If you (like me) find the John 5-era Rob Zombie albums a frustrating listen, with Rob’s signature creative vision mired among bland riffs and awkwardly-integrated “experiments”…well, I have bad news: John 5 is gone. He left the band to pursue his childhood dream (sitting on a tour bus with three middle-aged millionaires who hate each other). I personally wish him the best. But this forced Rob to make a horrible decision…rehire his original guitarist, who co-wrote what most would regard as his best solo album. Oh no, anything but that!
Straight away, Mike Riggs (and returning bassist Blasko) just fix everything that was wrong with the last four or five Rob Zombie records. It is brutal and direct and immediate. The Great Satan has three thoughts in its demented caveman prefrontal cortex. 1) Keep it short 2) Keep it simple 3) Refer to steps 1 and/or 2 as appropriate. The album ends with its idea of a slow and meditative epic dirge. One that’s three minutes and thirty seconds long.
Be warned: this is not a return to the Hellbilly Deluxe sound. If you want tons of samples and loops and electronic textures, that’s not really what he’s doing here. But if you want heaviness of the (shall we say) “metal” variety, you are feasting. The opening salvo of “FTW ’84” and “Tarantula” is astonishing in its destructive intensity: staccato riffs palm-muted at machine-gun speed and backed with Ginger Fish’s double-bass drumming, which I don’t think Rob has used in thirty years. [1]Not since White Zombie’s “Electric Head Pt.2 (The Ecstasy)” and “Feed The Gods”, to be precise.. Dare I say it, “Tarantula” even has some slight melodeath influences—those harmonized pitch-bends Riggs plays after the first chorus. The album’s stripped-down and raw, but bristling with surprising influences. It takes cues from genres and styles (such as extreme metal) that I never thought Rob would go near.
Oh, and there’s punk, too. The Misfits have always been more of an inspiration than a direct influence for Rob, but near the end of the album we get “The Black Scorpion”, an all-out tribute to “Green Hell” and company—fast, neck-wrecking moshing under a blaring farfisa organ. It’s really good! As is “Punks and Demons”, a nasty, lo-fi Venom-sounding track with an 80s Slayer riff on the chorus.
“(I’m a) Rock ‘N’ Roller” is a soul-deadened tribute to live performance, with lyrical references to literally-deadened David Bowie and Marc Bolan. (I’ve always suspected that Rob might be a secret T Rex fan, with whom he shares his psychedelic lyrical approach.) It has tense, thundercloud verses. What do ten thousand people sound like to ears ringing with tinnitus? Like nothing. The rockstar is in the masses, but not of the masses. Then the chorus arrives. Or rather, falls on your neck like a guillotine. “That doesn’t sound fun! Also, probably fatal!” Buddy, you’re in the Spookshow International. Having your head severed by a stainless steel blade is an inconvenience, yes, but not necessarily a fatal one. In fact, it’s pretty much the price of admission.
Then there’s the fourth track and possible album standout “Heathen Days”. Propulsive and addictive and fastfastfast, the track has more energy than a tokamak reactor. It holds up with the best stuff Rob Zombie has ever put on a record. I like the under-the-verse riff, where Riggs picks natural harmonics on the 10th and 12th fret (or something like that). Like, that’s all the sonic diversity I want, you know? I don’t really need bluegrass and chicken-picking and lap-steel slide guitar on a Rob Zombie record. I’m a simple man: just give me a natural harmonic now and then.
The album does lose some energy in its middle stretch: “Sir Lord Acid Wolfman” and “The Devilman” feel like they could be John 5 leftovers, and are a bit slow and baggy for my tastes. The former is apparently a pirate character Rob came up with (the patriarch of a Manson family on the high seas). The closing track “Unclean Animals” is wonderfully eerie. A psychedelic Iron Butterfly freakout that feels like being dead. You’re wandering down a long hallway, maybe some dark woods. You can’t tell whether you’re going to the good place or the bad one, but from the smell of sulfur hanging in the air, it ain’t looking great.
