The artifact arrived on my desk at some point between the second and third pot of coffee. No postage. The cover was damp, though it hadn't rained in Pennsauken for eleven days. I wiped it down, read it through twice, and am pleased to report that whatever it tracked in from wherever it came from has so far declined to spread to the filing system.

Here is what you need to understand about Signal to Noise, delectable temporaries: it arrives already knowing what you are afraid of. Not the large, theatrical fears — not the teeth and the tentacles and the unpronounceable syllables reverberating from before recorded time. The small ones. The domestic ones. The television in the living room that shows you something it shouldn't, briefly, just long enough to make you doubt whether you saw it at all. The child who was there a moment ago and is simply, inexplicably, not there anymore. The engineer who hasn't come to work in a week and left his lunch in the refrigerator and his keys on the counter. Signal to Noise is a scenario built from the horror of normalcy gone precisely one degree wrong, and it is very good at it.

The setup is admirably mundane in its packaging. It is 1989, and a regional Pennsylvania television station called WSHP-TV Channel 17 has had its signal hijacked four times in six weeks. The broadcasts are strange, so the station president wants it stopped before it derails his mayoral campaign, naturally. The investigators assemble, and the tape rolls.

And there it is. The moment the tape plays, the investigators are already marked. Colin Richards understands something that a great many designers of this style of scenario do not: the most effective horror is delivered before the player knows to be afraid. By the time your table has sat through Video #3 and heard the Emergency Broadcast tones and watched the text read WE WATCH YOU WATCH US, the damage is already done. The investigation phase that follows is experienced by investigators who are already compromised, already changed — they simply don't know it yet. The paranoia is, for once, not manufactured by dice rolls but an accurate assessment of the situation.

The investigation itself is structured with unusual generosity. There are multiple avenues, multiple handouts, multiple characters whose information overlaps, corroborates, and drives them onward, and a timeline that the Keeper can pace with real flexibility. Calvin McClosky — the sweating, paranoid television repairman who is himself already being stalked by the thing he refuses to name — is a particular achievement. He is comic in the way that all truly terrifying people are comic: he is right, he is alone in being right, and he is spending his last functional weeks watching a television set, hoping to record proof of the thing that is going to take him. I have filed a note about him. The note is not optimistic.

The Gray Woman earns her presence on every page she haunts. At the furthest margins of the scenario she is a doodle in a dead engineer's notebook. In the middle distance she is a figure at the end of a hallway who was not there when you looked again. By the time she fills the attic of the Forsaken House and herds your investigators into the Impossible Hallway, she has built to something that does not require mechanical justification. The scenario trusts the escalation it has constructed, and that trust is warranted.

The Signal Realms — the second, survival half — is where Richards commits to something genuinely ambitious: a place made by entities who observe our world entirely through its broadcasts and have assembled their understanding of it accordingly. Everything is wrong in the way that a translation is wrong when the translator has never spoken the language, only read the dictionary. The studio audience encounter, the impossible forest with its carpet floor, the library of VHS tapes that are not recordings but windows — these are not random unsettling images. Coherently, they describe a particular kind of incomprehension that is both hilarious and awful in the way that all truly alien intelligence should be. The Signal Beings do not hate your investigators — they simply do not understand them, which is, reliably, worse.