There are several disturbing aspects to stories where characters are able to transport themselves into the universes that are, from their point of view, works of fiction — sometimes ones they wrote themselves. There's the "World as a Myth" novels of Robert A. Heinlein, Greer Gilman's Moonwise, and the Harold Shea stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, just to give a few examples. Heinlein managed to catch one of these disturbing aspects, namely that if fictional universes are real, the author is an awful person for writing a story that isn't set in a utopia. One other extremely disturbing implication, however, is that there have been a sizable amount of authors who hold racist beliefs, and let this influence their work. That means that if all works of fiction exist in some parallel universe somewhere, there must be thousands, if not millions of universes, where racist beliefs are empirically correct. There are universes where The Birth of a Nation is a documentary. The same goes for all sorts of other bigoted, intolerant beliefs. If anyone who held those beliefs ever wrote a story, that means that somewhere out there is a parallel universe where all their hateful beliefs are right.
Peanuts compared to a universe where I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is non-fiction. Frankly, the notion that any piece of fiction exists as a reality somewhere is frightening enough — racist worlds are really small fry compared to some of the other things people have written.
...wrote the Troper, on the Internet. And there are plenty of people who say they would actually like to live in those universes. It also leaves the possibility that this universe is fictional.
The horrors of writing worlds into existence is touched upon in the Myst novels; which, come to think of it, would be fridge horror itself, if not for the necessity of special magical letters for the process to work.
How so? I thought they made it clear that the writers only created access to already existing worlds? (Even though that doesn't explain how they were able to change certain parts of them later) But even so, what's so scary about writing a world?
What if you erased something? Also, there's Comes Great Responsibility in the mix. Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Bronze Pen illustrates this pretty well.
Luckily, this one is easily disproven: If it was actually true that every story is real somewhere, then some story containing dimension-hopping apocalypse mosnters would have already become true. Unless we're the one world nobody ever goes, which, given a by definition infinite amount of monster universes, is rather unlikely.
Wrote a story about a race of dimension-traveling creatures whose sole purpose in life is to give bags of gold to their author to test this theory. Didn't work. It's safe to go back to writing, everyone.
I just wrote a story about a universe where people write stories about a race of dimension-traveling creatures whose sole purpose in life is to give bags of gold to their author, who fail to see their creations appear and continue creating universes full of horrible nightmarescapes, thinking they're writing safely.
Actually, being the one world where no one ever goes is, by the definition of infinite, just as likely as being a world filled with interdimensional monsters.
There exists a book intended for kids around 9-10 years old, (though this troper cannot for the life of her remember the title) about a little Jewish girl living in Germany in WWII. She and her family are sent to a concentration camp, and the book is mainly about their time in the cattle cars. At the end of the story, they reach their destination, and the girl is sent with her mother and other women and children to the showers. She is completely overjoyed to have a chance to get clean again, and the book ends with her raising her hands in anticipation, waiting for the shower to start. This in itself is pretty grim, until you realize that the protagonist is a very young girl, her mother is described as very frail, and they're surrounded by children. Just... think about that for a minute.
This Troper doesn't know its English title, but the German title is "Reise im August", Journey in August, by Gudrun Pausewang, the German queen of HONF.
In-story in a German legend. A rider is on a journey through southern Germany / northern Switzerland, during a very cold winter. He's crossing a big, flat plain. He thinks nothing about it, he just wonders why there's absolutely no sign of human settlement. Finally, he reaches a village. There, he asks a woman how far Lake Constance is. She's astonished and tells him that he came right from the lake's shore. Then it dawns him that he actually rode over the frozen lake and was damn close to a cold death... in fact, the shock immediately kills him.
Anthony Horowitz (author of the Alex Rider series) wrote two collections of short stories entitled Horowitz Horror. Re-reading these after several years, they didn't seem as scary... except one. Bath Night. In this story, the main character's parents buy a new bath which, it turns out, is haunted by the ghost of a serial killer who used to butcher his victims in it. This, coupled with the fact that the story ends with the girl being assumed crazy and taken away, and her father lying in the bath thinking about how he could get rid of annoying people, is all horrifying enough as a child. An older reader will pick up on two things. Number one; someone who kidnaps and murders women is not unlikely to have done something else to them as well, and leading on from that, number two; the ghost only terrorises the main character. Who is a twelve year old girl. While she is in the bath. I wish I hadn't re-read that one.
The novel explicitly mentions Jach the Ripper, who killed prostitutes. It is also strongly implied that the women were killed while taking a bath. A child thinks nothing of it, but what kind of woman would take a bath in a man's house during that time period? This gives the series of murder a whole different meaning: he didn't kidnap random women from the street, drag them to the bathtub and kill them there - he invited them for sex and he killed them when they took a bath (probably by his suggestion). This makes his interaction with the heroine (and the fact that he doesn't terrorize her mother, for example) all the more disturbing.
Oh, the ending isn't just about the father considering how to get rid of annoying people. He's explicitly thinking about his wife and daughter, who he thinks are unnecessarily causing stress in his life and are making him look bad. Now, tie that in to the implications up above, about who the previous victims likely would have been, and what was done to them. Now, consider the father doing that to his wife and daughter. Fun!
He's ALSO thinking about annoying students at the all-boys school where he teaches. Tie that in with the heroine's earlier jibe about homosexuality at boys' schools ... Oh dear.
