HORROR MONTH #4: My Father's Long, Long Legs, by Michael Lutz (2013)

Type of Media: Interactive Fiction

Every family has a secret. The one that no one wants to talk about, but it's still always there, causing tension. Ruining dinner. Slowly eating away at the back of everyone's mind.

Set in a declining Rust Belt town, My Father's Long, Long Legs is about a family with an especially strange secret. It follows a young woman reminiscing on her childhood, and on her father's strange behavior that eventually broke up the family. One day, for seemingly no reason, the woman's father brought home a shovel, went to the basement, and just started... digging. Though at first the digging was merely a weird hobby, it eventually became an obsession that cost the father his job, alienated his wife, and started causing physical transformations.

My Father's Long, Long Legs is a Twine game, a short piece of interactive fiction where you click on bolded words, occasionally making choices, to move a story forward. Nothing pops out at you or suddenly screams to startle you, though you should play it with headphones on because it does use some repeating sound effects to heighten tension.

My Father's Long, Long Legs isn't scary, exactly, but it is creepy and a bit disturbing. Playing through this story is a bit like looking at a photo where almost everything seems normal, but there are just one or two things that are a little off. Most of the events in My Father's Long, Long Legs show a normal domestic life marred by the father's unusual problem. 

It could be read as an allegory for dealing with a close family member's sudden mental illness. The family in the story is ashamed of their father, possibly too ashamed to seek some kind of help for him. The mother spends long periods of time locked alone in her bedroom, and the children stop inviting friends over. They live around their father's problem instead of dealing with it, to the point where it grows out of control and possibly starts taking lives.

Since it takes no more than 10-15 minutes to play through all of it, My Father's Long, Long Legs is a great way to get yourself in the mood for a longer horror story like a book or a movie. It can also be good for horror newbies as a way to just dip your toe into the realm of horror fiction to see how you like it.