Finally, one thing I really respect about this story was that it lived up to Simms' initial caveat: of the investigations that don't turn out to be hoaxes, the majority only yield more questions rather than any answers.
I've tried my hand at writing horror, and one of my biggest weaknesses in that genre is that I feel compelled to explore and explain everything. That's an impulse that gets in the way of the fear of the unknown, which is a more potent fear than just about anything you can actually visualize. There's nothing you could attach to that anglerfish lure deeper in the alley that would be more disturbing than, well, nothing. We'll never learn what that creature was. Or why it was active in a certain neighborhood in Scotland for five years before vanishing. Or whether there are more than one of them. What makes it a horror story rather than a dark fantasy or scifi thriller is that the monster won. Completely won. It wanted to snatch victims and remain hidden from the public, and it did. CAN you even fight something like this? Will it EVER appear in a place and time where people could be ready for it? We don't even know if it's a ghost, or a biological creature, or something weirder. Or whether its human-shaped lure was a projected hologram, a telepathic illusion, or what. Just what it did.
