Like Pen Pal, The Family of Fang and Claw
once started as an offhanded Creepypasta series by A.A. Peterson that eventually blossomed into a proper horror novel. The stories were posted starting in 2016.
It tells an anthology story centered around The Family, a family of thirteen interdimensional demons of incomprehensible evil trying to ruin humanity from the inside in their own neat little ways. Its most infamous installment is The Pancake Family. The Nightmare Fuel, Squick-iness, and Body Horror of this thing is a sight to behold.
The stories are:
- "Reunion"
- "The Pancake Family"
- "The Chooser" (aka "The Wound in the World")
- "Totem"
- "Gehenna"
- "Tongue Kiss"
- "The Chance"
- "Fat-Thulu" (aka "Feeder of Her": Part 1, Part 2)
- "The God of Halfway"
- "A Hell for the Common Man" (aka "All the Agony You Could Ever Want")
- "The Order of Edges"
- "Free Lunch"
- "The Choice"
The work provides examples of:
- 13 Is Unlucky:
- The Family is composed of, you guessed it, thirteen relatives. They include the grandparents: Ella (The Full Knowing Choice of Evil) and Tomas (The Seeder of Corruption), the parents: Silas (Everything You Want and Nothing You Need), Rosa (The Dark That Devours The Light), Melanie (Profit By The Pain of Others), and Ricardo (The Hate You Feel For Those Who Love You), and the children: Lisbeth (The Love of Lust), Stacy (The Bane of Error), Terra Joy (The Terror of Joy), Bryon (The Harm Inflicted As Affection), Eric (The Collecting On What Cannot Be Balanced), Susannah (All The Agony You Could Ever Want), and Basil (The Truth Is What You Want It to Be).
- There's 13 chapters in the anthology series.
- And I Must Scream / Fate Worse than Death: The Driscoll Family, oo boy. Read the Body Horror section while understanding that through all of that, they're still being kept alive in hellish agony through IV drips and breathing machines.
- Antagonist Title: "The Family of Fang and Claw" refer to The Family.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: All of The Family LOOK like humans of varying attitudes, but they're all Eldritch Abominations.
- Body Horror: Probably some of the worst a human could think up. Over the span of 20 years, the Driscoll Family are slowly but surely squashed into human pancakes. They're at first mistaken for flat slabs simply dressed in human skin, their skulls have been removed, and their eye sockets are the size of saucers.
- Casting a Shadow: The Family are all creatures of darkness, so they can appear anywhere they want as long as it's in a shadow.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: The Driscoll Family were submitted to some of the cruelest, creative, and Body Horror-ific torture possible for 20 solid years.
- Eldritch Abomination: The whole Family. They're from a completely different dimension, are trying to completely ruin humanity with their atrocities, are very cult-like in the way they speak and go about things, and have almost limitless supernatural powers.
- Evil All Along: It's eventually revealed that Miss Bamer was behind the kidnapping of the Driscolls all along - and she had potentially been torturing them herself (or at least involved with whoever did it) since she was a very little girl. Worse yet, her motivations for this remain unknown.
- Evil Old Folks: The grandparents of The Family: Ella and Tomas.
- The Family That Slays Together: The Family, a clan of thirteen demons who unleash unspeakable crimes against humanity.
- Foreshadowing: There are small details throughout "The Pancake Family" that steadily reveal that Miss Bamer was the one who kidnapped and tortured the Driscolls, i.e. her knowing more about the case than anybody else, the Driscolls begging for death as soon as they hear her voice, and not showing any emotion after the detective leaves the warehouse with her.
- Hell Is That Noise: The detective describes the pained screams of the Pancake Family as "the gates of Hell opening".
- I Love the Dead: Inverted in the most disgusting way possible. Lisbeth, in a rotting, zombie-esque form, sexually assaults Seth.
- My Greatest Failure: Stacy, as the "Bane of Error". So all of her atrocities are guilt and self-loathing-based.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Terra Joy's victim, Grant, who seduces him into doing messed up stuff like abandoning his own dying mother and telling a random kid his mother's dead by pandering to his nightmare fetishism.
- Sex Is Evil: Lisbeth is basically the personification of this. Terra Joy dabbles in this too.
- Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny: Grant fully understands this when agreeing to be Terra Joy's boyfriend, but he couldn't have ever fathomed just how evil it is, when dealing with The Family.
- The "The" Title Confusion: The online story collection does not have a "The" at the start of the title, but the print collection does.
- Wham Line: In The Pancake Family: "There is no one by the last name of Bamer on staff with the Daily World."
- Would Hurt a Child: The whole Family. The children of the Driscoll Family were described as "high school age and below", and we all know what happened to them...
- Lisbeth sexually assaults Seth.
