Thanks for the thoughtful review. My personal take is that it has a “feel shitty”/rotten ending. The idea is that the central male character is basically dooming all of the characters to death by flushing away the drug that’s keeping the survivors alive because he can’t deal with the alienation it produces and figures they’re all actually dead anyways. So I fully agree with you. I just thought it was a rather “rotten” ending and am actually very curious as to what made you think there was a glimmer of hope implied. Thanks again for taking the time to read it.
Short Story / Pretty Soon (Analysis)
“Pretty soon, we’re going to have to start killing each other over the remainder.”
“I’ll deal with that while you’re sleeping”, she said, slumping down
into the mildewed, dumpster salvaged sofa. Her eyes wandered to a corner, pupils dilated. She was apparently staring at abstract patterns in the dry wall spackle. They closed. He imagined he could hear her thinking.
His vision was slightly blurred, like miniscule drops of moisture congealing on the cornea. His body felt like more of a concept than tangible thing. The field of vision shifted rapidly to the upper left before recentering, slightly off focus, on a fraying tangle of threads erupting from the fabric pattern of the sofa, just beneath her drooped bare arm, just beneath the shaft of afternoon light exposing the suspended maelstrom of dust motes attempting to self assemble into more of the same. There was a sudden muted thud and abrupt metallic growl as the air conditioner kicked on, sending the dust particles in erratic directions. Into the ground, into the walls, into the frayed dilapidated sofa and into her eyelashes, which unclamped in time with the dull echo and revealed the same dilated stare bearing straight ahead into something only she could see. The worst part of all this was being aware of the moments passing.
“You’re pretty funny when you’re solipsistic,” he said, more for himself than anyone else.
He forced himself to stand up, balancing with one hand against the wall and rather feebly attempting to focus on equilibrium, not that it was helping much. He glided along the wall, stopping and stabilizing in the entryway to the kitchen. It was beginning to smell.
She couldn’t see anything anymore. Before it was a million murals, mosaics, tiny white plateaus casting shadows against each other and shifting, modulating monochrome pixels of depth and relation, the sui generis autopoiesis of some shit or another forming shifting icons, a series of low rent Mandelbrot sets communicating ideographically. She blinked and something became lodged in her right eye. Both eyes shut tightly again, reflexively, trapping whatever it was. She didn’t respond at first, now having a sensation of mild burning to focus on. The involuntary spasmodic blinking didn’t seem to be developing into any coherent pattern, so she decided to wait until it did.
She wondered why she couldn’t remember any of it, any of them, the glyphs. She was certain she had seen things, that things had been said, yet had no specific recall. She couldn’t understand why she had a memory of remembering or why she even wondered. Maybe she should have said something, or taken a picture, hired a stenographer. Her eye welled over with tearing and opened to the quiet sting of oxygen. The mild burning was still there, rapidly subsiding. She couldn’t remember a pattern. There was a deep, aggravated cough coming from the kitchen. Her cheeks felt cooler than the rest of her body and she heard, rather than felt, her stomach growling.
He walked, more stumbled but with a modicum of conscious grace, to the dead body lying upright on cheap scuffed tiles and took a pack of cigarettes from its front shirt pocket. Not his brand. He knew the name not very long ago. If he went to sleep he might remember. That was wasn’t likely considering the shit they were on. He probably should have laughed back there. She might have just been being witty. No need to be rude.
He almost ran into the small wooden dining table lumbering over to the gas stove. He clipped one of the two chairs but that wasn’t enough to stop him. He turned on a stove top, allowing his eyes to wander while listening to the frantic clicking of the pilot light attempting to ignite. There were a few books, half empty coffee cups, assorted condiments, unopened bills, and a portable digital scale sitting next to a large block of brown flecked whitish powder. He knew better than to touch that junk. Probably what happened to that poor bastard on the floor. Just nodded off and forgot about the entire situation. Maybe the poor bastard chose to forget. He leaned over and lit the cigarette. Upon inhaling, he began coughing convulsively.
