was confused about why it was formatted the way it was but the margins, line spacing, and word spacing are HUGE in this book like it thinks you're gonna be taking notes. I don't think I've ever seen a book do that. Normally if a book wants to take up space they make the font bigger so you can see it better, but this book decided to go the route of just making the spacing huge. But anyway, because of how short it is and the way it's written you can totally think it's a kid's book until somebody pulls their dick out. It's real weird.

The point is that all the kids get along great, Beth is glad to have her sister over for a visit to her perfectly lovely house, and Lottie is just a giant dick for no good reason, to everybody, including literal children that she keeps calling ugly because they look like their dad, who I guess was ugly, because he had black hair. I have black hair. Fuck you, Lottie.

While Lottie is visiting her sister, her husband is fucking the nanny- not even a nanny, she's an Au Pair, which I have never heard of because here in the states we literally have ONE agency in the entire country that will touch that unconstitutional bullshit with a 10-ft poll. An Au pair is a slave. Straight up. They're not legal here. They're a live-in nanny that you don't pay. In the states we can kinda get around it by treating it like a college placement education thing, but it's this whole thing, it's not common and it's not something that most people know about, and in looking up what the hell this is it's not something that most folks in the US would ever support being a thing. I am very very against this being a thing and idk what the hell is wrong with Europe. So this chick is kinda stuck here, having to fuck her boss, and it is made very clear that she does not want to. This is like... I don't know why this is in the book and why it isn't treated like horrifying sexual assault. It's treated like, "Oh, he's cheating on his wife," and not, "Oh, he's a serial rapist," where he literally rapes a chick at least twice off the top of my head, just right in the book, explicitly, in front of the audience. That's just a thing that happens. It's straight up disgusting and it doesn't need to be in the book.

I don't get why like... books that aren't romances feel the need to have the grossest possible sex scenes in them. Like... to what end? This book never has an actual erotic sex scene, it's all like, teenagers and rape. It's just... idk, it's a choice I guess. Not to my taste, but it's a choice. But I have no idea why it doesn't know the difference between cheating and rape and it bothers me a lot, like as a psychologist and as a person. Like in Wicked, right? Fiero cheated. Fiero and Elphaba wanted to have sex, they did, and neither of them told his wife. That's what cheating is. That is not what happens in this book, but that's what the book treats is like is happening. And I'm just sitting here like, "what the hell?" the whole time we head hop over to this dude, or the Au Pair chick. This whole subplot could have been done off screen, cut down on the head-hopping so we'd have a more concise story, and just be a better book. You don't need to leave every scene you write in the book. On account of some of them are shitty and should be cut during the editing process.

Anyway, Lottie is a bitch, but her husband is a rapist and even she, the bitch who is mean to children, doesn't deserve to be with a rapist, so right from chapter 1 you're hoping she leaves his ass. This is contrasted by Beth, who had a loving, caring, respectful, and healthy relationship with her husband and the father of her children- but because for drama resons we can't let any of the characters have nice things and be happy so he's dead now. Just everybody is fucked, at the beginning of this book, except Lily because her dad's not dead, but he is a rapist, but she's 6 and doesn't understand that. So Lily is like, OK on a cognative level and just wants to do little kid shit.

So the kids want to go off into the woods and pick mushrooms, but Lottie doesn't want her kid doing that for unspecified reasons that she's real big on, but she doesn't say anything about it because that's just who she is as a person. She waits until she can get the kid alone in the middle of the night to tell her, but before that happens Lottie is hanging out with her cousins and Amy tells her this story she made up about the Mushroom Man.

The story of the Mushroom Man is that there was this dude who lived in the woods, and he noticed that when it rained it really fucked up the fairies because they'd get all wet and couldn't fly that well, so he made them umbrellas out of mushrooms. The fey were so impressed with this umbrella technology that they offered him a wish that they would grant using their magical abilities, so he wishes to be a fairy and a member of the fey court so he can live in a tree castle and be immortal. The leader of the fairies grants this wish and he lives happily ever after, as a fairy.

So this kid, being 6, is full on about it, but when she goes to bed her mom tells her she can't go mushroom picking in the woods, no explination given.

