“I think that the determining moments in your life are not seen as such until much later. You can only weigh their importance once they are in the past, and maybe that’s the great tragedy of time.”
This week's recommendation is A Smoke Story, a collection of short stories. You may also know the series as 'The Books of Sand', named after but not to be confused with 'The Book of Sand' by Jorge Luis Borges. They were originally posted on 4Chan's /x/ board before being reposed on a Blogspot site and are currently being reworked and uploaded to Substack under its new name.
A Smoke Story is penned pseudo-anonymously, with the author only going by L.B or Little Brother. It’s structured as the translated and edited accounts of L.B’s deceased brother and his friends on what they call "weird shit" that happened around them. Each story is told by a member of the older brother's group, with added notes by LB.
The stories evoke a feeling that I can't really find words for, something akin to a melancholic nostalgia. The best way that I can describe it is like reliving the adventure and nightmare of being lost in an empty city at dusk as a child, everything feeling completely different now you're viewing it as an adult. Does that make sense? No? Good.
The accounts are from different parts of the group's lives, from childhood to adulthood, varying in how seemingly supernatural they are, if at all. The stories all work alone, but also entwine and reference each other through common events, characters and locations. The writing does an excellent job of making each story feel like a slice out of a fleshed-out life in progress, making everything feel real. As the stories progress, you can also piece together more and more of what is happening in the city, using details from each to piece together a greater story.
You can find the original versions of the stories, Books of Sands, here.
You can find the reworks, A Smoke Story, here.
The YouTuber Chass released a TTS narration of the story here.
I’d suggest reading the stories first, but there is a strange haunting quality that the Chass version achieves between the TTS voice and BGM.