FimFiction Link - Short ID: 450955/the-door
Published: Nov '19
'The Door' is a little less than four thousand-word horror oneshot. The funny thing is about horror is that you can take the most mundane thing in the world, in this case a door, and then through the interactions of the characters make it into something that invokes intrigue and perhaps a bit of dread. Now, because the story is so short obviously the reader won't be overly shook by the events, but regardless for a tale this short and a premise this bizarre, I think most of it works fairly well.
What's more interesting is the way the story is presented. While as mentioned above the story has less than four thousand words, the text is separated into twenty seven chapters, each being less than two hundred words long. This serves a dual purpose, firstly it drives the slice-of-life part of the plot as each little chapter tells us about a different day of Twilight and how she copes with the mysterious door that keeps popping up everywhere. The other purpose is that the chapters' titles read together form a sentence, that I assume the author intended to be foreboding, but I personally thought it's a bit too camp to be taken seriously.
I don't wish to give away the rest of the plot, because it's so short, but I sadly have to admit that the ending felt weak to me. The door turns out to be the manifestation of her psychological trauma. We've all seen a thousand stories like this before and the pony setting adds nothing to the narrative. Also due to the shortness of the chapters, the revelation comes extremely abruptly and it frankly had no impact at all on me. I feel like the story worked much-much better before the "joke" was spoiled.
Overall: 6/10 I enjoyed the weird marriage of horror and slice-of-life and the individual chapters held up tension nicely despite only being about two hundred words long. The ending, however, kind of ruins the aftertaste of the story. I can recommend it, if you need something you can finish in half an hour and walk away saying "that was alright." Otherwise don't bother.