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Book: “Scanlines” by Todd Keisling
Publishing Info: Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, May 2021
Where Did I Get This Book: I own it.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: In 1987, Congressman Benjamin Hardy III died by suicide on live television amidst accusations of political corruption. Years later, rumors of a recording surfaced among VHS trading groups and urban legend chat rooms. Dubbed the “Duncan Tape,” after the deceased cameraman who attempted to sell the video, the rumors allege that anyone who watches the tape is driven to suicide.
Or so the story goes. In truth, no one has ever seen the supposed Duncan Tape, presumably because it doesn’t exist. It’s a ghost story perpetuated on the forums and chat rooms of the internet, another handful of bytes scattered across the Information Superhighway at blistering 56K modem speeds.
For Robby and his friends, an urban legend is the last thing on their minds when a boring Friday night presents a chance to download porn. But the short clip they watch turns out to be something far more graphic and disturbing, and in the coming days, they’ll learn even the most outlandish urban legends possess a shred of truth…
Review: Every once in awhile I decide that I need to do a bit of a ‘Spring cleaning’ on my Kindle, in that I look back at books that I purchased on a whim and then never actually read. It’s such a bad habit of mine, and it’s even worse on the Kindle because since it’s digital I never actually have a physical space that is taken up by said purchase. So a couple weeks ago I was looking at my purchases, and decided it was time to pick a book to read. I opted to go with “Scanlines” by Todd Keisling, in part because it was a novella and therefore a quicker read, but also because I remembered that a lot of horror influencers had raved about it, which led to me purchasing it. I settled in one evening, knowing I would no doubt finish it in one sitting, but I wasn’t really prepared for what I found. But that’s a compliment.
“Scanlines” is a mix of a cursed media horror story with a coming of age tale, short and brutal while also having a certain nostalgic edge to it. We follow Robby, a teenager living in the 1990s in an age of dial up Internet and a lingering naïveté about the world wide web. When Robby and his friends stumble upon the notorious “Duncan Tape”, a video of a U.S. Congressman killing himself on camera and becoming stuff of urban legend (as anyone who watches it will supposedly kill themself), their lives are sent into a tailspin. This alone is already great, I love a cursed media story as it is. But “Scanlines” is incredibly clever in that it takes Internet urban legends, the violence that was so Wild West at the time (Rotten.com anyone?), and the very real suicide video of U.S. Congressman R. Budd Dwyer, and creates something deeply unsettling. And graphic. I mean the cover alone! We watch as these teenagers start to see a dead man everywhere, haunting their every step, and their desperation to solve what he could possibly want as his image follows their every move and makes them more and more desperate. The descriptions of the video, the descriptions of the twisted face, the way that these kids just unravel, it’s all so messed up and scary, and Keisling fits it all into a novella’s length without it feeling lacking or rushed. The scares are tight and relentless, and the imagery got under my skin very effectively.
But what really caught my attention with this novella is how it really captures the nostalgia of the time period. I was a teenager in the late 90s into the early 2000s, and while my Internet connection at home was pretty sparse (AOL hooked up through the home phone for awhile, then we eventually got a separate line but it was still pretty minimal), I do remember stumbling upon things that scandalized me (not the Dwyer tape thank goodness), and how it all felt so novel and like uncharted territory. Keisling has a great author’s note to go along with this book talking about how this story took some inspiration from something that did actually happen to him and his friends back in the day, and that exploration of the friendships between Robby and his friend group and the ways that dynamic functioned and changed after experiencing a shared trauma added a whole other layer to this story, pulling out some nostalgic aspects of teenage friendships as they shift and evolve, especially when life changing things happen. I found it to be moving in spite of the pretty visceral violent moments in this book. It’s a very fascination dichotomy in tone, and I thought it worked really well.
“Scanlines” was an effective horror novella that I shouldn’t have sat on for so long. I will absolutely seen to check out more from work Todd Keisling.
Rating 8: Short and nasty but also a meditative coming of age tale, “Scanlines” is a rough ride, but one that I found myself oddly moved by in a way.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Scanlines” is included on the Goodreads list “Cursed Media”.
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