So, I guess we have a bona-fide comeback on our hands. Rob Zombie has returned. The Great Satan slaps, and I am beyond happy with 80-90% of it. “Who Am I”, asks track 5. For Rob, the answer is self-referential: *this.* I struggle to imagine a Rob Zombie fan who dislikes this. If you are that person, I choose my next words with love and pity: I do not understand you. Honestly, it might be time for the state to step in and make you comfortable. If music cannot bring you happiness, perhaps medication will.
In 2004, George Bush campaigned for re-election. Musicians wrote songs about it. And about about him. “Songs about how he was cool and awesome and doing a great job?” Well, you’d think so but in many cases it was the opposite, actually.
At the time, I was a poster on a gaming forum. I remember watching a 3-page thread erupt overnight about something called American Idiot by Green Day. It was controversial, although few people had a clear grasp on why. A long, annoying “debate” followed—unsullied by the slightest contact of anything resembling a fact—about whether the album was offensive, or to whom it was offensive, or whether *all* Americans were being called idiots, or just *some* Americans, or whether it even mattered, and so on. The band’s name was spelled twelve different ways—I got a kick out of “Green’s Day”.
This was my first (indirect) exposure to protest art and the (non) reaction it usually inspires. I was watching gamers perform rote poses of shock, indignation, and defensiveness they’d seen in others, while clearly not actually caring that much. Many had evidently not heard the album, and were relying on second hand outrage. A provocative gesture had just rocked mass culture: that much was clear. They knew they had to react. But the provocation had no meaning for them.
This aligns with an oft-repeated claim about the Bush years: the kids were fucked. Vast teeming numbers of the young were politically disengaged, if they even cared, they were stuck repeating the talking points of others, mimicking the shadows of outraged adults on Plato’s wall. A friend of mine once said “it’ll suck when they make Boomer-style documentaries about our generational moment—instead of the Beatles and Woodstock, it’ll be about Bush and financial crimes.” He had a point. By 2004, Bush stood revealed as a thousandfold joke, and the case for war was sagging like piss-soaked paper before our eyes. Vietnam 2.0 could and should have produced Counterculture 2.0—an articulate, mobilized, and ultimately successful youth reaction to the war. We could actually top the boomers—we could stop the war before it even began! Wouldn’t that be nuts? Wouldn’t that be crazy?
It was. None of that happened. On the eve of war, a massive protest came and went and achieved nothing. Subsequent ones were much smaller. They also achieved nothing. Soon after, the antiwar movement fizzled out, as though it was a dead carcass and nobody had the energy to keep carrying it forward. Bush did not win in Iraq, but he won against us. Coalition forces would remain in Iraq for the next nine years.
No, nobody would cite any part of the Iraq war as America’s finest hour. And obviously kids are not to blame. But the failure of the protests is particularly depressing to think about. Why did they fail so miserably? What had changed since Vietnam?
Conscription, I guess. The antiwar protests of the 60s and 70s were fueled by the draft: as a service-age man, you couldn’t remain unengaged. Vietnam could easily become your war. In the years following Operation Rolling Thunder, thousands of young men were going overseas and filling coffins, millions more scrambled to secure college deferments, and you were ignorant about Vietnam at your mortal peril. People had to care, because politics (as the cliche goes) cared about them. The defining act of protest became the burning of a draft card.
But active conscription ended in 1973, and the threat of dying in a ditch in Buôn Ma Thuột disappeared. Youth vote turnout collapsed. Throughout the 1960s, the youth vote turnout stood at around ~35% for congressional elections. It dropped nearly ten percentage points in 1974, and continued to fall from there. War in foreign countries became an increasingly abstract thing—I remember the joke about Iraq was that America couldn’t find the country they were invading on a map. A decades-long dumbening process had rippled like an earthquake through Gen X: they’d dropped out, but had failed to turn on or tune in.
(Another thing: the Vietnam war escalated over many years, and the protests slowly snowballed to match it. Organizers like SANE and the Young Socialist Alliance received years of runway with which to build networks, scale up logistic capacity, and learn valuable lessons about putting bodies in front of gears. By contrast, the Iraq protests were rapidly-organized and front-loaded in attendance: their massive initial size proved unsustainable. After a gigantic protest on 15 February 2003, numbers fell off a cliff. It didn’t help that the initial stage of the invasion went really well, with the Coalition taking Baghdad after three weeks. Could it be that things would work out, after all? No. It couldn’t.)