So of course she does, and just sneaks out before her mom wakes up, because this is a rule literally known only to her, Lottie didn't tell anyone else she didn't want her kid in the woods. That seems like something to tell the people who were gonna take your kid into the woods, but she's just not a communicative person because she wants to be a bitch about everything. It never explains why she's such a bitch to her sister and her kids and I wish we had that foundation because it's treated like she has a right to act that way, but there's no explination given except she disliked her sister's husband for no reason and with no provocation; to the audience he seems like a cool dude.

So Lily stays out in the woods slightly longer than she was supposed to, so Lottie absolutely loses her shit, so Beth makes her kids run back out to the woods and get her, where they find her immediately- and here's the thing: I feel like maybe for city slickers this reads as scarier than it does for me, because I live in the woods, and 'not coming inside instantly when you're told to as a 6-year-old who was playing in the woods' is just not cause for alarm for me. They probably just didn't do what you told them, on account of they're 6. That's not being 'lost in the woods', that's being 6. But Lottie is acting like this is a huge emergency, when the kids find her in like, one second.

So the kids are all, "Your mom is freaking out, why didn't you go back to the house?"

And Lily is all, "Oh, I was gonna do that, but then I stopped to talk to the mushroom man."

And Beth's kids are all, "Go back to the house, your mom is insane."

Then there's a subplot about Lottie buying a pair of underwear and underwear must be way more special in Wales than they are in the US because it's a whole thing. There are like, several scenes about her getting a new pair of underwear-of her buying a pair of underwear and then instantly going to try them on, and then later changing her mind and not wanting them- there's a whole underwear subplot about her taste in panties and I... I just don't think I give a shit. It's not even a like, she's out with her man 'gonna get me some dick' underwear, they're not the world's most comfortable underwear, they're not magical or anything, she buys them off some random old lady at a local store and we just... we have this subplot about buying underwear. That goes nowhere. I have no idea why this is in the book. Who is this for? Is there a target audience of middle aged women who get real excited about buying underwear? Because if there is, this is the book for you, you can vicariously watch somebody else buy underwear. That they way way overpay for. For no damn reason.

Then Lily gets lost in the woods again playing hide and seek and found instantly- and this is where the creepypasta...ness... starts creeping in. They find her in a place they had previously looked, and she wasn't there before. So they ask, once again, where she was, and she says, once again, that she was with the Mushroom Man.

So now, if you're a fan of creepypastas, you can feel the tropes sliding into place, and you're starting to be all, "Ooooh shit, the Mushroom Man is a kidnapper. He's a human man and he's gonna get her. Gonna snatch her right up like an evil human person would do. Gonna steal him a human child." So it's actually getting scary. But she's coming back every time, and she's 6, so you can't confirm that, but it's in your head. Because it's happened twice now.

So Lottie gets sick to her stomach, I guess from her cursed underwear or something, it's not explained, and starts puking her guts up. No one else gets sick, this isn't explained. I guess she just has so much hate in her heart that it makes her sick- that's a thing that can happen, you can puke from stress. And she is real hateful, the whole book. So she decides that she's gonna go home the next day, but Lily doesn't want to do that, because she's having fun playing with her cousins and whatnot. And also, Lily has made fun with the Mushroom Man, and wants to hang out with him more.

So the triplets go to play with Lily and she's drawing/coloring a picture of the mushroom man, and when one of the cousins, I think Jude, is using a red marker to color on her nails, Lily snatches it back and in her little kid lack of fine motor skills makes a mark on her drawing she didn't mean to make and then starts first grade crying over the fact that her picture is ruined because she was gonna give it to the Mushroom Man, because he was going to turn her into a fairy and she was giving him the picture in appreciation.

So to make her stop making that goddamn noise, which humans as social animals are primed to hate and try to stop, on account of our species preservation over self preservation instinct- that's a true psychology fact, a human baby crying is literally the worst sound a human can hear, because of our instincts, we're primed to take care of younger/weaker members of our species, so that noise grates on everybody's nerves and we want it to stop, because in our brains that means the species is failing to rear young, which will kill off the species, given that we're a social species with a really low birth rate, we're not sea turtles who can have 500 kids and whoever makes it makes it, we're one-at-a-timing it here- Jude tells her that she'll get her a new, better present for the Mushroom Man if she'll just stop making that noise in particular.

