Origin of Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

It all began with half a rotting cantaloupe.

Illustrator Trevor Roberts was employed by a small architectural firm when he entered the office break room one day in the summer of 2019 to find the wilted remnants of a co-worker’s breakfast lying atop the counter. Little did he know it at the time, but this abandoned chunk of melon was about to change his life forever.

“I’m waiting for my lunch to microwave and I’m looking at this cantaloupe half, all nasty, and I’m like, ‘Oh, man, that would look really weird if you were small and standing right on the edge of this,’” Trevor recalls over Zoom.

He snapped a quick photo of the fast-decaying produce and began to wonder what creative fruit (no pun intended) it might bear with a little Photoshop manipulation.

“I found a stock photo of an open pit mine in South Africa and Photoshopped the open cantaloupe into that. And then I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I should change it to red, so it looks really meaty.’”

The resultant image reminded him of “a WPA national parks poster” and, as an avid member of the r/WorldBuilding subreddit, Trevor posted it to the site for a laugh.

“People really liked it. And so, I thought, ‘Well, okay, this is fun. Let’s take this a little bit more seriously [and] try to think about why would they be going down in this thing? What reasons would there be? What would there be to do? What is this?’”

“This” was the birth of Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, a fictional tourist attraction built within the the grotesque maw of a subterranean colossus (referred to as the “Permian Basin Superorganism”) that operated for several decades before an unforeseen disaster shut the place down over July Fourth weekend in 2007.

“For a long time, I’ve been a big fan of any kind of defunct attractions [and] resorts,” admits Trevor, citing the Defunctland YouTube channel and websites that “catalogue very niche, little, local state-level attractions” as major sources of inspiration.

In particular, he points to the case of Mystery Fun House, an Orlando-based theme park attraction that closed its doors in 2001 after a 25-year run:

“It was really oddball and when it closed, someone cataloged every little thing about this little funhouse/arcade place. All the brochures and the pamphlets and the ads and the billboards. To where when you read this, you kind of get a pretty good sense of what this was. But because it is presented entirely by one person, there is this kind of subtle editorial quality to it … creating this dark narrative that really didn’t exist. So I thought, ‘Well, what if I tried to do that intentionally with this thing?’”

A culmination of Trevor’s background in illustrative and architectural design, Mystery Flesh Pit adheres to a similar format: letters, posters, diagrams, advertisements, and other supplementary materials comprising a wider narrative about the park.

What started off as a fun what-if exercise soon became a regular commitment once COVID sent Trevor careening over the edge and into the belly of the beast. “It wasn’t until the pandemic that I really started to focus on it,” he says. “Mostly just for my own mental health, having something to work on.” Around the same time, he launched a Patreon and began selling Mystery Flesh Pit merchandise — both of which allowed him to make the fictional park his full-time gig a year later.

Since that first Reddit post in 2019, Trevor has steadily built out the apocryphal historical beats of the biological abyss — from the crater’s discovery by West Texas workers drilling for oil in the early 1970s, to its rapid commercialization by the shady Anodyne corporation, to the park’s aforementioned closure.

“These larger things are established,” he says, “but within that framework, I intentionally leave it open because I know there’s gonna be things that I encounter and immediately see, ‘Okay, yeah, that needs to be a Flesh Pit thing.’”

Trevor’s eye for detail — his uncanny ability to imagine the cultural, religious, political, scientific, and economic ripples caused by such a bizarre endeavor — is both impressive and staggering. Intentional or not, his nuanced exploration of humanity’s brazen hubris and our never-ending desire to suck our planet dry for profit may be the freshest genre riff on those themes since Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park.

“You look at all these other real-world things, where humans have encountered something miraculous and strange. And immediately, they begin to commodify it and sell tickets and things,” Trevor explains. “If you want to look at it as a critique of capitalism, maybe that says something about the world. It’s more of an examination of how we deal with the natural world, how we deal with tourism and spectacle. It didn’t start as an anti-capitalist thing. I think it just kind of turned into that.”

The whole thing packs a snapping satirical bite with an endless supply of ironic dichotomies: a disarming park mascot known as “Caver Coop” contrasted with man-eating creepy-crawlies scuttling within gloomy folds of tissue; corporate partnerships with AT&T
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and Coca-Cola
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juxtaposed against enzyme pockets waiting to turn hapless visitors into quivering puddles of raw genetic material.

It’s all very reminiscent of Cronenberg-esque body horror and while Trevor is certainly a fan of films like The Fly (and its “much more gruesome” sequel from 1989), the monstrosities lurking within that godforsaken chasm in West Texas are mainly rooted in the terrifying apathy of the natural world.

“Things become very scary and vastly larger than the human scale if you push through the marketing of things like real national parks, and you really start to investigate, ‘What is this?’ Things like Carlsbad Caverns.”

Mystery Flesh Pit is currently the focus of a Kickstarter campaign for a tabletop RPG designed in partnership with Ganza Gaming. The campaign, which originally set a goal of $15,000, now has $69,000 in financial backing.

“We’re doing a big, 250-page game book that outlines how to play and the character classes and the monsters and all that kind of stuff,” Trevor teases. “Especially now that we’re funded, that’s going to take up a lot of my time for the next couple months, doing all-new art and everything for that.”

If you’re thinking to yourself, “Hey, all this stuff would make for one hell of a movie or TV show,” you wouldn’t be the first. Per Trevor, “there has been some interest from Hollywood” in adapting Flesh Pit into a potential series or mockumentary.

“If it was entirely up to me, if I just had all the money in the world, I would totally do it like HBO’s Chernobyl series,” he says. “Play it completely straight.”

A coffee table book is also on the docket and while it won’t take priority until his RPG duties are squared away, Trevor promises it will be the final word on Flesh Pit.

“The book is going to be the definitive endpoint. There are several things to the narrative, to the lore — details, visual things, stuff about the creatures that I have intentionally held back and am saving for the book. And once the book is published, it’s done and it’s sealed and I’m moving on to the next thing.”

Those interested in seeing what that “next thing” is can hop on over to spectralhaptics.org.

“It’s similar to Flesh Pit, in that it’s kind of an alternate history,” Trevor concludes. “Looking at existing things, but looking any them with a couple key changes … I’ve already got several sketchbooks and notebooks full of info on how I want to do that. I’ve got some of the seeds of the world planted already.”