She hoisted herself up from the couch clutching a small pillow, pausing a few seconds for the room to stop violently shaking on a horizontal axis. Her vision blackened and the familiar haze of orthostatic hypotension invoked its little buzzing and ringing head rush, smearing out her train of thought in the process. She half realized, colors and forms steadily coming back in incongruously, that she was probably misinterpreting the signals her body was sending her, but resolved to urinate if for nothing else than the sheer force of habit. She had apparently sat back down on the couch. That was news to her. She cupped her left hand over half of her face and crossed through the beam of afternoon into the disheveled bedroom, squinting.
The bedroom was like countless others she had been in. Single twin mattress lying on floor approximately 2 inches from the walls and aligned haphazardly with what was presumably the first right angle the occupant saw. Single sheet, single pillow, single self assembled bed stand with single lamp, single alarm clock (flashing, yet insistently continuing to keep an arbitrary, incrementing, inaccurate time: it read 10:35AM), multiple glasses with various volumes of differing liquids, single bottle of sleeping pills. Cheap pop art prints without frames and posters of 10+ year old bands lining the wall, reminding the viewer of that one restaurant or club that everyone has been to and of all those tunes still on the radio today. Demon slumping inside a martini glass. They had been obtained without discrimination for aesthetic or consistency of motif. They had been acquired to be familiar to others and make them feel comfortable. She heard a thump emanate from the adjacent bathroom and waded through a shallow film of unwashed clothes en route.
He swallowed the large wad of phlegm that had been manufactured in his mouth. His throat was still dry. Fucking menthols. He turned the stove off with a loud snap, pivoting and stepping over the corpse with a single extended step, lightly tracing the tip his of right shoe over the sunken, immobile stomach. Someone had left the refrigerator door slightly ajar. He opened the freezer. There were two large blocks of bundled hash inside, to the right, but that didn’t really concern him at this point.
No, he was after the bluish-grey, bundled sticks of tiny “Rods” sitting right there, in the average household Ziploc baggie. He had wanted to call them “Cyllies”, because they looked more cylindrical to him, and well…he thought it was funnier. No one laughed and Rods won the lexical combat. The corpse had said they were synthesized in South America from some Ayahuascasomethingorfuckingrather extract, but more refined and potent with some special synth sauce thrown in for extra mileage. He was convinced that was just noise tossed out to hustle up the markup. At bare minimum, some ad hoc homage to some burnt out 60s fuck up. Didn’t really fucking matter now. He grabbed the lot of them, shoving them into his pocket and feeling the chill bleed through the interior lining of his jeans. He then reached into the overflowing icebox and pulled out the handgun, shoving it into the front of his pants. The sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
She was sitting on the toilet, pants pulled to knees, with the pillow on her lap, about 4 feet away from The Kid who was laying upright in the empty bathtub, staring with uncharacteristic sobriety directly in front of himself. The Kid was in his early 20s. She didn’t know precisely, had never asked. The Kid had two Rods vertically impaled into an obnoxiously bright yellow bar of soap sitting in its dish, resting on a throne of its own run off and surrounded by a halo of soap scum. He was mouthing something. Etruscan poetry, perhaps. Chit-chat seemed apropos.
“So, what’s up?” She began urinating.
The Kid seemed mildly startled when she spoke. He exhibited a slight twitch, exactly like being poked from a daydream, and turned to face her. They almost made eye contact, but he became distracted by the small medical cabinet mirror located directly above her right shoulder. She thought he was staring at the light reflections but had no way of being certain.
He lightly swatted the freezer door shut, letting the automatic hinge do most of the work. He turned around, leaning back over the corpse, gently inserting the pack of cigarettes back inside the shirt pocket and giving it two gentle pats when fully inside. He stared at the face. The small black sores were present on the lips and one of the larger boils had apparently started to have formed on the side of his neck. He hadn’t had it for long but it got right on top of him. He flipped an arm over and noticed the tell tale markings, the inky darkening of the veins defiantly bleeding through the skin. Hell, the corpse probably loved that. Made it easier to find his tracks, but then again, he could tell that had never really been a problem in first place. He closed the cemented open eyelids with a swipe of his palm. He would have made the classical play of coins over the eyelids, but hey, it’s all plastic these days.
“What’s up?” She reiterated, raising her voice slightly compensating for the trickle while simultaneously demanding response.
“Oh. I’m counting tiles.”
“How many are there?”