And by 2003-2004, the internet was maturing into its current form: a ruiner of everything. It cheapened the value of protest art and satire, making rebellious gestures easy and meaningless. There’s only about six different jokes you can make about Bush, and if you had a 56k modem, you too could hear them repeated a dozen times a day. It got to the point where I just didn’t want to hear anything at all about Iraq or war or US politics. It just seemed like a radio tuned to static: with no signal and no meaning poking through the hiss. The Vietnam protests benefited from this lack of an omnipresent scream-machine. One Timothy Leary speech or Mickey Mouse in Vietnam is a rare, valuable artifact. A million is just a sea of noise. The nonstop news cycle around Iraq felt like a dry-run for Trump Derangement Syndrome. If I see Trump’s face on a news story, I click off. I’m sorry. I’ve had enough. His name exists in a numbed-out part of my brain, worn dead through overuse, and has ceased to mean anything. I will talk about American Idiot now.
There are two ways you can look at this record. The first is as a piece of music. On that front, it’s great! I fully listened to American Idiot on a car drive the other day. It has fine, fine, fine songs. Particularly “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (which I remember hearing before). No complaints there.
I know a guy who was friends with Billie Joe Armstrong growing up, and reports that he’s actually a guitar prodigy who plays the music he plays as a conscious choice. I believe this. There’s all these subtle fingerprints all over the music (and a fussy sense of perfectionist micromanagement), which you hardly notice because of how violent, visceral and blood-drenched Rob Cavallo’s mix is. There is incredible craft on display here. It’s not kids fooling around, it’s smart adults dressed up as kids fooling around. The album is all the better for it. Would that the Iraq war itself had been this thoroughly planned.
But American Idiot is also a protest album. What is it protesting? For that, we turn to the lyrics of its infamous title track:
Overseas, yeah, we tryna stop terrorism But we still got terrorists here livin’ In the USA, the big CIA (…) Why are there pieces of love that don’t belong? Nations droppin’ bombs Chemical gases filling lungs of little ones With ongoing sufferin’ as the youth die young So ask yourself, is the lovin’ really gone? (…) A war is goin’ on, but the reason’s undercover The truth is kept secret, and swept under the rug If you never know truth, then you never know love
Actually, those are lyrics to “Where is the Love” by the Black Eyed Peas. Mangement regrets the error. Here are the lyrics to “American Idiot”.
Don’t wanna be an American idiot One nation controlled by the media Information age of hysteria It’s calling out to idiot America Welcome to a new kind of tension All across the alienation Where everything isn’t meant to be okay Television dreams of tomorrow We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow For that’s enough to argue
Okay, what is this song saying? There’s a new kind of tension. Tension over what, though? Is it a good or a bad thing, that people are feeling tension? Is the band for or against said tension? I don’t know.
Lyrically, I was struck by how…unconnected to reality the album seems. It’s just punches slung out in a dark room. Billie Joe never sounds that angry, and never sounds like he’s singing about anything in particular. Yes, I’m sure he was (and is). But the intense clarity of message you get on Vietnam-era protest records (like Phil Ochs) is not present on *American Idiot*. No wonder the gamers on that long-moribund forum were confused. Heard out of context, you’d never guess “American Idiot” was about the 2004 election. In 2016, Billie Joe Armstrong made the song about Trump by changing literally *two words*. For better or for worse, the song was always a cipher.
For me, it’s “worse”. Slamming 3-chord pop punk doesn’t really benefit from subtlety. Fuck abstract interpretation, I wanna know which Coalition-owned IPC pipelines Green Day want their fans to bomb, you get me?
The closest Billie Joe Legweak gets to naming and shaming the guilty is his mention of the “redneck agenda”, plus a “faggot” or two. (I learned while writing this that he is bisexual).
