A Silly Complaint About a Silly Horror Story
"It's Later Than You Think" by C.K. Walker rotted my brain
Usually, when something moves into my head without intending to pay rent I let it roam around there until I can articulate some bigger point I can share with you all. As the title of this piece suggests, It’s Later Than You Think is different. I’m really not interested in forcing four thousand or whatever words on you with a half-assed thesis, it’s not some kind of assigned essay that I have to submit if I want to graduate and have a career at some point. Consider this just two thousand or whatever words of me showing you this fucked up and funny thing I found so I can pass the brain rot along to somebody else. If I can stumble on some salient idea on the way that’s even better, but it will be an accidental side effect.
Readers, let me ask you this: How scary is too scary? Or, rather, how much horror elements can you cram into one thing before it loops back around and isn’t scary anymore?
It’s now well half-way through November, but since time is fake and it seems to me that Halloween season was just here I’ve been re-binging a lot of those “Disturbing Movie/Event/Whatever Iceberg” videos. I’m not all that desensitized, I know that if I was ever faced with those things head on I would bawl and throw up and turn it off - big shocker, disturbing things disturb - but as long as somebody else is just telling me about it something different overrides the natural sympathetic response. What always strikes me about the gutters of those compilation lists is just how banal they are - there are only so many combinations of sex, death, and violence you can smash together before it just kind of makes me roll my eyes.
On that note, C.K. Walker and It’s Later Than You Think. I heard this story just recently on the NoSleep Podcast, as I mentioned in The Internet, Forever I listen to it to fall asleep (ha) and hear some genuinely stuff on it. Like in the case of The Hidden Webpage which I recommended in that piece, It’s Later Than You Think did not, in fact, help me fall asleep. It actually fought through two melatonin doses and made me laugh so hard I stayed up until early hours of the morning, head in my hands. So, a very different experience from The Hidden Webpage.
Here I will disclose that from this point forward I will spoil the ever living shit out of It’s Later Than You Think and another story Borrasca by the same author. Just because it wasn’t for me doesn’t mean I should rob anyone from experiencing it and deciding for themselves, both and many more are available on Walker’s website and, as always, I do recommend the NoSleep Podcast rendition.
To help you understand what was so hilarious about It’s Later Than You Think there are two things that need to be pointed out. First, it was presented as the final story in a season finale of NoSleep, a space usually reserved for longer stories and overall a prestigious spot, indicating that what you’re about to hear has been carefully picked out of, no doubt, hundreds of contenders. Second, the first ninety five percent of it are genuinely so good.
It’s Later Than You Think is the story of Elena, or Laney. Laney is engaged to Matt, a regular dude with nearly zero personality she’s going to marry in a few months, and is best friends with her sister Gia, a selfless woman and single mother to her three-year-old Wyatt. At her bachelorette party/her friend’s birthday Laney gets peer-pressured into taking some mushrooms dangerously close in time to when she’s supposed to drive home. When she does finally hit the road, Laney gets chased by a terrifying, not-quite-right deer creature and crashes her car. She begs to live to whatever entity may hear her and slowly fades into oblivion. But upon regaining consciousness, behold! She’s in her bed, not a scratch on her or the car safely parked in the garage, except time seems to be going suspiciously, even if just a bit, slow around her. And the creature keeps gnawing on her limbs every time she dares to close her eyes to catch some rest from this new reality that makes less and less sense…
I know I’m kind of rushing through the explanation, but you see how this is good right? Even if the premise gets a bit too close to D.A.R.E. rhetoric to my liking, questioning if Laney is just having an awful, permanent trip or if something more sinister is going on as she tries to go through the motions of daily life and wedding preparation is genuinely grueling in the best way. Personally, the fact that a rare side effect of psychedelics is that you can just straight up trip all your life keeps me up at night, so It’s Later Than You Think really worked for me in that way. As the story ramps up it throws more and more breadcrumbs your way, even as they are filtered through this fun-house mirror that is Laney’s life. Matt and Gia seem to be acting strange around her, Wyatt begins to resemble someone in her life more and more, and her loved ones just keep repeating during the strangest times at her - it’s later than you think.