He briefly reflected on the question.
“I don’t know yet. The numbers keep changing.”
She stood up and placed the pillow under her arm.
“I think I puked on myself,” The Kid said, returning his gaze to the 12 o’clock, 3 foot stare.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said while zipping up her pants.
“Want some…”, The Kid trailed off while his head drooped imperceptibly to the left and he ran a hand over his face.
She walked back into the bedroom.
“Me neither.”
He had twisted and pulled on the door knob several times before realizing it was dead bolted. That seemed totally unnecessary. The swelled door produced a loud boom as he yanked it open and he shielded his eyes his from the full brunt of the afternoon sun. He heard her voice shouting from the bedroom.
“What are you doing?”
“Not my brand,” he shouted back.
“What?”
“Fucking menthols.” He unintentionally slammed the door behind him.
The Bird Watcher was still sitting on the curb in the same old ratty and mud smeared bath robe, watching a flock of something and rats steadily devour away a number of the several corpses that had collapsed randomly around the cul-de-sac. He had an old ornithology manual, late 80s probably, opened up on the grass next to him. Looked like he had made it to the cardinal entry.
“Seen any new ones?”, he asked, going through the motions of obliging the interest of another.
The Bird Watcher pulled his novelty strain binoculars up to eyes, cheap plastic made in China straps and all, and seemed to be intentionally magnifying the sun. One of his estranged grandchildren had probably won them from some grocery store crane machine and accidentally left them at Gramp’s house.
“I don’t understand why they aren’t migrating,” The Bird Watcher pathetically moaned in a weak, confused voice.
It was summer. The Bird Watcher was old, he couldn’t tell exactly how old, but the fucker was old. They had caught him wandering in a circle around the cul-de-sac in the early stages of symptomatic onset, senile or something but oblivious to the dead around him. Old fucker was probably so hopped up on prescriptions and so delighted to have a younger woman pay attention that he just rolled with the program when she shoved the Rod down his gullet on a self righteous lark. They had figured out fairly quickly what was keeping them immunized. The Bird Watcher had been squatting the curb ever since. They supplemented him everyday out of ostensibly humanitarian reasons. He had no idea how the old man made it through the nights. He walked over and cupped The Bird Watchers chin with slight force, directing the Bird Watcher to stare at his face. There were still the thin, wispy, black capillary stains running the terrain of what was most likely his formerly bloodshot, alcoholic nose. He noticed the same welts and boils poking through his thinning gray hair. No change. So it apparently stabilized symptoms as well as delaying onset. The Bird Watcher was an excellent case study for several reasons.
“I’m going to the store. Do you want anything?”
The Bird Watcher stared up plaintively before asking “Do I need anything?”
“I’ll bring you something back.”
The Kid would simply not be done in. He was learning from his mistakes. The numbers kept changing. He was fairly certain of their tactic as well. They would change as he counted them. He had to devise a method of stopping that. There is a specific and immutable cardinality, within finite sets, and he was pretty god damn certain the fucking tiles in this shower were a text book definition of a finite fucking set. He needed a way of remembering, marking each successive number. Some way of transcribing and recording the accounting of each tile, in sequence, in order, in scratch marks if so fucking be it. He had spent far too much time on this not to realize how duplicitous these fuckers were. That’s when The Kid had a bright idea and that’s when The Kid shoved his fist through the small, tilting glass window shedding a modicum of sweet sunshine into bathroom.
She was on the back porch. She didn’t remember the corpse in the kitchen expiring, but then again, she was willing to concede she didn’t remember a lot these days. Oh well. As time goes by.
What did concern her was the emaciated, dehydrated dog that had literally collapsed at the end of its chain. It was panting fiercely with eye closed, nothing more really than a heap of fur and forced respiration. She could fix that. Some of that.
There was an unfurled garden hose lying at her feet. She picked it up.
He swung around again to face The Bird Watcher.
“Time for the meds, pops.”
He fished a Rod out of his pocket and shoved it into The Bird Watchers mouth. The Bird Watcher shuddered and immediately clasped his hands around the base of his neck, staring into the asphalt.
“I’ll be back, and all that jazz.”
The Kid had it figured out.
“One.” Scratch. Mark.
“Two.” Scratch. Mark.