So she gives her her dead dad's pocket knife and just lies to her sisters and says that their mom said it was OK to do that, which they don't believe at first, on account of their mom's love for their dad and the fact that she hasn't completed the grieving process and definately still wants all his stuff, but Jude just says, "No, she totally did, go ask her yourself," hoping that no one will call her bluff, and nobody calls her bluff.

They then wrap the knife in the bag from the underwear store that they found in a drawer, from that side plot about the underwear, this is the payoff for that, they have a shopping bag to put this knife in. That was the whole point of that long-ass underwear shopping, running home to change underwear bullshit. To get the bag. Could have been one sentence but this book is already too short to justify being called a novel so literally all I can think is that stupid underwear shit was padding. To get a shopping bag. Lily makes a card to go with the knife and stops crying, so everything looks like it's working out.

But then you, the reader, remember that Lily has no reason at all to think she's gonna go play in the woods again, because her mom told her (and no one else, she frequently tells shit just to the 6-year-old and nobody else and I have no idea why she does this. Wouldn't be me. If I went to visit one of my brothers and got sick as a dog and planned to leave the next day because of it, I would tell them that I was gonna leave?? So they wouldn't be shocked when I took my kid and left. Lottie is a weird person and her weirdness is never really explained. She's just... like that, I guess.) that they were leaving in the morning. So why does she think she's gonna see the mushroom man?

Because she's gonna wake her ass up 6-year-old early and just fucking leave, is why. Kids kill me waking up at the crack of dawn like they gotta go to work on a weekend. Go back to bed, child. But she doesn't, she gets up and goes out into the woods to see the Mushroom Man. Now, again, nobody else thinks it's weird for a kid to go play in the woods, because nobody else knows that Lottie is planning on leaving and told her to pack her shit up because they were leaving in the morning, so no one is on guard to ask her why she would go off to play in the morning instead of packing her shit up.

So then Lottie gets up, apparently still sick and pukey- I wish to god the book had given some reason for her to be sick, it is literally just her that got sick, nobody else, and she slept in the same bed with her kid despite being all germy, which is not a great idea- Lottie is just... something else. She only doesn't look like the worst character in the book because the book also has a literal rapist. If not for him, she would be the worst character in the book- wakes up and starts losing her shit because she can't find her kid.

Again, as someone who grew up in the woods, this is not a weird thing, you can just go out there and find them and tell them to come back, so Beth sends her kids to do that. But they come back saying they can't find her, so Beth has to go herself, aggravated at her incompetent children. Beth is like, such a normal person, I don't know how her sister got like that.

But that aggravation turns to concern, because she, the adult who knows her own land, also can't find this kid. So she comes back all, "Oh shit, no, this is actually a problem, we're gonna have to get the cops to find her," and calls the cops.

So Lottie calls her man, to tell him that their kid is actually like, genuienly lost in the woods, and he fucking ignores it. And it didn't go to voicemail, it went to his 2003 answering machine so he hears her say, "Our kid is lost in the woods, this is a real thing that is fucked up," and he just gives no shits. He is a cartoonish villian. This dude just walked into the book like, "I'm forgettable name and I'll be your villian this evening."

Then he goes and I think sits on the porch and thinks about how much he hates his kid. Because he's all mad that he has to do dad stuff instead of fucking his wife and that's why he has to rape the Au Pair. Like the kind of evil this dude has is that transparent evil where he's not like, a real person. I hate characters like that, because like, I'm a psychologist. I am really interested in human cognition and behavior, and most of the characters like, have that, and then we just throw this dude in here who doesn't even have the thought processes of a normal evil person. Child abuse and neglect definately happen, like that kind of cognition is a thing, but the specific way he does it is completely buckwild and I have no idea why authors don't at least fucking read interviews of people who have been convicted of child neglect. Because they exist, the cops release all the interrogations and court documents. Take a few days before you write your book, sit down with that shit, and read over it, and develop your character from those things so they read like a real character instead of a cartoonish villian meant for children.

