Literature / Burgrr Entries

Burgrr Entries is a multi-chapter creepypasta by Bogleech originally published to the defunct website burgrr.com, beginning in 2013. It's a first person account of how one woman was bewildered to discover a supernatural fast food chain that seemed to emerge from another dimension and had a mind-altering, deadly effect on humanity. Despite the hopelessness of the situation, she follows one bizarre creature caused by the invasion, and into the surreal, horrific origin point for Burgrr.

Can be read here.

Tropes demonstrated:

• And I Must Scream: Eggheads are still conscious when their faces are smoothed over into their current state, as they're shown to occasionally paw at their heads as if looking for where their faces used to be. They are also aware of the pain that comes with brainflies maturing in their skulls, and are helpless to do anything about them until either they're killed or the brainfly hatches on its own.
• Anthropomorphic Food: The protagonist confronts a humanoid hamburger being, and finds the notion as uncanny and creepy as such a being would be if contronted by a person in real life.
• Apocalyptic Log: Humanity will gradually be destroyed by Burgrr unless there is a massive change, but people unaffected by its brainwashing who could offer resistance seem vanishingly rare as far as the protagonist can tell. So the journal is more about the protagonist trying to maintain their sanity than to get the word out.
• Badass Normal: The protagonist, a regular human, is able to repel most of the abominations in the Burgrr dimension armed with only her trusty shovel. However, the BBQ woman and the giant grinder both easily overpower her.
• Black Comedy: The outlook for humanity in the story is bleak, but the nature of it so bizarre all the reader can do is chuckle. Even the protagonist snarks about it when describing situations of mortal danger.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Whatever force is behind Burgrr seems to be so alien that it's hard to tell if its acting out of malice. While its actions are overriding people's free will and killing them, it's hard to tell what the motive is, if there is one. When the protagonist crosses over into their world, the entities she confronts are initially willing to deal amicably with her (though this is potentially them being Faux Affably Evil). There's also no observable sense of hierarchy to the aliens and little sense of rhyme or reason to what the aliens have to do with each other. Other Bogleech works involving Burgrr, such as Awful Hospital, confirm that the organization is more eldritch than actively malicious, but they primarily deal with entities in layers of reality beyond human cognition and perception, and obviously don't obey human morality.
• Downer Ending: After running out of non-infected food, the protagonist succumbs to the same brainwashed behavior patterns everyone else has, as shown by her enjoying Burgrr-altered food to a point where she likes eating a steak she found in an incongruent place because it screams. Not just Downer Ending, but downer the hatch, as it were.
• Egg Folk: Eating enough Burgrr food turns people into "eggheads", emaciated stick figure-like creatures with white, bulbous heads. The protagonist originally just called them that because of their superficial resemblance, but she's later proven accidentally correct when she kills one and watches a brainfly emerge from the head's gory remains.
• Elective Broken Language: Because whatever forces that function behind Burgrr are so dissimilar to humans, their attempts at slogans and other communication include nonsense statements like "IT CAN DREAM A GREAT FLAVOR!" or the caption text in the thumbnail image.
• Hope Spot:
  • Late in the story the protagonist has her first violent confrontation with entities that seem associated with Burgrr and is able to kill them with a shovel with relative ease. It gives her confidence that Burgrr will be beatable, and that she'll be a hero with a significant role to play in besting them. Then she confronts something that seems much less vulnerable to a shovel. Then It Got Worse.
  • Downplayed in the end. The protagonist wakes up in her home unscathed but bloody, making her come to the conclusion that the entities attacking her decided she wouldn't be able to do much to their operations and sent her home. Then she finds that all of the food in the house has been replaced with Burgrr knockoffs, at which point she gives up and finally starts eating it.
• People Farms: As more and more people are engorged by Burgrr's meat products, The protagonist comes to the conclusion that they're bring prepared for some other being's consumption. It turns out humans aren't so much cattle as cattle feed, as the brainflies are the main product that Burgrr harvests.
• P.O.V. Sequel: Awful Hospital has a blog maintained by BBQ Girll, the grill monster the protagonist encounters in entry 5.5, which briefly touches on the events of the story before going over her getting involved with the Hospital. According to her, the protagonist sneaking into the slaughterhouse and hitting her with a shovel was just a minor nuisance at the workplace that they quickly corrected by making her more susceptible to brainfly farming.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: The description of Burgrr products makes them seem as such, what with the broken language and strange packaging. As Burgrr continues to expand, even regular food items begin to get phased out for Burgrr knockoffs, as evidenced by the Protagonist having to sort out which ones don't have hidden burger logos or bogus ingredients. This is because Burgrr is an otherworldly force that has only very vague understanding of human customs and presumably languages.
• Squick: Early in the story Burgrr causes people to ravenously eat or even fight over food that normally would be considered revolting. It only gets worse from there. Many readers have commented that the story put them off meat for awhile.
• The Stoic: The protagonist doesn't seem to particularly care about humanity succumbing to a bizarre alien influence, so much as just feel detached curiosity that she investigates. This could more be just feeling jaded from an inability described early in the story to get any authorities or other people in general to even acknowledge the bizarreness of Burgrr.