All Night Laundry (chapters 1-2)
This review was commissioned by @skaianDestiny.
All Night Laundry is a...well, it bills itself as an "interactive webcomic," but it's a quest. Just like the original version of Kill Six Billion Demons, it's an old school illustrated quest from the MSPA forums, cross-posted on the author's own site. That said, unlike a normal quest thread, this one has a gimmick that makes reading it on the author's site after the fact a different and arguably better experience than being one of the players.
See, in the MSPA thread, the creator had to go back and edit previous posts whenever earlier events in the story were altered by time travel. Which means that you had to have been active in the quest before and after each instance in order to appreciate that anything was going on at all. The webcomic version uses cookie tracking to fuck with each and every new reader's mind at their own pace.
So. All Night Laundry. A tale of desperation, horror, quantum mechanics, and progressively less subtle Dr. Who references. Before diving in though: this is the kind of story that you really need to read unspoiled to get the full experience. It is also, at least going by the first couple of chapters, one of the best things I've reviewed to date. So, if you think you might want to read the comic, go do that before continuing this review.
We start out with somewhat crudely drawn and monochrome (she gets more detailed and colorful as the story goes on and the artist improves ) college freshman Bina needing to do her laundry in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, the 24 hour place near the dorms seems to be having issues.
Power surges. The sound of the TV turning on and off, despite there not being anyone inside. Eerie warnings telling her to get out, run while she still can, manifesting from her subconscious as split-second flickers of black graffiti in animated panels.
It doesn't seem significant at first that there's a new construction site right behind the laundromat. Or that it sounds like some kind of machine is running in the basement. Then, when one of the laundromat's proprietors walks in, well...is he just a socially inept weirdo who doesn't speak English very well, or is he a rampaging serial killer? Turns out, it's much worse than either of those options.
And that's just the guy's dirty laundry. The man himself is even more dangerous. And his employer, meanwhile, well.
Fortunately, Bina has her wits, her resourcefulness, and her late grandmother's wisdom to guide her. As well as the strength and courage of her barbarian ancestors, possibly including Genghis Khan himself, who she knows were in fact barbarians on account of them not speaking Greek. She also has very little patience for hoojoo, whatever the hell that is, and her laundromat-related trauma is starting to nurture her latent nudist sympathies.
Yes, the author carried over the quest's shitpost suggestions into the webcomic version as parts of Bina's mental narration. On one hand, it makes the reader wonder just how poor Bina's mental health was even before she stumbled into the reality-warping horror. On the other hand, it does provide some much needed moments of levity in what would otherwise be an oppressively dark and unhappy tale.
That said, at least from these first two chapters of it that I've read, All Night Laundry isn't a hopeless story. In fact, hope is a strong running theme in the story. Hope, and moreso, the will to survive. The determination to defy apparent certainties and resist the seductive temptation to give in to despair and let the bad things happen.
...
You know, putting it that way, it occurs to me that it might not be a coincidence that the story's primary antagonist sometimes manifests as a TV screen whose victims are bound in seats before it forced to sit still and watch it for eternity.
The Doomscroll of Cthulhu
When it's not busy being a black fractal mandelbulb-monster hidden just out of focus at the edge of the panel, or a forest of glowing green parasitic tentacles, at least.
...
Anyway, to actually kinda sorta explain this now, to the best of my ability.
The construction site behind the laundromat - seemingly just a throwaway detail at the beginning - turns out to be more important than the laundromat itself. A hundred and two years ago, a mad physicist with strong occultic leanings tried to break the first law of thermodynamics, and succeeded. She came up with a device that exploits the observer effect (or at least, the pop culture version of it) to essentially create "counterfeit" electrons. The device required as many observers as possible to create any measurable electric current, though, so she enlisted her factory-owner husband's assistance in making a grand spectacle of it, counting on the high audience turnout to provide the energy for the very event they were coming to witness. The machine would power a tiny, green-tinted light bulb, and the key component in the device would be...something secret that she kept in a little box and let no one else see. The experiment ended...poorly...for the factory grounds and all the witnesses on them at the time.
Just recently, the construction workers dug up the land where this experiment was performed, and unearthed a device that somehow called out to a neighbouring laundromat worker.
The "maggot" that most likely hatched out of the inventor's secret machine component is still hungry. Its atemporal existence allows it to feed from captive observers all up and down the timestream "simultaneously." And also to "react" to interlopers before they've even interloped. Its lair is a bubble of timeless space from which that fateful day in 1911 is visible, but inaccessible to those it's imprisoned.
Bina is pulled into the maggot's lair, but manages to escape its ensnaring tentacles (even if she has to literally pull one from the multiple holes all the way through her arm it's looping between). This enables her to briefly escape into 1911 and learn enough to start figuring out what she's dealing with, before someone or something shunts her back to her native 2013. And, just by existing for those few moments in 1911 and having an interaction with the monster's unwitting midwife, Bina alters events in a manner that might threaten the creature's interests.
