from the pen of icarus blake

It only takes a cursory glance at my blog to know that I have a special affinity for dogs.  Their joint history with humans, the dichotomy of fear and love that can make a dog a protector or violent monster, the wolf just beneath the surface.  They are both the family dog chasing a would-be burglar away from the front porch and the terrible baying in the distance when you’re walking home alone.  It’s this duality that makes a dog a perfect horror antagonist, and why all of the stories that frighten me the most feature them so strongly.

This idea of something taking the shape of man’s best friend in an attempt to manipulate the humans around them shakes me to my core.  Perhaps that’s why, as a teenager, coming across this piece on the r/nosleep forums stuck to my head so hard.  To this day I cannot peel it away, like a thin skin of glue clinging to your fingers after an ill-advised craft project where what comes out is a distorted mirror of the demonstration piece.

This story is “My dog was lost for three days. What came back wasn’t my dog.” by u/chewingskin on Reddit.  I’m linking it here, read it before you continue:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/3w4xif/my_dog_was_lost_for_three_days_what_came_back/

The first time I experienced it, it was narrated.  This narration probably increased the impact of the piece — or maybe I was overcaffeinated and 16.  It has all the expected tropes: mutilated animals, weird woods, isolation.  It also has one of the most on point descriptions of an uncanny valley not-dog I’ve ever read.  

The use of movement here is significant: because dogs come in so many shapes and sizes, an important aspect of “dog” to the human brain is the pattern of movement.  It’s why we can tell a dog from a wolf, why we can tell a cat from a small dog.  The way dogs move and act is immediately identifiable to something primal in our brains, something that identifies them as an animal we know.  When you twist this, as the author in this piece does, the reaction is immediate and unsettling.

Most dog owners have experienced something like this.  The first indication that something is off with our pals is a change in their behavior or movement.  Their steps get tight, they sit too still, they stare for too long or not long enough.  We know, based on the tiniest change in behavior, that something is off.  If our dogs were to return to us after 3 days, changed, moving wrong, we would assume injury.  But if that continues, we may realize that our dog no longer moves like a dog, and what does not move like a dog….

Well, that’s not a dog, then, is it?