By I am a big fan of r/nosleep, a forum for users to post short horror fiction. The gimmick of the subreddit is that the stories are often framed as Redditors’ real personal experiences, to enhance the immersion factor of browsing the stories. (In 2024, I want to start posting more reviews and articles about Internet fiction, creepypastas, ARGs, and things like that, because I really enjoy them and believe these are under-appreciated storytelling mediums amongst the traditional reading community.)
“Borrasca” is one such piece of fiction, a short story written by C.K. Walker, originally posted in parts on r/nosleep. Now it is hosted in full on her website, which I highly recommend you check out before reading my review, as this review contains spoilers. Also, note that this story contains very mature themes.
It’s a long story, but one you’ve never heard before. This story is about a place that dwells on the mountain; a place where bad things happen. And you may think you know about the bad things, you may decide you have it all figured out but you don’t. Because the truth is worse than monsters or men.
Borrasca I
The first part of “Borrasca” introduces our protagonist, Sam Walker, as a 4th-grade kid. He moves with his parents and older sister Whitney to a new town, called Drisking, nestled in the Ozark mountains.
Playing with the neighborhood kids, Kimber and Kyle, Sam gets his first introduction to Borrasca. There’s an urban legend about people disappearing to Borrasca, “a place where bad things happen.” At night, sometimes they can hear a strange noise coming from the mountains, and Sam is told this is the sound of Borrasca.
Sam also learns that there have been disappearances of people, and his friends tell him that these people were probably taken to Borrasca.
Then, tragedy strikes: Sam’s older sister, Whitney, mysteriously disappears. His parents hold onto hope that she merely ran away, but they seem to know that wherever she is, she isn’t coming back. Of course, both Sam and the reader are left to assume that she has been taken to this mysterious place called Borrasca…
Borrasca II
The second installment of the story takes place seven years later: now Kyle, Kimber and Sam are finishing up their sophomore year of high school, and the shadow of Borrasca is still hanging over them. Whitney was never found, and the odd happenings in the town continue.
Most of this part is dedicated to raising the tension and the sense that something in the town is very off. We are introduced to other characters, such as Sam’s friends Phil and Mike, and given the names of some more people who have all gone missing over these past years. We also learn that Kimber and Kyle are now dating and that Sam’s dad is a cop in the town because the other kids teasingly refuse to let him smoke weed with them.
C.K. Walker employs a lot of foreshadowing and tension-building in this part, which was really well done. This is where the story starts to get pretty unsettling, and you get the feeling that something big is going on, a huge conspiracy that the characters are on the verge of uncovering. Now that the characters are teenagers, too, rather than young kids, their concerns about the sinister “Borrasca” are in some way easier to take seriously.
“Yeah, man,” Phil nodded. “You know sometimes, when I’m high, I can see them all. And I feel like I know the answer to the mystery, man. Like I’m so close to solving it. It’s just something I can see. Like they’re all puzzle pieces and in my mind I see the puzzle put together but I can’t tell what the picture is of, you know?”
“You’re fuckin’ high, Saunders.” Kyle said.
“We all are, man. We all are. Everyone in this town is drinking the fuckin’ kool aid.”
This is a pretty usual horror trope: the creepy small town where something strange is going on and everyone seems to be in on it, but it is executed very well. I was invested in the characters by this point and couldn’t stop reading.
We are also introduced to Sam’s co-worker Meera, the manager of the sandwich shop they work at. The shop is owned by the Prescotts, a rich family who we learn own a lot of property in the town. We also learn that Meera and her husband are struggling with infertility, a detail that at this point in the story feels innocuous, but will become much more important later on.
I was really impressed by the amount of foreshadowing in this chapter, especially because it didn’t register as foreshadowing until I had read to Part IV of the story.
The end of Part II sets the spiral of tension into overdrive when Kimber’s mother commits suicide with no explanation.
Borrasca III
Part III picks up where Part II left off, with Kyle and Sam trying to figure out what caused Kimber’s mom to jump off a building with no explanation. They are surprised that she wouldn’t have left a note or anything, and are pretty sure they heard Kimber’s dad mention getting a letter from her mom. However, the other adults they ask about it are being weirdly cagey, giving them the feeling that something dodgy is going on. Could there be some sort of cover-up that the other adults are in on?