That's actually one of my biggest issues with this book. The whole thing reads like it was written for children, like on that level, except for the fact that people do the sex in it. It is indistingusihable in tone, itonation, word choice, vocabulary, etc from a middle grade book, except for the adult situations. So like, you wouldn't let a kid read it, but you're not 12 so it feels like an idiot is talking to you as if you are a fellow idiot. This is a debut novel, the author is still in school, but like... where the fuck was the editor during the publishing process? It really reads like there was no story editor, no line editor, and no proofreader. And it's a good creepypasta, it's just like... the way it is written is unreadably bad. There is supposed to be a team of people who fix this shit before it goes to print. And they really let down the unit. Yes, some of it is the author's fault, but a goddamn proofreader should have caught that there's run on dialogue and no quotation marks in fifth fucking grade. You couldn't turn this book in for a creative writing assignment in middle school and not fail the hell out of it. It's that bad. I don't know how this happened.

So we cut away from the evil dad doing child neglect to the cops showing up and asking what happened, then going out to look for her. This turns out to be a real pain in the ass on account of how shitty Charlotte is, because she lies to them about her kid having a reason to want to run away and then also has nothing for the dogs to smell, like she has no clothes that her kid has worn? Really Lottie? They ask for a stuffed animal, because that holds scent, and she doesn't have that either because apparently she doesn't let her kid play with stuffed animals- actually there's a throughline about how she just is shitty to her kid too, she doesn't let her have toys or watch TV or play with other kids, she's on some fairytale evil queen shit, for no reason, there's no explination given for this- and the bedclothes are all pukey and germy because she kept her kid in the pukey germy bed with her, so because of her overally shittyness the dogs have nothing to go on to try and find her kid. So the cops are kinda fucked in their search because Lottie just... is a shitty parent.

So the cops go out and look all day combing the woods and can't find her, because they have literally no information to go on except, 'idk probably outside somewhere' and come back empty handed, and the other kids, Beth's kids, tell them about the Mushroom Man. They tell them about how Amy made up this bedtime story, and Lily believed it and said she saw the Mushroom Man twice, so the LITERAL CHILDREN are more helpful than Lottie is.

So the cops are all, "Wait, so she said she saw this Mushroom Man? What did he look like?"

Also, for some reason, the author neglected to give the cops names, they're literally called "Police Officer One," and "Police Officer Two," and that gets as old as fast as you think it does. Just as an aside. Good story held hostage by a terrible writer.

So the cops gets the picture she drew of the Mushroom Man and are all, "Ok so this is a child abductor, looks like an old white dude, this is who we're looking for. This is now gonna be treated like a kidnapping. We're gonna get a bunch more cops and a helecopter and shit, because this is now starting to look like it's not a kid lost in the woods, it's a kid who has been taken by this dude, who we only have a six-year-old's picture to use as a clue."

For some reason this makes Lottie cut up the underwear she bought and spent like $20 on. I have no idea why. She just kinda does shit.

So Beth tries to call the dad again, because Lottie is just kinda doing shit, so she assumes she just straight up lost her mind- despite this not being how people act when they're in psychological shock because this author just... the ship of realism has sailed a long time ago, let's be real- but what is cool is that the cops notice that this isn't how a person acts when they're experiencing trauma, and think that she's putting on. So I guess the author intended it to look weird, but Lottie didn't like, kill her kid, and there's no alternative reason given for her behavior, so I just... yeah, I don't know. I got nothing. Like achnowleging you did the wrong character behavior doesn't fix it. Like it reads like a story editor was like, "Hey you did the wrong character behavior," and instead of rewriting the scenes she just has the cops say out loud that the writing is bad. I've seen other writers do this, and I don't know why they think that achnowleging the thing as like, an in-joke, fixes it. That's not a thing. You have to actually go back and rewrite it and fix it.

So Beth is talking about cops, so the dad actually answers the phone this time because he's all, "Oh shit, cops!" and says he'll come down there in an hour because he's too drunk to drive, on account of how shitty he is he thinks that he can just sober up in an hour and not be drunk. Beth just lets him do this, because she kind of hates him anyway, on account of he's apparently always been shitty since she first met him so she's like, "Yeah, that tracks, he'd drive drunk, he's a shitty person, that sounds like a thing he would do." and hangs up.

