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 Review #4774440 |
| (4.0)| Greetings Sumojo  ! I am sending you a review of your story, "Bad Boy" . I hope that you find something interesting or helpful to you. WHY I AM REVIEWING THIS: It is Week 36 of "I Write in 2024" . FIRST IMPRESSION: I decided to go ahead and post my story in I Write and review whatever was posted there ahead of me. I was pleased to see it was you, since I am sure it has been quite a while since I have sent you a review. Then I realized it was a horror story, and that gave me pause. Well, it won't be the first horror story I have reviewed by a long shot. I will just have to read it see what you've got for me. TITLE: Your title is appropriate to the story and appropriately ominous. HOOK and SETTING: You set up the classic horror scene of the nighttime woods in your first paragraph. It is a dangerous place and we know something bad is going to happen in those woods. CONFLICT/STORYLINE: We have a man in the woods at night, identified as a predator, who is watching some young boy scouts who are camping in the woods. CHARACTERS: The man in the woods is having flashbacks to his own childhood when he was severely abused. It seems that things aren't going to end well for the scout who is celebrating his tenth birthday. DIALOG: Most of what we get is the internal dialog of the unknown man in the woods. It is certainly an important part of the story. The reader gets the feeling of how his childhood affected his mind and the darkness that is driving him. POINT OF VIEW: Third-person limited point of view works well for this story. NUTS & BOLTS:But the natives are not the only ones who need to be aware. A two-legged predator is on the loose this night, roaming in familiar territory, watching and listening to the strangers in his midst. I am not usually someone who fusses over starting a sentence with a preposition, but I think you could easily delete the "but" and the sentence would read just fine and probably be even a little less awkward. be aware. I think you meant beware. "In his midst" doesn't really work. Something can be in the mist of a group or a crowd, in the midst of an episode of something, in the midst of a place, but not in the midst of a single person. I tried really hard to come up with a work-around to help you, but I failed spectacularly. I'll have to leave that up to you, LOL Little did any of them know how the birthday party is going to end. Someone is going to die. I am going to assume that you had a limited word count and that is why this story ended with a cliff hanger. That works for me.  I didn't really want to read about little kids dying anyway, if the truth be told. On my first reading, I assumed it would be one of the kids that would die. On my second reading, I got hung-up on the word "someone" in the very last sentence. Wait...does that mean there could be a different ending, maybe the kids manage to take the stalker down and kill him instead? I'm probably reading too much into that word. If my first assumption was correct and that is what you want your readers to think, I would change "someone" to "one of them". If you want to keep it ambiguous, than leave it as is. Only you know what your actual intent was.You stick to present tense through the whole story until this last sentence. Little does any of them know...  FINAL THOUGHTS: Thanks for sharing your nice and creepy horror story! I'm staying out of the nighttime woods for the foreseeable future. Good luck in the contest!   My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 09/06/2024 @ 7:40pm EDT