The three teens hatch a plan for Kimber to look in her father’s study for the hypothetical letter, sneaking home during the funeral. However, after leaving the funeral, Kimber doesn’t come back. She isn’t answering any of their texts and seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Desperately, Sam asks his dad, to look into why Kimber is missing, figuring that as a cop his dad might have more information, but his dad merely says that Kimber and her dad must have just left the town.
It’s very weird and harkens back to Whitney’s disappearance and the other disappearances during the story. Again, C.K. Walker expertly builds tension: the disappearance of a main character that we have grown to know and love raises the stakes even more and compels the reader to continue reading the story. At this point, I knew that I could not stop reading until I learned what happened to Kimber and the others, and what Borrasca was.
Borrasca IV
Part IV of this story is what sets it apart from other horror stories that I’ve read.
Desperate to find Kimber, Kyle and Sam decide they need to figure out what Borrasca is. They speculate that the Prescott family has something to do with it, because they are the most powerful family in the town.
They decide to consult a historian from the town about what “borrasca” means. They learn that it is a old term for a mine that is underperforming, and conclude that “Borrasca” must refer to one of the old mines from back when the town was a mining town.
They hike through the woods and up into the mountains, trying to find the old location of the mines. They finally find it, and discover that there are some buildings still standing. At this point they know that this place must be Borrasca.
“This is the machine. This is where they take them,” I said. “This is the place where people die.”
Walking towards the buildings, they start to hear some noises coming from inside, sounding like people having sex. Seeking to investigate what is going on, they go inside and make a horrifying discovery: some of the buildings are full of women who are heavily sedated and strapped down to beds, with many of them pregnant.
At this point, I stopped reading and said, “Oh my god, there’s some Handmaid’s Tale shit going on here.”
Horrified, Sam and Kyle realize that these are all of the missing girls from the town, including Kimber and Whitney. Frantically they begin to untie Kimber and she makes a run for it. Sam and Kyle try to stay to rescue Whitney too but before they can they are caught by Jimmy Prescott.
Clery, one of the other police chiefs, is also there, and he and Prescott have a Bond villain moment where they smoke cigarettes and tell Kyle and Sam about their entire plans (the absurdity of which Sam recognizes, a clever 4th-wall-break moment). It turns out that the secret of Borrasca is that they are running a “baby farm” thing because the drinking supply of Drisking has been contaminated by chemicals that caused infertility. They kidnap women from the town and rape them, then sell their babies. The sounds of Borrasca are the noises made by a machine they call the “Shiny Gentleman” which grinds up the women after their bodies are used up.
There are several disturbing revelations here, beyond the obvious disturbing revelation that the entire town of Drisking is covering up this sex trafficking-baby trafficking operation. The reader also realizes that Meera, Sam’s co-worker, must have adopted her child from Borrasca, and that, because the children of this operation are given names based on who fathered them, that Kimber and Kyle are actually half-siblings. So that’s creepy.
Jimmy Prescott starts punching Kyle in an attempt to make him tell them where Kimber went, and Kyle ends up severely injured. The men taunt Sam by telling him that unless he leaves right now to take Kyle to the hospital, he won’t survive. This forces Sam to leave Whitney at the baby farm and take Kyle down the mountain.
When he gets back, Sam desperately runs to his father and tells him everything, but his father just tells Sam to never speak about the incident again. Shocked, Sam realizes that his father must be in on it too, and the entire police force of the town is part of the baby farm operation.
This part of the story really shocked me, and is the reason why I think this story stands out among other horror stories. The first three parts of Borrasca follow the usual horror story progression, with the build-up of a mysterious secret. C.K. Walker does a great job of making you think there is some sort of supernatural entity in Borrasca, or that there is some sort of monster in the woods. I really did think that the story was going to involve some sort of supernatural entity, but Walker pulls the rug out from under us in the fourth part with the revelation that the true “monsters” of the story were the characters we implicitly trusted the entire time-– even Sam’s father, a police officer.
I also think it leaves an impression because the evil that humans are capable of is far more chilling than any supernatural entity could be. There is nothing scarier, in my opinion, than humanity itself. The operation of the baby farm brings to mind patriarchal oppression as explored in stories like The Handmaid’s Tale, and even factory farms.