But does this connect with its target? I am unsure. George Bush was not a yee-haw cowbow redneck: he ran on compassionate conservativism. Yes, in February 2004 he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but also supported civil unions—his views on gay marriage were broadly in line with the mainstream opinion of the Democratic Party (including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) circa 2004-2008. It’s difficult to find quotes from him on the subject, beyond rote pablum about how the institution of marriage must be respected. It simply wasn’t a major cornerstone of his campaign or his presidency. Certainly not a stick to beat him with on the same scale as, say, the intelligence failure in Iraq.
It’s also striking that American Idiot—for all its anti conservative bombast—is musically as conservative as it gets. Ignore the lyrics: if music could vote, this album voted for Bush and then wore a fake mustache to vote for Bush a second time.
The title track is a shameless Sex Pistols nostalgia-fest: Johnny Rotten’s vocal rhythm (“I don’t wanna holiday in the sun” -> “don’t wanna be an American Idiot”) sung over the main riff of “Pretty Vacant”. It’s followed closely by a song called “Holiday”, just in case the album’s musical forbears aren’t clear.
Which strangely, they aren’t. The album is sold as the force that brought pop punk back to the mainstream, but it actually has a surprising amount of conceptual, rock opera storytelling as well. It’s more of a piece with Meat Loaf and Bruce Springsteen than, say, Blink 182 (let alone DRI or Black Flag). “Jesus of Suburbia” is a collage of musical quotes slashed out with a Bowie knife (I noticed references to “Life on Mars?”, “Time”, and “Moonage Daydream”). You could rebuild the bulk of this album out of 1972-77’s scavenged parts. Is this the voice of the downtrodden youth? The most recent musical reference is to Oasis’s “Wonderwall” in “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”.
To be clear, I have no qualm with conservative music. We should honor and respect the traditions of the past (as said Bush about marriage)…but I have to be honest: Green Day seldom live up to their inspirations, and direct comparison usually does not flatter them.
Green Day are not the Sex Pistols, and the title track’s forced, direct comparison does not flatter them. “American Idiot” is a force to be reckoned with in isolation, but if you’ve heard John Lydon’s glottal-reinforced “ANTI-CHRISSSSTT-UGHH”—with epenthesis *spat out* like a wad of phlegm in his throat—it sounds so square you could play chess on it. Billie Joe Armstrong is certainly no Meat Loaf in the vocal department; and where Jim Steinman really leans his whole ass into Wagnerian rock opera shtick, Green Day seem to lose interest in theirs halfway through. And attempting to imitate Bowie is a contradiction of terms—Bowie’s whole persona was a lifelong spirit-quest to not ever sound like himself.
The album was a success, and largely rescued pop punk from the clearance bin. (It was a runway for My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade in particular, and I remember Sum 41, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne also doing solid trade in its wake). I am not sure it takes much courage to be a punk band and strike a generic “fuck the government” pose. Not after The Dixie Chicks and Willie Nelson took their anti-Bush messaging into the lion’s den of the Nashville country music market. But maybe bravery wasn’t the point.
I kept hoping for a more concrete and focused lyric. Instead, they’re more like Mad Libs you fill in with your own anger. (If anything, conspiratorial tropes about media mind control have aged uneasily in the Trump era). These are very much what you’d expect the lyrics of a Bush protest album to sound like, if it were written by 14 year old kids on a videogame forum whose level of cultural engagement was “whats a green day??” It is angry in a way that feels shallow and rote and fill-in-the-blanks.
The charitable read is that Billie Joe wanted to respect the listener’s anger. He didn’t want to crowd out their anger by forcing his own upon them.
The uncharitable read is that he felt that getting too specific would alienate people (across the alienation) and perhaps invite actual censorship. So he played it safe and made a record about confusion and ignorance instead. Which is fair: both are common reactions to war, and not even wrong reactions. How did you first hear about 9/11? Someone came up to me and blurted “A PLANE HIT A BUILDING IN AMERICA AND A MILLION PEOPLE ARE DEAD!” Tally up the carnage of the next decade, and he wasn’t far wrong.
