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The Fun House
“Come on in…if you dare.”
A short story by Tom Buck.
Review by me.
I like the image used. It’s creepy in a child-like horror sort of way. I notice the “F” is missing and bigger in the title. I’m moderately interested.
Oh! Everybody knows a Johnny. “It”, so non-specific and curiosity-invoking. I wasn’t very interested in this paragraph, so I more or less just danced over the words, and I honestly believe that if the ending words, “without making the warning come true” hadn’t been there, I probably wouldn’t have continued reading.
Sweetie, please, please let it be an amazing fun house. I want something beyond incredible. I want to experience the rapture and horrifying events of your funhouse world to the extent and treachery your mind is capable of. If there are clowns, they had better be more terrifying than anything my clown-fearing mind could dream up. I want to know horror, and if this is horror, then it needs to be more than just tentatively stepping on toes through a thousand mirrors and those little containers of white face paint. Just, please. Let it be an amazing fun house.
With a delicate hair ruffle, here, I’m kind of feeling wry in regards to your character becoming some form of deity among the friends. You better not let me down with this. I’m expecting great things from you now, your holiness.
Okay, some kind of telepathic clown head..? Maybe…?
This sentence should be impossible. “…spent the rest of the afternoon sketching a map of the inside of The Fun House from memory.” There is a story in itself right here. I want to know the exact details of WHY these details are known by heart.
Your lead character is losing his god-status. Is that deliberate? It’s nice to try to humanize him, but this is just a bit too neurotic. He has forty minutes before he sneaks into a Fun House that he somehow knows by heart, and looking at a clown head somehow caused a reaction inside him to make him freak out before anything happens? One minute he’s Proggy the Powerful and now he’s whining about how scared he is. This bothers me and makes me unable to concentrate on the story.
Oh, this made me laugh. “I had flashbacks of our last adventure.” How many stories is that in one short sentence? And he’s sitting here freaking out over a clown?? You do know eventually you grow immune to this sort of thing, right? Unless you are really watching too much Scooby Doo.
Your sentence, “”That excursion now seemed like child’s play compared to this one” made me wince because I just kind of got on to you for that, so I’m going to re-read the paragraph. Ok, a broken gate at the back of a neighborhood cemetery. Late at night, yeah, you know, I’m convinced that as he’s speaking to me he’s lying through his teeth. I don’t believe he went to the cemetery. I think maybe he waited by the gate. “I had managed to appear calm that night”. I just have to conclude with, Why. This paragraph does nothing to set up the story for me. If you want me to be scared good and proper with your funhouse, you better scare the daylights out of me with your cemetery.
Dread. This word is boring me. I want to hear how your bowels are churning like you ate a bowl of ghost pepper chili. I’m not feeling dread. Scare me!
Ok. What on earth happened to Johnny. He was a pretty cool guy until he started whining. Your guys are wimps! This story is going to need a plot twist where one of them grows a set. I’m going to root for Becky.
I lied. I no longer like Becky. She is mean and a large scary clown with razor wire for teeth needs to eat her face. Why? “Becky giggled, as she usually did when I teased Johnny about his weight.” Becky sucks. I’m rooting for the clowns from now on. You are intruding on their space. Rawr.
“…a foul odor demanded my attention.” I giggled. I’m sorry, I did. You’re scared to death, inside a clown that is terrifying you telepathically, a “grotesquely dressed attendant” is no longer at my back, and I just landed hard on concrete. Yeah, I would say there is nothing about the situation leading up to that line that wouldn’t have made me giggle.
Yawn. Mirror Maze. And something really stinks. Rats? OOooh wait, Drah-coo-la. And now Becky’s missing, excellent. This story is going exactly to plan.
Shoot. She came back. Course, I was away from the screen to type this and got to enjoy it longer. If I had continued reading, it would have been as traumatic as flicking the lights on then off. She was behind you! Terrified whisper, “I…don’t know” –oh wait! There she is. I don’t really like this part much.
