A Review of 'In Response to "I regret it"'

In August of 2022, a story was posted online called "I regret it". An obvious short story meant to spark perhaps creepy pastas or to just circulate the internet to scare little kids, similar to many other stories and pictures carelessly posted. It failed, however, not that it has been out very long, but immediately no one was reading it. It wasn't circulating, it wasn't being commented on, it's just there. Strangely enough, a "response", if you can call it that, was posted later that same month. A person claiming to be a Daniel Montoya wrote an extended "article", if you can call it that, very heavily criticizing the short story. The "article" was named "In Response to 'I regret it'" and it was supposed to describe the many ways why the story was fake, ridiculous attempt at a horror story, and additionally was able to somehow find the anonymous writer? I ended that sentence with a question mark because Mr. Montoya, or so they claim to be, I'll be referring to that later in my review, they leave more questions unanswered than they started with. I will begin with why I don't believe that this is actually Daniel Montoya writing it.

Perhaps it's just an alias, or just the main character for the poorly written horror short story. The biggest red flag is that he claims to be attending the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Now, I did have to research a little, mainly because I was curious, but that curiosity paid off. This university is a big time research university. As you may have guessed, I did not attend a university, but I'm smart enough to realize that there's no way that some college student from this school would be doing a research paper on this small time random short story on the internet that nobody knows about. The response does not mention what he's studying there, but it seems, if he's doing "interviews" for his paper that he may be part of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. Why would someone part of the school for communication and journalism make such careless grammar mistakes, did no one proof read his "article"? I also looked up Daniel Montoya in University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Most of the results came back with older gentlemen living in various places across the southern part of California, mostly between Los Angeles and San Diego. Any Daniel Montoya I did find in reference to the university were researchers who helped with various projects, nothing really referring to journalism. I refuse to believe that this Daniel Montoya was writing any papers for this school, ESPECIALLY in early August. Most schools haven't even started. He dates himself in the response. I did look up anything about Daniel Montoya August of 2022. I found more Daniel Montoya's but it was mostly random information about random older people. There were 2 deaths though in August with people who had the name Daniel Montoya. Daniel L Montoya, and Daniel M Montoya. I'm clearly unsure if either of these could definitely be the same Daniel Montoya, though, Daniel M Montoya did in fact attend the same University 3 years ago, but I consider it a coincidence. It was a brutal home invasion murder. They apparently never caught the alleged murderer, but all of it happening 3 years ago, especially with the date being included in the response has to many differences.

I decided to attempt to find the person who posted the article. His name is Rick Pension and he apparently writes semi regularly. He's apparently only written 5 stories so far, but some of them consist of short horror stories. The best part, it shows both other stories were posted by him. I'm not sure if he's writing them or just posting other people's stories as it seems weird how he's writing them and publishing them as if they were separate stories. Regardless, it appears this Rick Pension may be the culprit behind this ridiculous string of stories that appear related but are just random outputs. His horror is meager at best. One of his stories discusses a refrigerator eating someone. In another, he writes about sentient ants, though I believe it was labelled comedy.

Here is my review of the stories so that you do not have to read them. The stories attempt to suggest that the protagonist, in a first person perspective, is writing everything supposedly as they happen. It's ridiculously pretentious. "I regret it" is a failed attempt to scare the reader by forcing them to wonder what happened at the end of the story, but nothing was established. Nobody cared for the protagonist, the concept of it was super vague and lacked intrigue. I will say one thing, it was just as boring as reading some stranger's small journal entry. Now for the response, I'd say the most interesting part was the interview, where the supposedly anonymous writer describes what they claimed to have possibly seen had the first story been real. It was a vivid description, which I appreciated. I admit myself, I was a bit captivated reading that one paragraph, but the rest was just as pretentious as the first, claiming to be some educated smart journalist. It ended, like I previously mentioned, heavily criticizing the first story, which isn't unique and didn't work. Now that I believe that Rick Pension is the author, it makes the whole of both the stories that much more ridiculous. Maybe he should've put more thought, time, or even effort in his own stories if he's going to do anything with them.

So if you want to waste your time reading these stories, you can, but really don't blame me, because I warned you. They aren't scary.

If you want to read more of my reviews on short stories on the internet, please follow me on Reddit, my name's shortstorykiller, and I like to post most of my reviews on r/ShortStoriesCritique, including this critique.