Best of Web Fiction: INSTRUCTION FOR A HELP

Cropped for spoilers. Check out the date, though.

Instruction for a Help is a series of howto guides that are written in spectacularly mangled English that suggests some sort of a translator. Take this advice in Instruction for a Fruit: "Take a bad water and make a good water. A fruit loves a water twice a day." The language, and the articles' apparently insane notions ("The eyes of a fruit close and a tear comes") are written by Zack Parsons, for comedy website Something Awful. But soon the bizarrely humourous become bizarrely disturbing, and it becomes obvious that comedy is not the main thrust of the series.

 The readers of the "instructions" mostly call for people to love and respect nature, and to report to "THE CENTER" to be "diagoloised" and assessed for what we can safely assume to be reproductive activity, or as they call it, "formulating a babie"(lol). Having trouble with your "babie"? No problem, just ring for your neighbourhood friendly red worm. He is your friend, and will protect you from the mans from below, which incidentally, if you see him, you should open up his skin and "take out ALL his fluids".

This world where man and nature live harmoniously by all accounts, is flavoured with strange distorted images, becoming fragmented and broken as the series hits its climax, when the mythical "mans from below" threaten the status quo.

It ends rather ambiguously, but is tied strongly to a companion narrative, also written by the same author, called "The View From Below", which despite spoiling the mystery surrounding Instruction for a Help, The View from Below is what I would argue is the "meat" of the the actual story. The View from Below is an arguably even better story, this time with proper English and a much more straightforward narrative with the same setting. The setting of it, political aspects and all, are well-realized and believable; the plot twists and turns past an easy ending into an epilogue that is one of the more intriguing endings I've seen in Fantasy/SciFi.

It is quite long, but segmented into convenient chunks and is unusually well-written and original for internet fiction.

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