DOOM: The One That Started It All.

To a twelve-year-old mind, it was the stuff of genius. A fiction assignment, a short story, to be typed on the computer lab's Macintosh IIs during Writer's Workshop class...with a wholly unprecedented twist the teacher would surely never see coming. A retelling of the plot of the then-popular first-person shooter video game DOOM...with the author himself as the main character!

Part of what made this choice so daring is the fact that DOOM had almost no plot to begin with. The storyline is straight out of a Sylvester Jean-Claude van Seagalnegger film: You're a marine in a military base on a Mars moon, attempting to single-handedly fight off an invasion of Hellspawn. You do this by running around and shooting everything, moving to the next level, and running around and shooting everything again. It's hard to structure a significant narrative out of this thematic material, but that didn't stop our precocious young writer from embarking on his postmodern experiment. He quickly dispatched two pages and sent them in for the review of the first draft.

It's common for pedestrian educators to be incapable of recognizing true creative talent in their students, and this paper was no exception, with scads of markup "correcting" his unconventional grammatical, punctuation, and page-formatting structures, as well as a stern warning to "remove!" stunningly graphic content the Puritanical administration no doubt found noxious to their delicate sensibilities.

How could they recognize the sheer intrepidity of the raw, unbridled prose?  The originality of opening the story with a line about a stormy night in a town called....Whitehall? The foreshadowing of the author's own impending encounter with girls? (That section drawn from the vicissitudes of real life, no doubt...) The (literal) bang-bang action that perforates the scene within sentences? The fact that almost half the first page is written in CAPS LOCK? The keen blurring of protagonist and auxiliary characters through the repetition of the word "man"? The curious invention of a "gauge shotgun" with an incredible 250-shell capacity? The Beckettian dialogue between the narrator and his comrade? The amazing Shyamalanian reveal at the piece's conclusion, that it was all a dream...Or Was It? Certainly, the labyrinthine complexity of this piece will have literary scholars debating for decades.

Serendipity sometimes brings us our most treasured keepsakes, as is the case here: the author left the marked copy of the first draft in the computer lab, where it was discovered by a classmate and immediately disseminated to everyone in the common areas. It became an instant classic, laughed at by legion and inadvertently inspiring a new catchphrase throughout the school: "DOOM!" became the default substitute word for any unfortunate mishap, troubling prediction, poor performance, or colossal failure. You will see the word repeated many times in future postings, as it made its way into (or onto) papers, quizzes and tests of students who knew before time was up that their grades were sinking right before their eyes.

But no critical analysis can replace a study of the actual source material. Here it is, complete and unabridged, unedited except to remove the name of the author, whose august brilliance must shine forth anonymously. And so, I present to you, in its entirety...DOOM.