In one science fiction anthology, there was a story about reptilian aliens who had taken over the world and controlled humanity through a mass hypnosis that made humans see the aliens as other humans. Now, the main character somehow wakes up from this hypnosis and, after being effectively sentenced to death, decides to go on a rampage and overthrow the alien overlords. Okay. But, some of his victims are very young aliens. Remember, the hypnotised humans see the aliens as other humans. Connect the dots.
The anthology is The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction 8, the story is Ray Nelson's "Eight O'Clock in the Morning", and the hero is George Nada. His girlfriend is horrified to see him kill a "neighbor" she still sees as human even after it's dead. Going to the neighbor's apartment, George finds half-eaten (actual) human bodies, then sees floating slugs in a tank, realizes they're children and kills them all. He's alone when he does this, though.
Enid Blyton wrote a story called "House-At-The-Corner" about a family who have an Austrian maid, Greta. The story makes several references to Greta's family being lost, and also mentions that she used to have a twin. The book was written in 1947. Greta's family were killed by the Nazis.
In Toaru Majutsu No Index Volume 4, everyone in the world is switched with someone else - but they think they are that someone else and so does everyone else around them. Only the protagonist Kamijou sees through this. The girl Index replaces Kamijou's mother (and believes herself to be his mother), and everyone sees her as the mother - including Kamijou's father. So when the dad starts getting frisky, Kamijou has to keep them apart the whole night, as Index is actually fourteen. Kamijou succeeds of course - but wait. The entire world has been switched around. Think about it for a minute.
I got a dose of this in my adult rereading of, of all things, Freaky Friday. Early in the book thirteen-year-old Annabel, in her mother's body and with everyone else thinking she's her mother, makes plans to go with her father to see a "pretty dirty" movie. Fortunately for ALL concerned, Annabel's mother re-inhabits the body before this takes place. Annabel was naively only imagining this as a chance to see a movie she'd never otherwise have a chance to see, but imagine her father coming home from seeing a sexually explicit film with the woman he thinks is his wife.
The Clique: The horrible realization about the characters in these books. (Alicia being implied to have breast implants, Dylan having a budding eating disorder, Massie being a sociopath, Claire living a lie, etc.)
Jaquleline Wilson books have this, if you've read them as a child and then look back on them. For example, Tracy Beaker's mum was a porn star.
In Guus Kuiper's Polleke series, the titular heroine, a (then) 12 years old girl, is approached by a driver on her way home. The driver says her father had a terrible accident and that he can drive herto the place. Polleke gets in, and only then does she remember that her father is in Nepal at the moment and (an In-Universe example) realises the man is a child molester. When the car gets stuck in traffic, she makes a run for it and escapes. This by itself is devastating to her and horrifying to the reader. But then you remember that just about six months ago, her father was a homeless drug addict, living in the same city with her. Had the man approached her then, she probably wouldn't realise it's a trap until way too late.
Come Back, Lucy by Pamela Sykes is a story about a girl discovering that she can travel back in time to be with her friend, the ghost of a Victorian girl who lived in the house a hundred years previously. She cannot control her time travel and has to make excuses to her adoptive family to cover her absence. A child reader would not realize at first glance that her guardians might have been worried about more than ghosts when a ten-year-old girl is disappearing at night.
A Safety Town book called Poisons Make You Sick follows the story of a young girl named Tammy who got sick after eating nearly half a bottle of asprins. No, Tammy, poisons don't just make you sick; they can KILL you. In fact, in the book, she's just in bed like she had a cold. In real life, if she weren't dead, she would be in the hospital getting her stomach pumped. Of course, as a child, you're not aware of this horrific implication until years later when you read about people who die of drug overdose either accidentally or intentionally...
Actually, this ramps up the horror when you ask yourself: "How many kids unknowingly overdosed on what they thought was a small bottle of candy?" There is a reason the warning labels on the perscriptions tell you to keep the pills away from children.
The story that Susan Varley wrote called Badger's Parting Gifts. It tells the story about Badger dying, and his friends each sharing their special memories of Bagder. The Fridge Horror you may ask? When Fox went into his house, he saw a letter saying that he went through the "Long Tunnel." Now, judging by this letter, you can interpret the letter as a suicide note, and that he killed himself. Or, alternatively, he probably wrote the letter when he felt like he was dying.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder wrote fridge horror brilliance in one of her most popular novels, The Changeling (on which the Green-Sky Trilogy is based). When Ivy and Martha are seven, Ivy appears at Martha's window at midnight in the middle of a rainstorm. Martha suspects Ivy is crying, asks how she could come all that way in the dark, and Ivy buries her face in a towel for a minute before whispering "There's worse things than dark." At thirteen, Ivy furiously states "I am never going to grow up." Not just a teenager's wisdom that Growing Up Sucks, she is angry and defiant about it, not wistful or nostalgic. Asked by a neighbor what she has been doing, she says "Waiting." This was published in 1970, when sexual abuse was never referred to explicitly even in young adult books.
Reading The Spider and the Fly as an adult is horrifying. The spider murders the fly, eats her, and gets away with it. Both are fully anthropomorphic. My copy has dim, black-and-white illustrations, emphasizing the gloom.
That's probably not all he did with her...
Consider how spiders eat. First, they paralyze their food with their venom. Then they gob acid in the hole they make, and wait for their victim's organs to liquify. Then they slurp it out.