The fucking dog wasn’t responding to the hose. It was just wobbling there and failing to rise. Sure, it was evidently trying, just not happening. She increased the water pressure.
Conveniently, the convenience store was located round the corner. There was a cop car that had crashed into a nearby lamp post. The lights were still rolling but the siren had either died or never been turned on. A cop was splayed out of the rolled down window, head resting horizontally on the arm perpendicularly splayed out the rolled down window, purple from lack of circulation, head bobbing and gasping weakly. He walked forward and drew the gun from his pants, its chill contrasting the afternoon height of heat.
“Five.” Scratch. Diagonal mark. Quintuple recorded.
The Bird Watcher found his migration. Staring into the asphalt, he saw the flocks he had been waiting for. Flying north, in glorious synchronization. A community with mutual purpose and in constant communication, organized and with a defined goal. It was hard to tell. The sky was grey and they were white, but the flock seemed to be flying in a pattern that was recursively looping inward. He couldn’t determine the size of the flock or really ascertain the migratory direction. Had to be North. It was summer. He was still sad. He saw no cardinals.
“Hey there, Sarge. What’s the word on the street?”
He used the tip of gun to prop up the face of the dying cop. Popped boils, black veins, impaired respiration. He was already a goner. Flies were imperiously clinging to his necks and sores, unwilling to yield their claims. The cop tried gurgling something producing only a stream of damned up saliva broken up with orangish strains of phlegm that clung to the side door defying gravity. He gently used the barrel to return the cop’s head to its original position.
“I know what you mean. This town’s dead.”
He cocked the handgun.
“I want you to know…”, he leaned into the cops ear, batting away flies.
“When I was young, they wrote pop songs about this.”
He pulled trigger with the barrel firmly planted at the temple.
He took the keys.
The Kid had it all figured out. The numbers were fighting back. It was about endurance at this point. He stood up and strode forth confidently from the empty, yet increasingly stained bathtub. If this was going to take as long as he suspected, there would be certain minor details to attend to. He opened the medicinal mirror and dumped the rubbing alcohol over his head and body. You could say that he felt the burn.
He kicked the door to convenience store open with a solid blow for no particular reason. He waved at the surveillance camera, knowing no one would ever see it. They had just all started dying. In a matter of hours. 4 or less normally. Except them. He fished another Rod out. It instantly dissolved in the moisture of his saliva. Another 36 hours at least. He was certain that there was probably some dead hapless teenage employee with his bobbing the toilet right now. For a moment he wondered why so many people apparently go to die in the bathroom. Probably had something to do with shame, he figured.
He grabbed his brand, 1 wide margin notebook, 1 pack of block Crayolas. Easy grip.
The dog was simply non responsive. Fair enough. She used her thumb to direct a jet of water and half fill a water bowl. She kicked over the can of garbage on the way back in. In all fairness, it was utterly sincere. Had she been paying attention, she would have realized that the dog could reach none of these gifts given the length of his chain, let alone crawl to them.
He saw another one crawling down the street on hands and knees, delirium in her eyes. He shot her. He realized this could be attributed to mercy, but honestly it was something to be doing beside thinking. That could drive you crazy under these circumstances.
The Kid could tell this would necessitate a change of strategy. He looked at his red thumb and slowly flexed it a few times. Better living through technology.
The Bird Watcher eyes were streaming. He could no longer see the flock. He had vomited on it.
He rounded the corner, gun lopping against his hip in stride.
She turned television on again, hoping for anything, only to be greeted by static once again, channel after channel. The drone was comforting.
He stepped up to the Bird Watcher. He threw the notebook and Crayons down beside him, deftly adjacent to the ornithology manual.
“How’re ya holding up, Pops?”
The Bird Watcher picked up the note book, flipped it open and tore the top off the box crayons. He scribbled hastily, in bright red.
“TIRED”
“I hear you.”
The Bird Watcher leaned into the barrel and it was a clean shot through the forehead. He barely registered the sound of the head thumping on the curb.
She flipped off the television, laying back down fetal curl after hearing the gunshot.
He walked back in with the same booming effect and lit another cigarette.
