Two Sentence Horror Reviews

2025/04/07

There comes a time in every woman's life when she simply wants to assign numerical values to art whose form is fundamentally flawed. Is there anything quite like mulling over whether a bad political cartoon deserves a 3 or a 4, like some sort of malevolent god-king weighing the souls of the damned? Today, I'm sating that urge by going on r/twosentencehorrorstories, sorting by "Top this month", and rating what I see until I feel like I've learned enough about my preferences to write a conclusion. ¹

Disclaimer that I'll be talking about fiction that discusses things like incest and CSA, often very clumsily.

My coworker never struck me as very misogynistic, so I was surprised when he told me to smile for him.
That surprise turned to confusion when he saw my smile and immediately shouted "Call an ambulance!"

One of the things you have to overcome in the two-sentence format is that it's hard to engineer a compound-complex sentence such that your "punchline" is at the end. On some level you're working against not just the English language, but also the limits of information processing. This story does a pretty good job of it-- the second sentence has its details buried, but it's not illegible. However hamfisted it is, it also doesn't explicitly tell you the speaker is having a stroke, which counts for something. For me the problem is that whenever a speaker in one of these stories talks about a conviction they hold, I'm bracing myself for an ironic tragedy. I feel wild saying I'd rather read a Redditor making up a story about a woman suffering because she refused to smile, but at least that would be a story with cause and effect, rather than a story where the character has a peripheral thought about the plot. 5/10.

"After taking this pill you'll die within a day but in that time you'll hallucinate at least 85 years of happy life," said the government official.
"Favorable outcome for everyone," he added as they started distributing the pills to the homeless population for free.

I'm not in love with the craft here-- "the government official" is pretty toothless, and it's almost hilarious how non-visceral the choice to tell, not show is in the clause "distributing the pills to the homeless population for free". I think to really sell the horror here, the speaker needs to be the one who thinks the outcome is favorable for everyone, or the one kindly giving away the experience machine, or otherwise doing an atrocity. Without that, it's just a plot summary of a Black Mirror episode, and one where I'm surprised at how much I feel the horror of the experience machine has been defanged. 4/10.

My daughter was born with blue eyes, a wide smile and the prettiest head of straw-colored hair.
If only she'd been a brunette, I might have seen her in time to turn the combine.

This one hits for me. My favorite part is that there's the faintest kiss of the speaker's desires gone wrong. There's an eerie sense that by being implicitly grateful for his daughter's trope-y beauty, the speaker somehow manifested the punishment. Obviously that's not what happened, that's not how cause and effect works, but the juxtaposition of the two sentences links them in a sort of written Kuleshov effect. This is helped by the subtle voice of the speaker, in the way they describe a certain white beauty standard with twee Southern-isms. I can't think of anything that would make this better except for expanding it, so I guess this is what a 10/10 looks like!

My daughter closed her eyes, just like I told her to, and excitedly said, "What's the big surprise, Daddy?"
I tried pressing the disconnected brake once more in vain, watching through tears as the end of the highway come [sic] closer and closer, and replied, "Now if I told you, it wouldn't be a surprise!"

This is a good moment to write about-- I think bittersweetness is a really achievable thing to get from a 2SHS. My only problem is that it's so, so wordy. The trouble is that you can justify every word having a purpose. "Watching through tears" reads as clunky, for example, and the result is improved once you edit it out, but without it maybe the piece reads as the dad being another boring murderer. 4/10, maybe Hemingway was right about adverbs.

“When you said you were making yourself a man, I thought you meant you were transgender,” My [sic] friend says in awe
I look up at them from my latest creation, wipe the blood and sweat from my brow, and with a smile, I reply, “Oh I am, but you know Frankenstein was my favorite book.”

So this is a pretty cute "banger tweet from an annoying trans Twitter poweruser" made to fit into the mold of "two-sentence horror story". My problem is that I literally cannot read the second sentence. I read up to "creation", my eyes skip over a bit and I get a vague sense that the speaker is about to reply, and then I read the part in quotation marks. Also, the first sentence spoils the punchline! 2/10, but I love seeing a world that lets trans people be mediocre.

Out of all the PayPal addresses filling her Cam [sic] chat, she recognised the $100 donation, as it always appeared on Friday evenings.
She wished her allowance was just paid in cash like her friends.

What an awful first sentence. We don't need to know that she gets the donation in a recurring way, and the first half of the sentence could be smoothed down considerably. The second sentence is also a really classic example of bad passive voice-- presumably because they didn't want to spoil the joke by making the subject "her parents", but I think a "they" with no antecedent reads fine. I also feel like it's very detached from the horror-- less a horror story, and more a dark joke to be passed around on social media alongside Mr. Incredible's sullen face and the caption "WHEN YOU GET IT...". 5/10.

Conclusion

The most obvious criticism of 2SHS is that they're often dark-humor riddles or knowledge-checks. "Why," asks the Sphinx, would a man call an ambulance after looking at a woman's smile? Why would it be upsetting that the boy who was bitten by the racoon doesn't want a drink of water, or that the tardigrades the astronauts brought with them died?" Don't get me wrong, I don't like these stories where the narrative revolves around whatever fun fact was on r/TIL. But more than that, I'm yearning for stories where the speaker does something wrong-- maybe even accidentally, maybe even blamelessly-- and we see the results.

What's become clear to me is that, overwhelmingly, I think two-sentence horror stories are best when the speaker has a real perspective, one that we come to realize is flawed in some horrific way. By far the best story here, at least to me, was the one where the speaker's joy is coincidentally rendered twisted through juxtaposition. A story where the speaker watches the government commit an atrocity with an experience machine? Boring, said, upsettingly mundane. A story where the speaker likes the atrocity, grapples with their acceptance of it, or even performs it? That's something I can mimetically project onto, something I can unpack. In other words, it's art that doesn't read as a summary of better art.