Then she tells her kids to stay in the house, except for the teenage one, who is gonna come out with her and help with the search, and locks her crazy sister in the bathroom because her drama queen bullshit is just something that nobody needs right now, and she figures the husband can deal with it when he gets there.

Then there's the most European scene ever ala Shawn of the Dead where if you're an American you remember that European people don't know how guns work, because she wants to take a shotgun and fill this child abductor who came onto her property full of buckshot, and her son is all, "Hey maybe don't do that because you don't know how to shoot and gun safety 101 is don't just pack loaded shotguns around if you don't know how to shoot," but she just does it anyway in complete defiance of gun safety rules and it doesn't bite her in the ass. I really feel like if an American had written this it would have paid off. This is a literall Chekov's gun that doesn't pay off. If there is a gun in the second act, it needs to be fired in the third act, author. There's literally a name for the bad writing you did here. I don't know if this was supposed to be an inversion or like... this story is completely off the rails at this point.

So now there's all these cops and local volunteers and dogs and helecopters and welshwomen with guns running around the woods and yard and shit, and the triplets are like, "Look these grown ass adults are not gonna find her because they don't believe she's been spirited away by fairies, so what we need to do is get a bunch of kids together and go ask the fairies to bring her back." But because of all the people they can't just walk out of the house, so they make a rope out of bedsheets and climb down a side wall and just run off into town. Upon their arrival, they use what can only be described as 'shinanigans' to recruit a bunch of other kids to do their plan at like, a playground and a candy store.

So Beth comes back, realizes her kids are gone, while there's a child abductor on the lose, and is all, "Oh shit my kids! The fuck is wrong with them? I told them not to leave!" and goes to tell the cops that her kids are gone too, climbed out a window like jackasses, probably gonna also get abducted.

The cops are like, "This is the last thing we need," but I don't know if they say that out loud or not on account of how bad the punctuation is in this book.

The dad shows up at some point, I don't care about him and he's not important, but like, he gets there without killing himself drunk driving and finds his wife locked in a bathroom, and I was wondering how she got locked in a bathroom, but it was the smallest plot hole of the book, so not that much, honestly, but apparently you can lock that bathroom door with a key. Like an internal door. Is that a thing in Wales? We don't... that's not a thing in the US. I have never seen an internal door that uses a key. On account of then you could lock people in rooms, in your house.

I googled it, and yes, this is a thing in Europe. This is literally illegal in the US. It's a fire hazard and if a home inspector finds it, you have to change it to a normal lock that only locks from the inside or they'll condemn your house. What the fuck is up with Europe making it really really easy to enslave and kidnap people? What are y'all doing over there?

So anyway, the kids are walking back to their house to go ask the fairies to let their cousin go, and they run into this preacher who has a crush on their mom. He was in the book earlier, but not that much and this is his first taste of plot relevancy. He was preaching a funeral in town and he just walks out and sees all these kids so he's like, "What are you doing? There's a child abductor on the loose! There should be a bunch of cops and volunteers at your house!"

And they're like, "Yeah, mom sent us out so we wouldn't be in the way, on account of the search and all."

And he's all, "I don't know, I know your mom and that does strike me as bullshit, is the thing. So get in my car, I'm taking all of you home."

And they're like, "Well no, see the thing is, these kids, their parents aren't home because they're helping with the search so we're watching them."

Which is actually a really good lie, like good on them for that one, that actully tacks if you don't think too hard on it.

So he's like, "Well you still shouldn't be out here by yourselves, so get in my car and I'll take you back to my place and I'll watch you. Because I'm grown. I have a couple coming over to plan a wedding, so I can't go help with the search yet but I can watch the kids so they don't get in the way and also don't get abducted."

And that's so reasonable that they're trapped by social convention and pretty much have to go with him. But he lives like, on the other side of their mom's property, so pretty much all that does is cut out the walk for them so idk why they're acting like this is some huge horrible thing. They more or less just got a ride back to their property. Which is where they were going. But they act like this completely thwarts their plans.

So somebody calls the cops and tells them that the triplets, who were, if you'll remember, reported missing, got in a car with a bunch of other kids and some adult man. They run the description and find out it's the preacher. So they go tell Beth that they know where the kids are and who took them, and he probably also has Lily, because that's how detectiving works.