The Kid wandered into the living room, bleeding from jagged scrawls on his legs, arms, chest. Quintuples of five, seeming to document some demonic game of dominoes, wearing only soiled underwear.
“I think I need a calculator,” The Kid said while stiffly walking into the small kitchen and managing to not trip over the corpse. After a moment, one could hear him rummaging for a junk drawer, the one everyone has.
“We have to get out of here,” he said.
“And go where?” said she.
“I can drive.”
“I want to wait.”
“Then we’ll wait.”
He turned to his left and had no need to squint. It was dusk. He walked directly into the bathroom. He took out the Rods. Dumped them into the toilet. Watched them dissolve.
Flushed.
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daithi reviewed Version 1 -
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I liked the story overall. You said it was based on your friend’s dream, but it definitely reads like a series of cohesive vignettes. I could picture it being a graphic novel or some kind or “Sin City” type film; a lot of good imagery throughout. I found it’s wordiness somewhat distracting in the beginning and somewhat at odds with what seems to be the main character, but as you say it’s from a dream. . . .
I am interested in reading more of your stuff. Good work!
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kaptainkranium reviewed Version 1 -
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I think the best thing you established here was the mood. Having had my fair share of drug-related experiences, I would venture to guess that you have too. You really captured the sense of confusion and insecurity and dysfunction that appears when you find yourself asking why things are so different, and why did you come to that place in the first place. It made it more nightmarish and real when the effects of this addiction were shown on wider society.
I feel like your ending left me wanting more, not in a good way. There was a little glimmer of hope in the end, with him flushing away the “rods”, but this being a short story, I feel it betrays the feeling you conveyed throughout to introduce the possibility of this redemption without expanding upon it. If you are looking to revise this I would recommend either expanding and committing more to that last little glimmer of hope, or cut it out and leave the reader feeling rotten.
Either way, I guess I feel like a short story should have a well defined feeling or thought to walk away from.
Oh yeah, and as far as the talentless hack thing goes, i’m not sure which end of the spectrum is good or bad, so i went right in the middle, but know that you have talent and I would love to see it developed.
Overall, good job!
Marvin reviewed Version 1 -
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“than tangible thing.”—could use an “a” after than. or not. it works, but my eyes were looking of an “a.” nice opening, got me interested what “remainder” they’re talking about…
“The field of vision…”—this line offers some fine description, but it’s long. really long. maybe consider breaking it up so it’s more easily digested. or not. up to you. it’s ALL up to you.
“directions. Into”—a semicolon here might make the second sentence read better. with the period break, it exists as a fragment with no plausible stylistic motive.
“That was wasn’t”—kill “was”
...so far, some wonderful writing. original and quirky. still trying to figure out what the rock is going on though.
“He almost ran into the small wooden dining table lumbering over to the gas stove”—sounds a bit odd. a small wooden dining table can lumber? how about: “Lumbering over to the gas stove, he nearly ran into the small wooden dining table?”
“immobile stomach”—sounds odd. maybe kill “immobile.” dude is dead right? immobility is implied.
nearly half in: two people, guy and girl, hanging out in dead dudes place getting whacked on junk? i’ll have to backtrack once i’m done if it doesn’t snap into place.
“cemented open eyelids”—awkward. to me.
“Seen any new ones?”,—kill the comma. i’ve noticed this before too. don’t need um.
The tone is very surreal. Well done there. Odd, shadowed with violence, strange characters. Once the “Kid” is introduced, the identity of the nameless man gets mixed in with the kid occasionally, confusing me. maybe something to consider.
“before asking “Do I need anything?””—asking,
i’m pretty settled in now and i’ve let go of the reins. this reads as searing social commentary on a society impervious and/or blind to death and hooked on drugs and medications. it’s disturbing. and effective.
“Oh well. As time goes by.”—perfect line to sum up their apathy. nicely placed.
wow. ending fits nicely.
overall- manic, disturbing piece.
good, dark imagery.
criticisms?
a bit wordy in spots. some of the language/sentences could be trimmed and tightened. also, never giving “he” or “she” proper names leaves them a bit blank, and “he,” in particular, gets confused with the “Kid” but only at the kid’s initial introduction.
but well played. i’m gonna go puke in a bucket now.
