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Comment by jjk166 | Hacker News Reader

Thinking about it from the bee's perspective, this is like raiding the lair of an eldritch horror for gold. A beekeeper is just a funny looking bear-thing that takes honey sometimes, but the shop of a beekeeper is full of devices beyond a bee's comprehension, more honey than a bee would ever see in its lifetime just all sitting around, its own sun which can turn on and off. To find yourself in such a place by accident must be a crazy experience, convincing your brethren to attack it by shaking your butt is on another level.

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Is there a genre of fiction or collection of stories in this style that presents a fairly normal thing from a horrifying perspective? Maybe the story describes the thing in this horrific manner, and the reader slowly realizes what the "normal" thing actually is, all the while using factual basis for the phenomena. In the case of honey bees, I'm imagining the worker bees selecting a female to become queen, per wikipedia:

>"Queens are developed from larvae selected by worker bees and specially fed in order to become sexually mature."

This has much horror potential.

I wondered if "slender man" was this. An unnaturally tall and thin figure, it doesn't have hands, but some sort of tentacles growing from its back. It doesn't strike at you, you're just likely to feel a sudden, crippling pain if you catch its attention and it comes too close, followed by your certain death. It does not move quickly, but it is relentless - you thought you had outrun it, and then it's suddenly right behind you again.

It occurred to me that this could be how a savanna predator views a human hunter. Our hands wouldn't register as hands (forepaws) for them, they would be some sort of super-flexible grasping thing, like a tentacle. Standing upright we would seem impossibly tall and thin. The animal doesn't understand throwing, let alone guns, all it knows is that getting the attention of this creature is related to sudden pain and death at a distance. Endurance hunting is pure horror - you thought you had outrun it, but there it is again.

I realized a few years ago that cuttlefish were actually little Cthulhus, in behavior, not just form. What does Cthulhu do? His mere presence drives you mad, then he devours you. When cuttlefish hunt, they "flash" their chromatophore-laden skin in writhing patterns that daze or hypnotize the prey, preventing it from escaping or attacking when the cuttlefish moves to devour it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rbDzVzBsbGM

Not fiction but I love this part in Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:

“When he was very small we used to rock him to bed … and tell him stories, and I’d make up a story about little people … they lived in the ventilator; and they’d go through these woods which had great big long tall blue things like trees, but without leaves and only one stalk, and they had to walk between them and so on; and he’d gradually catch on [that] that was the rug, the nap of the rug, the blue rug …”

I can recommend "The Bees by Laline Paull". It attempts to show the world from a bee's perspective. It is terrifying, confusing, and horrific. An excellent story.

I can't recall a whole story or genre that plays with this concept to such an extent, but I've seen it pop up from time to time in all kinds of fiction.

First example that pops to mind: If you read that completely enthralling and wonderful novel Watership Down by Richard Adams, its told entirely from the perspective of Rabbits, and beautifully so. There are several scenes, especially one featuring their first encounter with a colossal freight train and its engine, described completely from their perspective, with no knowledge of what these man-made machines are. It's right up the alley of the horror concept you mention.

Terry Pratchett had some books kind of like this.

The Carpet People has characters that live in the fibers of a living room carpet and are subject to mysterious phenomena they don't understand (such as a vacuum cleaner).

The Bromeliad Trilogy is similar, although the characters are a few inches high and at least have a concept of full-sized humans. They have to move their tribe from a department store that's closing down to somewhere else, which means they have to learn about the outside world.