(This review is adapted from thoughts I gave in the RPC Reading Club on October 28th.)
This reminds me of a Snowy article, but with more polish. It leans hard on gratuitous body horror as a main appeal, which could make it kind of hit-or-miss, but that was the name of the game with MinCon.
RPC-622's posterior was found surrounded by its own excrement.
The dark, twisted mental state the author must have been in while penning this sentence terrifies me.
The second half goes instead for a conspiratorial angle that complements the subject well. In just a few paragraphs, it does a good job painting the Wards as ugly loners with an air of mystery about them. What stops me from fully adoring this article is that the aforementioned "mystery" is mostly an illusion. It works from the impression that there's more to the story than meets the eye, but there's transparently not that much to it.
The tone is competent, but sometimes simplistic and emotional in a way that sets me off. The use of imagery, however, is laudable. The yellowed, old-fashioned photo lends a sickliness that the article couldn't do without, an example of how a simple image can go a long way. I have to wonder if a second image to try and depict the anomaly itself could have worked, but I think the oft-joked-about tendency of RPC articles to describe horrific events just off-camera secretly adds to that uncanny factor we know and love. 4/5
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