TnD reviewed Version 1 -
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-Third paragraph, second sentence. => If a sentence goes on for three lines, chances are it needs to be shortened. This is one of those cases. It’s as though there’s more words in the sentence than is really necessary.
-The use of obscure words (solipsistic being one) kind of detracts from the story. It also makes it seem as though it’s pulled straight out of a textbook.
-Do we have names for these characters, or are we sticking with he/she? It gets kind of repetitive to see he/she all the time. Perhaps change it up a bit?
-”...the sui generis autopoiesis…” => The WHAT?!
-Guy on the floor?! From WHERE?! The male lead seems as though it’s just a run-of-the-mill thing. You know : Wake up, make coffee, kick dead body, drop toast on floor, etc. Might want to make him have some more emotion there.
-When you re-write this, make sure to use a spell-checker on it, please. May want to invest in Jarte (free writing program) if you don’t have Word. Has a spiffy spell-checker, but lacks the Word’s grammar correctamajig.
-Rods? Cyllies? While I want the two bundles of hash, I have to wonder what these things he just shoved in his pocket.
-The guy left the house, but the Bird Watcher is happy to have a woman around him? Did the male lead change in a way that we don’t know about? Or are the ‘rods’ have an additional strength?
-Changing who the focus is on kind of detracts from the story, as well. Ok. Bird Watcher, then The Kid, then the girl on the porch, but the guy? I understand that you’re trying to get all points of view taken care of, but there has to be some sort of transition you can do between the POVs.
-“You could say he felt the burn.” => Typically not a good idea to talk to the reader. You can keep the sarcastic undertone, but might want to change it to something like, “Oh, he felt the burn all right.” Or something like that. Maybe involve the alcohol burning his open sores, clotting the fresh wounds or something.
-Please find something other than he/she to describe the main characters. When the male lead shoots the random female, I thought it was your female lead. Hell, go for something like The Guy and The Girl. Just to change it up.
-Overall, I think that there’s a great story under here. You’ve got enough obscure English to make a professor proud, yet the rest of us normal people can’t get past anything like ‘sui generis autopoiesis’. There really is a great premise here, but I think that some more details need to be added. Again, what are the rods? What the hell happened here? You dropped us in the middle of a story, with no back story or ending (really). I think if you were to change this into a novel, you’d have something great. Start out with whatever it is that is destroying these people in four hours (or less) and finish with an ending. It’s kind of a sickening version of The Stand.
Good luck and thanks for sharing!
thisisnotanexit reviewed Version 1 -
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no, you are certainly not a talentless hack. i think you know that, though, and are just angling for an itch to be scratched. that menacing tone you’re after is pretty much there, though there are some nice jokes, too. this isn’t just a matter of the larger structure and execution of the piece: lines like “Conveniently, the convenience store was located round the corner” because they are so blackly comic in the context you locate them. on stylistic effectiveness and ease of reading – they are too bound up in each other to be considered separately, so i shan’t.
you open with reported speech which is clearly dialogue, not monologue. then a succession of sentences, which begin ‘Her eyes’, ‘She was’, ‘They closed’. it isn’t clear that ‘They’ refers back to eyes from two sentences ago; given this proliferation of multiple subjects, it could refer to any or all of these. ‘He walked, more stumbled but with a modicum of conscious grace’ – the punctuation is strangling the sense here. ‘more stumbled’ is a non-restrictive modifier, but given its parenthetical, interpolative tone, it might be better to separate it using dashes.
‘He’ becomes ‘the kid’, as i understand it. if it is your self-reflexive intention to confuse or unsettle the reader, then i’m not sure how well this works. the ambiguity just seems clumsy. picasso could draw before he started collapsing perspective. in the same way, i think, you need to demonstrate that you can delineate clearly.
that ‘cardinal entry’ skit is very clever, and pretty funny. i assume you intend the pun. no – you must intend the pun, because you pick it up a page later, with ‘specific and immutable cardinality’. that’s very good indeed, and the relevance of ‘the number of elements in a particular set’ to the text itself is nicely waggish. all this might perhaps make me take back my reservations in my previous paragraph, but not quite. i might not question your intentions, but i will question your methods, which seems to be what you want.