Anyway, if you want to truly and properly experience this story, you can check it out as I said, but I will now jump and bluntly place the conclusion. When the jigsaw of Laney’s life finally gets assembled, this is what is left: Matt has been cheating on her all this time. With Gia. Wyatt is his kid. And Laney finds all this out on that fateful ride home, high as a cloud, with Gia in her passenger seat. She did crash her car and has been in a coma all this time. It was all a dream!
This isn’t even the egregious part, I can roll with a good dream scenario. Okay, so Laney wakes up in the hospital, in front of a man she assumes to be Matt. This man informs her that she killed Gia in that accident, which Laney actually already gathered from dream-Gia before waking up. However, the man also confesses he’s not Matt, he’s Wyatt. It’s nearly thirty years later from that night, later than you think. Wyatt then spins this tale of how his heartbroken dad took custody of him after his mother’s death and then committed suicide on his eighteenth birthday because he was so ridden with guilt for her untimely passing. Laney and Gia’s parents poured all their money into keeping their only daughter left alive on life support. Therefore, when their mother, Wyatt’s grandmother, fell ill, there was no more money left to treat her. So she died and his grandfather, his soul completely crushed by all this tragedy, just skipped town and left Wyatt all alone. So Wyatt took over keeping Laney on life support but, ooh, for spooky malicious reasons! He confesses he did this, spent undoubtedly hundreds of thousands in courts and hospitals just for this - he places a mirror in front of now elderly Laney. She’s a quadruple amputee. The crash took all of her limbs. Laney, in shock, questions why Gia in her coma dream would beg her to keep living and not give into the darkness. Wyatt posits that maybe she hates Laney just as much as he does.
You see how this is a bit much, right?
I could get sucked into the trap of spilling rivers of ink into everything from questioning why this kid would spend so much money to keep this aunt he supposedly hates so much alive instead of, I don’t know, going to an Ivy League college and letting her rot, to meme-ing Laney waking up as an old, armless, legless stump. I honestly wish I recorded my reaction to this reveal, I started cackling like a hyenna in the dark in my bed. She’s just like that one anime girl meme picture I will undoubtedly put as the cover of this piece. But all of this is just self-evidently fucking goofy, I don’t think this paragraph was even necessary.
What kills me is that this isn’t even the first time it happens in a C.K. Walker story. The first of her writing I encountered was Borrasca, another story absolutely oozing with atmosphere right up until the reveal of the horror, which in that case is an incest child sex-trafficking baby farm. I don’t even have the energy to explain how Borrasca gets to that point and how it explains it but let me tell you, it’s not much better than this.
This gets me back to the introduction. How much horror aspects can you cram into one thing before it becomes funny? Well, I guess we can pretty much get it down to an equation here. In Borrasca, it’s incest and child sex-trafficking and baby farms. In It’s Later Than You Think, I was honestly on board with Laney killing her sister, Wyatt growing up to hate her deeply, her waking up old, her parents keeping her on life support to the point of poverty. But she also had to be a quadruple amputee for some reason, Matt had to kill himself, and Wyatt had to operate on cartoon supervillain logic.
So, this is the fucked up funny thing I wanted to share with you all. But I kept the kicker for last: C.K. Walker is not just some random creepypasta writer. It’s a pseudonym of Rebecca Klingel and Rebecca is a successful screenwriter, having worked on all three Mike Flanagan Netflix series - The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and The Fall of the House of Usher. Straight from her bio on the C.K. Walker website, “Klingel has worked with film icons David Goyer, Mike Flanagan, Eli Roth, Mark Hamill, and other talented filmmakers. She enjoys writing unique and elevated character-driven horror; in other words, horror with heart.”
God save us all and God save the state of horror.