Walk with me. Step into the Wayback Machine.
Imagine that you’re two asshole teenagers in high school.
Yes, you’re both of them. Each of you shares a brain with the other. Shut up.
So. Let’s assume you’ve sustained yourself on a steady diet of pop culture nonsense and academic ass-hattery. Your belly bloats with a meal that gurgles the Star Wars fanfare. You’ve got guts roiling with a heady, acidy broth comprising science-fiction, Terry Pratchett, superhero comic books, stand-up comedians, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Christopher Moore, computer games, video games, roleplaying games, pornography, the Bible, mythology, history, conspiracy theory, and also, pornography.
High school is a slow-simmering misery. (It’s not, really, but you’re two teenagers. Everything is a slow-simmering misery.)
You hear tell of a slambook that’s been going the rounds for years. It’s a notebook. People pass it around. They write silly shit to one another. They make fun of their fellow students. They take on pseudonyms.
You get in on the slambook phenomenon, but really, it’s not quite doing it for you.
You’re more than a little impatient.
You’re not that impressed.
You’re a cocky pair of pricks. As we said, two asshole teenagers.
You figure, “Fuck it, we’ll do one ourselves.”
So, you start your own notebook. You call it—
Shadowstories.
The book features rough analogs of you two assholes (for academic purposes, we’ll call one Lord Chuckles, and the other, Grebok, Son of Drogmar, Keeper of the Seven Keys of Ventoozlar). Plus, anybody else who wants to get in on it, can contribute. The book maybe has the barest, thinnest, gauziest thread of a plot, but only in the same way that a schizophrenic’s paranoid hallucinations have a plot. Every entry takes the last plot point and basically grudge-humps it against a sink. One plot becomes a hundred. Insanity rules. It’s a great place to vomit forth the aforementioned acidy gut-broth, too. Everybody has a good, albeit stupid, time.
At the same time you do a physical notebook, you also do one on the BBS you run. For you young’uns, a BBS, or “Bulletin Board System,” was the precursor to the Internet the same way that chimps and apes were the precursor to Homo sapiens; by which we mean, it was far more primitive, but also a lot more fun.
You do two or three of these things. One’s a notebook. Two are BBS forums. Or maybe it’s reversed. (Shut up, it’s been like, 15+ years, and we’re not that bright.)
After that, you start numbering them, like they’re important. And eventually, they’re all notebooks, and all the other people who worked on them besides you two jackasses come to realize that they have better things to do, like play football and get girlfriends. You two, though, are inspired toward no such nonsense, and keep writing these things like they matter.
You get Shadowstories IV, which is retarded enough that you have to introduce characters into the book called “Plot-Twisting Space-Monkeys,” because the plot jumps around like an epileptic on fire. It features girls, too, because, why not give the heroes girlfriends, at least? I mean, seriously. Somebody has to be getting laid, right?
Then comes Shadowstories V: The Time Continuum, which obviously features a lot of time-jumping bullshit. And then maybe the main team of heroes retires? And hires a new team? Or something? The girls from the last book have become wives, because what teenage asshole doesn’t fantasize about… er, getting married? Ehhh. Anyway.
Next in line is Shadowstories VI: The Next Generation, and it takes a quick look at the new generation of heroes—and they fail miserably, necessitating a return of the old heroes. Some of the book takes place in “reality” and “on Earth” in the same way that Star Trek IV: Whale Saviors does.
Ah, but wait, here’s the thing. This is the first time that the story really truly seriously started to make sense for more than, ohhh, five pages at a time. You two assholes started to figure out that you’ve been operating by unspoken rules, so you speak them, and start using them consciously. You actually start to think about these characters in ways that take them well-beyond their existence as mouthpieces for your teenage angst and hilarity. The books have started to evolve, like frogs that spontaneously shift from male to female, or monkeys who learn how to use handguns.
You figure, okay, this universe, called the Storyverse, is a place where all stories can happen, where they’re happening now, where each planet can serve as its own little story realm. It allows you a weird level of flexibility—one planet has Greek myths, another is fairy tales, another is about urban legends or epic high fantasy or space opera or boring stories people tell around a watercooler. You gain an accidental clue, and decide that these “heroes” are kind of the guardians of this place, put there by Cosmic Forces to keep shit in line.
Tumbling forth, then, is Shadowstories VII: Pirates of Paradox, which hands the heroes a threat in the form of… well, duh, the Pirates of Paradox, who transport our beloved heroes to some Silent Hill-esque town called “Julie’s Snatch” (this was well before Silent Hill, just for the record). This featured a song about sorghum, for the record. Also, children. Yes, wives have children and become mothers. Because what teenage asshole doesn’t fantasize about having children to take care of?