there are sneezes in grammar and punctuation – an incorrect possessive apostrophe here, some badly set dialogue there, use of figures instead of spelling numbers out – but these don’t detract, and i don’t imagine they betray talentlessness or hackdom on your part. ‘damned’ is a bit strong – i think you mean ‘dammed-up’. this brings me to compound adjectives, which you seem unwilling to hyphenate. why? it’s easier on the reader, and i am tempted to argue that it’s (more) correct. i question your use of ‘hypotension’, too. ‘hypo-’ means under, beneath, less than, or subordinated to – but i don’t think you do.
your dialogue is pleasingly snappy, and conveys a nicely nasty sense of character, i find. and the prose is good, too – capably executed, which the occasional flash of real brilliance, and a wry line in observational humour and asides to the reader. very occasionally, something strikes me as so good in this piece that i have to catch my breath, or at least reframe my estimations. i don’t think this is assured enough for me to assure you that you have realised your intentions absolutely, but you are pretty funny when you’re solipsistic.
Catastrophe reviewed Version 1 -
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To the contrary, you’re a very talented hack. :)
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece. You gave enough details to firmly set up the scenes for the reader, but didn’t get bogged down in the backstory. It moved very briskly.
You’ve got very convincing dialogue, and believable characters. I liked the way the story started out in familiar territory, then by the end, was someplace totally different. I also liked the jumps between the scenes with the different characters. The Kid is my favorite.
I didn’t notice any mechanical errors, but I was distracted by the story. A few bits and pieces that caught my eye:
“His vision was slightly blurred, like miniscule drops of moisture congealing on the cornea.” – Incomplete thought. Try ‘like he had miniscule…’. This paragraph, though, really captures the schizophrenic feel you’re shooting for.
“She blinked and something became lodged in her right eye.” – this is a great visual.
“They had been acquired to be familiar to others and make them feel comfortable.” – awesome detail.
“They had figured out fairly quickly what was keeping them immunized.” – intriguing hint.
“rolled down window” - you repeat this twice in the same sentence.
“The Kid would simply not be done in…” – This is my favorite paragraph in the whole piece. It’s got a great cyberpunk feel to it.
I hope you either develop this further, or post more like it. It’s got a Philip K. Dick meets William S. Burroughs vibe to it.
Excellent job.
arualsuga reviewed Version 1 -
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I liked your story, but i wouldn’t like to have that as a nightmare.
At the beginning i found that i couldn’t really ‘visualise’ the characters, like i can’t imagine running into people like that in the street. They’re hard to relate to. Your writing progressed as the story went on, like you were becoming more involved. I’m not sure if that was intentional, but it helped me ‘get into’ the story. And some bits were kind of disturbing/confronting but that added to the ‘air’ of the tale.
i really liked it, but i think that it was maybe a little bit too descriptive for my tastes.
All in all i enjoyed reading it, thankyou :)
ckbailey reviewed Version 1 -
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i really like this story. but then i am partial to stories about really fucked up people plowing through the world w/ their heads swaddled in self-inflicted delusional states. & this is a perfect example of that genre. it IS reminiscent of burroughs, but reminds me even more of phillip k. dick. the writing is strong & concise.
by the way, a word of explanation for my goal ratings: the “10” for the 1st one signifies that you are most definitely NOT a talentless hack(just so’s you don’t misinterpret it to mean that you are a 10 on the Talentless Hack Scale).
the 2nd rating is an 8 because, although i caught on quickly to the constant abrupt changes of perspective among the different characters, some readers might find it confusing. this would be mainly due to the fact that the central characters are nameless, so as the story proceeds the “he” & “she” might be muisconstrued once the additional characters are intoduced. other than that, i found it a good read.
MrEff reviewed Version 1 -
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I like the idea for this story: everyone’s dying of plague and the only cure is drugs. The drugs give a good explanation of why everyone is so messed up. The diction is a little complex, particularly the medical terminology. It’s an interesting overall, albeit somewhat lacking in universal theme.
guttaz reviewed Version 1 -
Read 100%% of the Item
sounds like a intense nightmare. its obvious you have spent alot of time working on this piece. great syntax (i believe that is the word) and entertaining but thrilling read. awsome work and i hope to read some more short stories from you in the very near future. thanx. well done.
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