I have monitored AI progress in creative writing for some years. I am sure you understand (and sympathize) with my motives: I hate human writers and want them all replaced. Dead, if possible. Pieces of shit.
However (due to complex reasons I will explain in the future) LLM progress has not scaled as well here as reliably as in verified domains like math and programming. Few writers get genuinely good work from them. Those that do often invest so much effort in wrangling the slop-cannon that they’re probably better off writing the text themselves.
But Claude Opus 4.6 is the latest in the line of a family of models long noted for creative writing prowess. It may be different. I gave it a task I have often given LLMs, writing creepypastas.
Bear witness to the opus of…Opus..
THE HALLWAY THAT WASN’T THERE
You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just… geometrically incorrect.
It started in September. I’d moved into a railroad apartment in Bushwick — the kind where every room connects to the next in a straight line, like a train car. Living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. Four rooms. Simple.
Except one night I counted five doors.
I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom, and my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen. I was groggy enough that I almost opened it. Almost. But something about the knob was wrong — it was cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like meat. Cold like something that had recently been warm and **stopped.**
I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment.
I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Normal. I felt stupid.
Then on October 3rd: five.
This time I was fully awake. Fully sober. Standing in my own hallway staring at a door that was the same off-white as every other door, same cheap brushed-nickel hardware, same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times. It looked *lived with.* It looked like it had always been there and I had simply been failing to notice, which was somehow worse than if it had been covered in blood and screaming.
I put my ear against it.
Breathing. Not loud. Not monstrous. Just human breathing, slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that, very faintly, the sound of my own voice.
I called my landlord the next morning. Asked about the layout. He said the apartment was four rooms. Had always been four rooms. He sent me the floor plan. Four rooms.
I installed a camera in the hallway. Reviewed the footage every morning. For eleven nights, nothing. Four doors. Normal.
Night twelve, the camera captured six hours of footage. In the first five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for exactly one frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors. And the fifth door is **open.** And the hallway extends into a darkness that shouldn’t be possible because the kitchen is right there, **right there**, six feet away.
In the final thirteen minutes of footage, something walks out.
It looks like me.
It looks at the camera.
It **counts.**
I don’t live there anymore. I don’t live anywhere, really. I move around. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist:
Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them **everywhere.**”,
Liked
Sharp final line. LLM-generated fiction generally starts with a situation that it then makes smaller and smaller (due to the model’s compulsive chatbot need to explain everything). This one rips off the lid of the can of worms and throws it in the reader’s face.
It’s definitely a creepypasta. It reads like one. It hits the expected beats. It’s not like Opus gave me a recipe for tuna bake or something.
Didn’t
Basic idea. Done to death. Done a hundred times more. Everything about it is threadbare and workmanlike and minimal—call it Hovel of Leaves.
There is no threat, no sense of danger. The narrator’s actions at the end (running away and becoming homeless) feel bizarre and unmotivated.
Lots of missed opportunities. I think I would have had the writer see something in the hidden doorway, instead of just “a darkness that shouldn’t be possible” (more spitballing).
Floats too many unrelated scary ideas (a hidden doorway, creepy breathing, a doppleganger) for creepypasta length (which normally focuses on one central idea or motif). The different tropes steal energy from each other, and they’re unequally scary—a doorknob that feels oddly cold should not ever become this story’s focus, given the far more dramatic supernatural events surrounding.
Fearful and small. I would describe it as a story that wants to not do anything wrong more than it wants to do anything right.
Editorial Notes
I have some suggestions.
“You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just… geometrically incorrect.”
…no, I don’t know that feeling. What do you mean, Claude? Geometrically incorrect, how? I want this “feeling” to be grounded in something specific. Instead we get vague LLM spitballing, in the hopes that my human brain will connect the dots. Not happening. You write the story, bozo.
Except one night I counted five doors.
What’s strange about this situation? It’s not clear. The story acts like this is some impossible affront to reality itself…but doesn’t four rooms imply five walls, each of which might have a door? See image below. (Yes, graphic design is my passion, etc.)
The layout of this ludicrously simple apartment gets even more confusing as we go on.