You know when someone says, “Die in a fire?”
That’s what happened to this book. It died in a fire. Our buddy’s house burned down (a merciless cell of terrorist squirrels ate the wiring), and took this book with it. That was you two assholes’ senior year of high school, just in case you’re making a timeline.
You assholes are sad about this, and decide that you need to do another one, and clear out all the craziness in a kind of half-ass sort-of-maybe “reboot.” You call this one, Shadowstories: The Beginning, with no numeral to go with it. It stumbles through the origin stories of the characters, less to be entertaining to third-party readers, but more because you two assholes don’t really know the origin stories, for sure, and this is one way of nailing ‘em down.
By the way, at this point, the books are really getting better. They’re downright readable. It’s madness. It’s proof of concept that, if you take a hundred monkeys—or, frankly, just two of them—and give them typewriters (or notebooks and BBS forums), you might actually get something that doesn’t suck. Even more miraculously, you manage to concoct this crazy book while sharing a brain but having your bodies live in separate states (specifically, Pennsylvania and North Carolina).
Okay, next: two books that don’t exist, and never existed, but are referenced in other books.
Shadowstories IX: An Apocalypse of Pachyderms, and The Shadowstories Short Story Collection.
They’re first referenced in Shadowstories X: The Corporate Invective, where a triumphant company called HappyCo dominates the future of the Universe. We threw everything at the wall on this one: characters dying, a prison planet, an ancient martial arts master, once-frozen pirates, an army of clones (well before Attack of the Clones, I’ll note), a cow, angels, Ouroboros, the ascent to godhood, and all kinds of other shit. It’s possibly the first book that is genuinely good, or at least not bad, throughout. This is about, ohh, 2000, 2001.
All right, I’m getting winded over here. You two assholes were busy assholes, so hold on. I need you to be cool. Okay? Be cool.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Right! Moving on.
Finally, you get the gem in the crown, the piece de resistance, the climactic chapter, written only about seven years ago:
Shadowstories XI: The Narrow End of the Wedge. This book knows that it’s time to wrap things up, and kind of walls itself in while also building itself a new door. Lots of temporal weirdness—the heroes are basically born as children at the same time that the heroes exist, so they have to try to save their baby-selves. Once more, a lot of elements in play: fathers, generations, interns, God and the Devil, retired mythology, the Argonauts, godblood, Frankenstein analogs, and more.
We never finished it. Came close.
That’s the dirty secret, here. About half of these never got finished. They all got close. But you two assholes weren’t really writers, back then. You dumb shits didn’t realize that you actually have to finish stuff to seal in the awesome-sauce. (Lesson learned since then.)
So, what happens, now?
You two assholes go on and live your lives. Since you apparently share critical brain materials, though, you’re never really too far from one another, forever passing in synchronized orbits. You’ve known each other since you were like, five or something, which is retarded. I mean, c’mon, get some new friends, you two. Are you just lazy? Or do you really like each other that much? Go and make out somewhere.
…
I’m sorry, I’m a very angry biographer.
Point is, a fuck-ton of years pass since the first one (roughly, 15), and quite a few since the last (roundabouts seven).
All throughout the years, you talk about Shadowstories. Like they were the good old days. “Remember when?” You know the game. “Remember when the heroes said, ‘This boat is for assholes,’ or, asked, ‘Do you hear ducks?’ Remember when they fought Geebo the Projectionist, or we figured out the one enemy’s name just by hitting a bunch of keys on the keyboard and it awesomely spelled out ‘Betadeotus?’ Good times, man, good times.”
Then you two jerkholes would go and empty your colostomy bags and polish your walkers and whatever.
Except, nostalgia is a cruel mistress.
Sometimes, she’s a soft pillow.
Other times, a niggling hangnail.
Somewhere in there, the Internet is born, a rough nativity of 1s and 0s and viruses and pornography, and along with it comes the ability to make your own website—like, say, this one—the same way that you once ran a BBS that hosted the early Shadowstories.
And then you say, “Shit, we could do this all over again.”
Because you’re both really stupid, and, as noted, lazy.
Except, “stupid and lazy” is maybe, just maybe, the mother of invention.
Or, at least, the mother of amusement.
You aim for the latter more than the former, and here you are.
With a brand new website. And promises of a comic book, and an Internet serial called Shadowstories: The Infi-Net Revolution, which uses the same process you’ve always used: one of you assholes writes a chapter, then “passes the book” the other asshole, who writes a chapter, then passes it back. Again and again, an endless tumbling narrative.
We hope you enjoy it.
…
Uh, I mean, you two assholes hope everybody enjoys it. Shut up.
Watch the skies, and watch this space.