Part IV ends with Sam finally discovering the letter Kimber’s mother left before she died, which details the entire conspiracy of the baby farm.
Part V
In the final part of “Borrasca”, we rejoin Sam ten years later. He left Drisking after uncovering the Borrasca conspiracy, and has been using drugs to cope with the knowledge that his sister Whitney has been a sex slave for years and is most likely dead, and that his father was in on the whole thing. We learn that now-26-year-old Sam is in active heroin addiction and even spent some years in prison for felony possession. There, he met his roommate Seth, who was in for hacking.
The inciting incident of this part of the story is Sam’s reunion with Kimber, who asks him to come with her back to Drisking to destroy Borrasca once and for all. Part V is primarily a story of rage and revenge, with Kimber and Sam’s goal to kill the men who perpetrated Borrasca, and also to save Kyle, who is still in Drisking and had suffered severe brain damage from the injuries he sustained in Part IV.
I watched her sleep and wondered at the madness of the world. We should all have lived normal lives: graduated together, went to college, been roommates, backpacked Europe. But none of that could ever happen now.
The two bring with them a stockpile of guns and ammunition, but they wake up one morning to realize that all of their weapons have been stolen and the only thing they have left is one gun and one bullet.
Sam decides to leave Kimber behind and go on his own to confront his father, who is now the main leader of Borrasca. He takes the gun and sets off on this suicide mission.
When Sam arrives at Borrasca, he is quickly outnumbered by the men. Confronting his father, he realizes that for the past ten years it has actually been his father who was paying off his heroin dealer– even his addiction was in part engineered by his own father to keep him distracted.
Even more disturbingly, Sam has the revelation that the reason their family moved to Drisking in the first place, all those years ago, was because of rumors that his father had been pimping out girls in their old town, making this a pattern of behavior for him.
“So this is what you wanted all along? A great, big rape empire?”
The sheriff shrugged. “If that’s what it takes. I’m only here for the power and the women. I’m an alpha, Sam, that’s why I can’t figure out what the fuck happened to you. You’ve got the blood of kings running through your veins and you fill them with tar. That shit is for the fucking women but I have to send it out to your handler every month. My only son is a white trash drug addict. How do you think that makes me feel? This should be your birthright and you’re too weak to take it.”
Kimber is also found by the men, and brought to where Sam is. She gets shot in the chest, and Sam assumes she’s dead. But while Sam’s father, the sheriff, is distracted, she shoots him, killing her rapist. She wasn’t dead, but is still severely injured. Sam has also been shot in the chest but he was wearing a bullet-proof vest.
Sam continues to talk to the Borrasca men, and points out a set of cameras he has installed pointing at the operation. They panic and call the Drisking High School to take the database that hosts the files about the business operation and destroy it. This tips off Sam that they are hosting the files on the school’s network, and he calls his roommate Seth, the hacker, to get into the network and steal the database.
Sam wakes up in the hospital to see FBI agents waiting to talk to him. He realizes that he and Kimber have succeeded in taking down Borrasca. The story concludes with Kimber and Sam visiting Kyle in a group home, and the ending is left kind of open-ended, with us never finding out how much of Kyle is still “there” so to speak.
The story has a somewhat happy ending, though it is hard to consider the ending “happy” after all that these characters have been through.
The Darkness Hidden In Plain Sight
To me, the standout element of “Borrasca” is the abrupt switch between a traditional horror story setup to the revelation that the real monsters were regular people. It reminds me of the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, specifically her concept of “the banality of evil”, that seemingly normal people can commit horrific acts.
Also notable was the way the villains spoke about Borrasca as merely a business. I am a person who truly believes that capitalism and money can drive some of the most disgusting actions– when individuals are treated as mere objects and a source of revenue, people will justify most anything out of selfishness. There is also of course the obvious point about the commodification of women’s bodies, which has been so prevalent throughout history and continues today.
Overall, I appreciated this story and found it one of the most disturbing things I’ve read this year. Props to C.K. Walker for great storytelling. I feel inspired to work on my own short fiction after reading this.
Have you read “Borrasca”? If so, what did you think of it? Feel free to let me know in the comment section.
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