So she goes back to the house to tell Lottie that the cops found the kids and are on the way to arrest the guy who took them, gets in the house and the dad is there, again, I don't remember his name, unlocks the door and lets Lottie out of the bathroom, and tells her the good news, so they're all happy they're gonna get their kids back, but Lottie is still pissed at the dad for his general shittyness, and especially him fucking the Au Pair, which she knows about for some reason that is once again, never explained. And once again, they call attention to the fact that it's weird it's not explained instead of explaining it.

But honestly the Au Pair has already decided to go back to her home country, on account of all the rape that isn't treated like rape by the story, so she's out of the story. She's aready gone. And, she was actually worried when Lily went missing, she's a way better parent than either of the parents, so that sucks for Lily.

But then the kids catch the preacher working, planning that wedding like he said, and sneak off into the woods to ask the fairies to give their cousin back, and it works, and they find her in a tree. And then shortly after that, because, again, they're on their own property just coming in the back way, they find some of the cops/volunteers and tell them they found Lily in a tree.

Then the preacher gets arrested with the helecopter over his house and it's very dramatic and pointless, because the kids tell the cops and their mom that he didn't abduct them and he's released immediately.

The cops take Lily to the hospital because she's been out in the woods for two days and needs to be treated for exposure because being out in the woods for long periods of time gives you the exposure, and there's a scene of her parents sitting in the waiting room while the cops are in there talking to Lily where the dad is trying to not act like a piece of shit and saying he doesn't want to get divorced and all this bullshit and Lotte, being fairly shitty herself and only having her character spared by comparison to her husband, tells him to fire the Au Pair, who had already decided to leave and wasn't in the house anymore, so he goes to do that at a payphone, despite having a cell phone. I don't know why.

Lily tells the cops that she lived with fairies for a couple days. That's her story and she sticks to it. The triplets also stick to that story and any time anybody tries to correct them asks who the hell they think they are for correcting the people who actually found the missing kid, and none of the adults have shit to say about that.

So I guess she was abducted by fairies. The end.

So I think I've made it pretty clear what I didn't like about this story, and that's the writing, every aspect of the writing is complete shit. But I will say that that's a shame, because I think that could have been overcome in the editing process; drafts are always shit, they need fixed before they're set before an audience. And the story itself has big creepypasta energy, and is a really good creepypasta. It's a story about a little girl being kidnapped by fairies and the adults treating it like an actual child abduction, so the other kids have to go and beg the fairies to return her. And, her personality changes upon return, she's much more sullen and serious than she was before, so it is possible that she's a changeling and Lily is still with the fairies. There is a good story here, buried under all the bullshit. There are a lot of really creepy elements, you just really have to work to get past all the bullshit.

I expect that this writer could definately find her feet and write actual horror novels that are good once she has some experience under her belt and finds an editing team that like... does their job, because the editing process is really where everything went wrong here.

Because of that, because it's the technical skill of writing that is bad, but the story is overall pretty good, I do think this is one of those rare occassions where a seasoned screenwriter could save it for an adaptation. I think this would make a good movie if an experienced screenwriter got ahold of it and fixed the things that should have been fixed by a story editor, like the pacing with all the weird padding, the characterization of folks like Lottie and her husband, the run-on dialogue that doesn't mesh with real dialects, formatted like a script so it's readable, those kinds of things. Because the core story is really good, and would work well in a visual medium, given that the characterization is so surface level so there's no deep inner thoughts one would have to channel, you could show all that visually pretty easily.

As far as I can tell, that hasn't happened, and I'm a little disapointed, because I do think that is what this book needs to save it. There's a few movies called, "The Mushroom Man," but none of them are adaptations of this book, most predate it by a significant amount of time, the most famous seems to have come out in the 1970s.

So because of the weird situation I find myself in, I don't really know whether or not to reccomend this book. Because here's the thing, the writing is really, unbelievably shitty, but it's also really really short. You can read the whole thing in a couple hours, easily. And the story is good. So I'm really torn on whether or not to reccomend it. I think I would say that if you like creepypastas, which are often posted unedited, and therefore can get around how poorly it's written, it's an alright way to spend a couple of hours. Because it is a good story.