Please Pass the Creepypasta: 13 Novels Based on Internet Horror

If you don’t spend very much time on web forums, the title of this article may sound like absolute nonsense to you. The word “creepypasta” comes from the older internet slang term “copypasta,” which was used to refer to blocks of text that circulated by being copied and pasted (on internet forums and other similar venues) as a form of internet humor or in-joke. One form of this is posting the script of The Bee Movie in an unrelated comment section–I once received this several dozen times when someone emailed all of the graduate students at my university but forgot to BCC the list. Creepypasta is, as the name suggests, creepy. It is often presented as factual and, in contemporary iterations, includes images and audio. It’s folklore for the internet age. Many of these tales originated on the r/NoSleep subreddit and other similarly anonymous corners of the internet where authorship is not easy to determine. You may have heard of Slenderman, the fictional entity at the center of a notorious attempted murder several years ago. I think my first encounter with actual creepypasta was through Abandoned by Disney, which has been republished as Dandyland to avoid the copyright wrath of The Mo...