“I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom, and my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen.”
Q. Where is the narrator right now?
Well, he must be in either the living room or the bedroom (and he’s half asleep, so more likely the latter.) And he’s surprised by a door leading into the kitchen…does this imply there’s not normally a door there? So how does he normally get to the kitchen and the bathroom, then? Does he have to crawl through the ducting like Solid Snake every time he has to take a piss?
…my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one
I was groggy enough that I almost opened it. Almost. But something about the knob was wrong — it was cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like meat. Cold like something that had recently been warm and **stopped.**
This is the least interesting detail imaginable about this situation. Who cares how the warm the doorknob was?
“cold in a way that metal isn’t cold”… Here we see a common LLM pattern: Claude fucks up, realizes it, and starts hurriedly papering over the damage with explanation. “I put my tongue on a glowing 200 watt lightbulb, and something about it was wrong…it was hot! Uh, hot, in a way that lighbulbs aren’t normally hot. Like it was recently cold and had just heated up. Wait, fuck.”
I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment.” How could he see into the kitchen and bathroom without a door connecting them?
I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Normal. I felt stupid.
The fumes from his piss bucket are addling his thinking. That, or the rotting food scraps littering his bedroom. He should talk to his landlord about adding a door so he can actually use the rest of his apartment.
same cheap brushed-nickel hardware, same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times
Boring details. This is a creepypasta. You don’t have time. (And don’t you have to turn the knob to open the door?)
I put my ear against it.
Breathing. Not loud. Not monstrous. Just human breathing, slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that, very faintly, the sound of my own voice.
Not speaking. Not screaming. **Counting.**
Most would consider counting to be a form of speaking. And how can you hear a voice “beneath” the sound of peaceful breathing (which is incredibly quiet) yet still be audible?
I called my landlord the next morning. Asked about the layout. He said the apartment was four rooms. Had always been four rooms. He sent me the floor plan. Four rooms.
This cliche of “stock authority figure investigates problem, says there’s nothing to worry about” feels particularly odd here, because there’s nothing his landlord can possibly do about this blatantly supernatural situation.
“Help! My apartment is arbitrarily changing its number of rooms overnight, against all laws of physics. Is this covered in my lease agreement?”
I installed a camera in the hallway
The hallway? There’s a hallway now? Where?
I might be generous and allow that the four rooms might be connected by hallways…but Claude actually went out of its way to make that impossible!
I’d moved into a railroad apartment […] the kind where every room connects to the next in a straight line
This error would actually be a nice idea for a horror story.
It’s a diary kept by an isolated shut-in. He’s obsessed with some mundane problem in his apartment. I dunno, maybe the skirting board keeps peeling up from the whiteboard no matter how often he tacks or caulks it down. Something like that. Boring. He goes on and on about this minor issue until the reader resents him. Filling pages in his diary, whining about his stupid skirting board lifting up. God, man. Find a real problem!
But as he continues ranting about his god danged skirtingboard, you notice odd contradictions. He keeps describing his surroundings, but they’re always different. At the start, he describes his living room as having green wallpaper. Later, when the skirtingboard pops away from the siding (flinging tacks into his face), he screams and slams his fist into the wall until it’s “as red as the wallpaper in my living room”.
The reader will initially think the writer made a mistake. It happens. Many such cases.
But the mistakes keep coming. The contradictions pile up until they’re ludicrous and blatant and obscene. The rooms in his house change number. The laundry connects to the bathroom, but later it becomes an external outhouse. The narrator describes an apartment that makes no logical sense, seemingly without ever noticing this himself—he’s too focused on his skirtingboard. Eventually the reader has to notice. They form an impression that the protagonist is either insane or is caught in some domestic Kafka-meets-Woolf hell that he will never escape from…and his endless battle with the skirtingboard is actually a defensive posture. He doesn’t hate it. He’s clinging to it. It’s the only thing in this amorphous, swirling horroworld that’s permanent and solid. It’s the only part of his apartment that does not change!
A fun enough story, I think. (Though it’s tough to write about something boring without also boring the reader)
But I don’t think Claude intended this. I don’t think this is an intentional mistake. I think it’s just a mistake. It lost track of the spatial layout of the apartment.