Being impaled through the arm by a monster tentacle also lets her travel through time herself now, by interacting with material things that the maggot has influenced. Those things include people, objects, and things that *used to be* people or objects. It's not clear from these first couple chapters how it does it, but the maggot is capable of unleashing all manner of horrors, from mad cultists to undead dog mutants that burst out of washing machines.
It's a one-on-one time war now.
...
Probably the highlight of these first two chapters is a...dream?...that Bina has when the creature impales her arm. Or maybe it's a dream that she had in her childhood, and that included elements of both past and future, and she's just now recalling it due to relevance. In any case, Bina (re)lives it from the perspective of her six year old self. I don't know if the writing is entirely convincing as a six year old POV (deliberate spelling errors aside), but the art shift makes up for it.
At age six, Bina's family took her to visit her grandmother in the old country. She either had this dream right after a real life conversation with her grandmother, or adult Bina is dreaming she's back in time and a little girl again. In either case, young Bina had a nervous disposition, and her sleep was plagued by monsters. Her parents always told her that the monsters weren't real, and she knew they were right, but somehow that didn't make her any less afraid of them. When the subject came up with little Bina and her grandmother, the latter informed her that her parents were wrong: monsters are indeed real. You shouldn't be scared of them, though; you should be better than them. Stronger. Faster. Smarter. More resourceful. Just plain luckier, if that's what it takes. There's no charm or trick that can magic the monsters away; you need to beat them yourself, using however much ingenuity, determination, or violence it takes. Above all else, never doubt herself, and never let anyone convince you to trust them over her own eyes.
I think it's important that her grandmother was an investigative journalist for forty years.
Anyway, after that speech, Bina's mother took her grandmother to task, and Bina overheard the ensuing argument. And it's one of the best things I've ever read.
It's extra powerful when you consider that one of the maggot's agents is indeed a violent man who pretends to be harmless. And that the atemporal entity's ability to change the past as well as the present maps pretty readily to gaslighting tactics.
In a subsequent, almost certainly just dreamed, conversation with her grandmother, little Bina draws a picture of the 4-dimensional eldritch abomination her adult self is fated to encounter and asks her for advice on dealing with this one. She is given a hand-woven red scarf, reflecting her family history as weavers, and told to use it.
And use it she does.
The scarf manifests in real life. Both within the maggot's extratemporal lair, and in realtime. She uses it for everything from impromptu bandaging to magic lasso that pulls you through time portals.
Also, yes, improbably long red scarf. It's a reference.
Another surprising element is the friendly beagle that seems to be wandering around freely in the maggot's lair. It's name is Piotr, and it belongs/ed to the maggot's human worshipper at the laundromat. It's implied to be another version, or perhaps a past/future version, of the undead dog laundry monster that attacked Bina in the first place. In her dream, while speaking with her grandmother the second time, Bina sees Piotr there with them, chewing on a toy snake that seems to represent the monster.
I feel like the whole Piotr thing might be building up to a "dog that chases Schroedinger's Cat" gag, but I don't know it yet.
...
Now, while the dream-sequence might be the most memorable sequence in these chapters, it's not the peak moment. No no. *That* would be a little bit later.
When the "What kind of maggot grows in the corpse of a day?" message appears on a door, Bina remembers it both having been there and NOT having been there when she looked at that door before. This prompted me to look back at the earlier page (which I remembered the message NOT having been there in), only to find that the message was there and now Bina has a headache and sudden nosebleed upon seeing it. I read forward again from there, to see what else had changed, and on the next page there was a TOTALLY UNCHANGED panel where Bina is wondering what is even going on and hoping that it's not time travel or something.
Again. This particular page is NOT effected by the retcon. That "I hope not time travel" caption was there all along. But it's placement a page or two after the point that the first time-travel incident leads you back to is very deliberate, and the second time you read that panel it hits you like a punch in the face.
Well done, comic. Very well done. And also a strong argument for the webcomic to be considered a unique medium that can do things other types of comic cannot (as evidenced by the author having to turn the quest version INTO a webcomic in order to pull it off).
There's a strong overlap with videogames here, in terms of what's being enabled by the medium, but at the same time I would never call the webcomic version of All Night Laundry a game (the MSPA quest was one, obviously, but for unrelated reasons). It's completely its own thing.
...
I had to exercise effort to not keep reading immediately after finishing chapter 2. And I only succeeded at stopping myself by remembering that @skaianDestiny said they were considering commissioning more of it. Even then, it wasn't easy.
This comic isn't flawless, but I am recommending it in the strongest possible terms.