Sorry. The f-bomb went through my head on this one. “While walking through the castle, I nearly dropped dead from fright when we passed a coffin.” Up to this point, I was pretty impressed they were all still standing. You scared yourself with a bad vampire…, no, I have to repeat this here. “an awful replica of Count Dracula sat up and grinned at us.” I’m thinking Sesame Street here, man. Come on!
No power? I am giggling. “You said there was no power.” I’m thinking in light of the technological world of Strange and Depressing phenomenon, this is the most heart-stopping sentence I have read so far. I say this with love.
Honey. No. “The Barrel O’ Fun”? It’s okay to name rides in a story. That makes it realistic. “Barrel O’ Fun”? Not so much in a horror story, lumpkin.
A mummy.
OH god bless. Seriously? This has to be the story maker right here, the one thing that describes your main character perfectly. In italics, “Are they playing a trick on me?” Yes, let your mind jump to the most logical non-extreme in comprehension. This is the response to a “terrifying scream”. I slap your hand here. No. Bad. I want you to take this scream and make it ANY REASON to get this italicized sentence out of the story. I am ice cold serious. A hero of a story should have any saving quality. Even the lowest bum at the end of the life cycle has a seriously beautiful character flaw that miraculously restores the faith in the characters at the end of the tale, satisfying the reader into convincing themselves the time was well spent. Your lead character does nothing for me. Create your lead. Explain what something would sound like. Make this story worth telling.
“My voice sounded as if it came from a scared little girl.” Oh please, I’m telling you, nothing in this fun house is that bad.
I gasped. A plan? You’re coming up with a plan? Are you seriously still trying to convince yourself this is a stunt? This isn’t courage. You aren’t reacting out of fear. There is no logic to this. There is nothing terrifying here. Think, man, for one minute. A clown, pulsing, sending terrifying images into your head from the safety of your home. A “terrifying”—NO, not horrified, not petrified, not hot-fudge sundae glue gun liquidated, but simply, antagonistically, “terrifying”. If I see something that is scary to me and it induces a verbal response that is more guttural, there will be one of two options. The fight, or flight, response. If it is a scream of fight, it will be the primal note made before the body savagely defends itself whether you want it to or not. It will be loud, it will be powerful, and it will be a rallying death cry. This is the sound that decides whether or not you wish to help a friend fight a foe to the end. It evokes your own response: go help NOW, or get out. In short, yes, it will be enormously terrifying. I am not going to worry about a plan. Your friend is good to go.
I was almost scared, for one moment. If you could change that word, “terrifying”, to something horrific, or some graphic and heart-wrenching description, that would help. I want to hear the sound of something dying, something with no hope left. Then let your lead character keep trying to stupidly come up with a plan. In heroic moments, stories worth telling, you don’t think, you act. The only thing that could make this truly scary for me is if the main character ignored the cries for help. Yes, very scary. But what you have, not so much.
Ooh! Werewolf! Casual name-drop of a zombie. These words alone don’t scare me. Drop them as descriptors.
Eh? I’m going to be absolutely honest. Right here, this paragraph, “Diving onto the slide, I hit the ground in seconds. I ran to the front of the building and waited, hoping my friends would appear, and we would run to our bikes laughing. I prepared to act as if I knew it was a joke.” You could delete everything after this sentence, I wouldn’t have to read a single word more, and this story would be just right, as is. Absolutely everything. Because then it leaves a great, terrifying wonder at the end. Here I am, enjoying a roll-my-eyes kind of laughing story, enjoyable like an afternoon of Spongebob, when all the sudden…! The story stops. And then I start thinking and then I’m scared. I don’t want to read anymore. I have accepted your story as it is, as scary. I refuse to scroll further. Everything to this point, I approve and am unable to offer a review for the rest of it.
As such: very, very nicely written. I admit, I didn’t see it coming. I thought it was going to be something silly that I had read a hundred times, overworked, but instead of telling me the same unspeakable story that never seems to be quite justifiable, it allows me to add my own details. 5/5!
I hope my words help you! Please review my submission as it is for a class. Thank you for sharing your story with me!
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