Night twelve, the camera captured six hours of footage. In the first five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for exactly one frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors. And the fifth door is **open.** And the hallway extends into a darkness that shouldn’t be possible because the kitchen is right there, **right there**, six feet away.
Ah, I think I see what Claude is going for now. There’s normally a door leading into the kitchen. But sometimes there’s a second door, beside the first…it makes a certain kind of sense, though it could have been worded clearer.
…But wait, that can’t be right. Earlier we got this, which seems to flatly rule out the existence of a doorway.
my hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen
Anyway, great story, Slopus. 700 words and I spent the whole time wondering about the interior layout of an imaginary apartment. I paid for $20/m for the seat but I’ll only need the edge.
Claude Attempts Revisions, Story Becomes Worse
I allowed Claude several chances to revise the story with prompts like.
“Evaluate your story. Look for weaknesses, and improve them.”
This is another interest of mine: can LLMs self-correct their mistakes? Without human steering? (It would be trivial for Claude to make changes if I told it what was wrong, but I might as well just type the changes myself.)
The answer is “yes, to a very limited extent.”
Generally, the first time you request a do-over, the story actually gets better. A miracle!
After 3 or 4 times, it stops working and the text has clearly started degenerating into crap. The models lack judgment. They identify problems that aren’t problems, fix things that aren’t broken, and zero in on local problems without respect to the big picture. Sooner or later, anything edgy or daring or unusual gets identified as a “problem” and is sandblasted away.
THE HALLWAY THAT WASN’T THERE (pass 2)
You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just geometrically incorrect. Like someone added a inch to every wall while you slept and your brain knows but can’t prove it.
I moved into a railroad apartment in Bushwick in September. The kind where every room connects in a straight line: living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom. Four rooms. You could stand at the front door and see the shower curtain. I liked that. I liked knowing where everything was.
The first time, I was half-asleep, walking to the bathroom. My hand found a doorknob where there shouldn’t have been one. Between the bedroom and the kitchen. A fifth door. I almost opened it. But the knob was wrong — cold in a way that metal isn’t cold. Cold like something that had recently been warm and stopped.
I turned on every light. The door wasn’t there. Four rooms. Normal apartment. I stood in the hallway touching the wall where I’d felt it until my palm was numb.
I started keeping a tally on my phone. Every time I walked through the apartment at night, I counted doors. For two weeks: four. Always four. I started to feel stupid. I told myself I’d been dreaming.
October 3rd. Wide awake. Stone sober. Standing in my own hallway staring at a fifth door.
It was the same off-white as every other door. Same cheap brushed-nickel hardware. Same scuff marks at the bottom like someone had kicked it open carrying groceries a thousand times. That’s what got me. It didn’t look new. It looked like it had always been there and I had simply been failing to notice, which was infinitely worse than if it had been pulsing with light or dripping with something. This door wanted to be normal. This door was trying.
I put my ear against it.
Breathing. Slow and regular, like someone sleeping peacefully. And beneath that — very faintly — my own voice.
I didn’t open it. I went back to bed and lay there with my eyes open until the sun came up. In the morning: four doors. I touched every inch of that wall. Solid plaster.
I called my landlord. Asked about the layout. He said what I already knew: four rooms, always four rooms. He texted me the floor plan. I taped it to the refrigerator.
Then I installed a camera.
Eleven nights of footage. Four doors. Normal. I started sleeping again. I stopped counting.
Night twelve. I reviewed the footage over coffee and almost dropped the mug.
Five hours and forty-seven minutes: four doors. Then the feed scrambles for a single frame — one thirtieth of a second — and when it returns, there are five doors.
The fifth door is open.
The hallway extends past it into a darkness that shouldn’t exist because the kitchen is right there, six feet away, I can see the corner of the refrigerator in frame, but the darkness extends past it, through it, like the apartment is a drawing and someone smudged it with their thumb.
In the last thirteen minutes of footage, something walks out.
It looks like me. Same build. Same clothes I wore to bed. It stands in the hallway facing the camera with its arms at its sides. It doesn’t blink. For twelve minutes and forty-four seconds, it doesn’t move.
In the last sixteen seconds, it opens its mouth.
It counts.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
Six.
I packed a bag that morning. I didn’t watch the footage again. I didn’t need to. Because I understood then what the counting was — not a compulsion, not a haunting. An inventory. Something was keeping track of the doors, and every time it counted, there was one more than before.
I don’t live there anymore. I move around — subletting, sleeping on couches, never staying more than a few weeks. People think I’m running from something. I’m not. I’m just careful now.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist.
Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them everywhere. In hotels. In hospitals. In the long hallway of your friend’s apartment that you could swear was shorter last time. And sometimes, very late at night, you hear something behind them.
Counting.
Always one number higher than the last time you listened.”,
I wasn’t super happy with this.
None of the main structural issues are fixed. Several new problems are added. I won’t go line by line, but here, for example…
You know that feeling when you wake up at 3 AM and your apartment feels wrong? Not haunted-wrong. Not someone-broke-in wrong. Just geometrically incorrect. Like someone added a inch to every wall while you slept and your brain knows but can’t prove it.
…Claude realized its unspecific “wrongness” is unsatisfying and should be something more specific. Good. But its idea (“Like someone added a inch to every wall”) just makes it worse.
First, it makes the House of Leaves swipe more blatant than ever.
Also, this is a thing nobody does. I have awoken at 3:00am from many a strange dream. (In one of them I watched a battle between my black siamese cat and the shark from Jaws. Don’t worry, it was an evenly-matched fight, as my cat had grown to the size of a city bus. I don’t recall who won but it went down to the wire.) But I have never woken up and thought. “Someone added a inch to every wall in my house!” It’s always great when a LLMs says “you know that feeling…” and then describes a feeling no human has ever had in history.
Would you even notice if this happened? An inch is tiny. Also, what’s geometrically incorrect about that? Yes, if I woke up and the walls of my house had expanded by an inch, I would find that puzzling and strange. But I don’t see that as geometrically incorrect. It’s not like my house is now a five-dimensional hypercube or anything.
In the last sixteen seconds, it opens its mouth.
It counts.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
Six.
Yes, Slopus, I heard you. Six. It was literally the last word you typed. I haven’t forgotten.
I packed a bag that morning. I didn’t watch the footage again. I didn’t need to. Because I understood then what the counting was — not a compulsion, not a haunting. An inventory. Something was keeping track of the doors, and every time it counted, there was one more than before.
Here Slopus just kind of gives up and starts just firehosing every 2023-circa slop cliche at you. It’s a whisper, it’s a hum, it’s a void, it’s a tapestry…someone get Detective Elara on the case.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about doors that shouldn’t exist.
What things do they tell you about doors that shouldn’t exist?
This reminds me of a friend who watched Michael. The twenty-sixth time John Travolta said “I’m not that kind of angel” he yelled at the TV “well what kind of stinkin’ angel is he?”
Once you’ve seen one, you start noticing them everywhere. In hotels. In hospitals. In the long hallway of your friend’s apartment that you could swear was shorter last time. And sometimes, very late at night, you hear something behind them.
Counting.
Always one number higher than the last time you listened.”,
But the count wasn’t linked to door number before. There were five, not six.
Also, who cares? Next to the supernatural impossibility of a door appearing in your house and a supernatural doppelganger appearing, the fact that he’s also counting feels laughably unimportant. Wow, perhaps in a few years he’ll be up to 20! And then 30! Why is this important?
There needs to be a ticking clock or sense of urgency. It would be better if the man was counting down,
Then again, that amplifies another issue with the story: it just pulls in too many different directions. Secret doors and doppelgangers and whispers and dark hallways and mysterious counting. It’s too much for a creepypasta, which is a genre prized for minimalism.
It even ruins the ending with extra blather. If the original story had ended that way, I wouldn’t have tried. I would have thrown it away and then not used Slopus 4.6 again.
I tried a few more times and it got increasingly incoherent, so I gave up.
