"God's in his heaven— / All's right with the world!"
Prompt: Haunted House.
Special thanks to Rosie and UncannyClown for valuable crit.
Drywall Hercules / Discussion
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the reveal is elegantly foreshadowed and executed; the prose is generally strong, though it lapses into a somewhat dry rhythm on occasion. nice work.
Pretty good stuff, though overall it does feel a little thin. I think the need to treat the nature of the conflict as a reveal holds the story back a bit from focusing on certain parts of the protagonist's psychology (motivation, self-reflection, outside relationships) as much as I'd like, sort of trapping the narrative focus in the realm of moment to moment atmosphere. The result is it can feel like its often belaboring its main point (this guy's sad and fucked up and something's wrong) without necessarily advancing or deepening the narrative.
You know, I hadn't thought about it that way. This is a really useful comment, thank you! I did try to go for a mounting horror thing and leave the psychological implications more implied, but you definitely have a point.
trapping the narrative focus in the realm of moment to moment atmosphere
Seconding this. As a writer who can sometimes leave vibes to more narrative work than they should, this does feel like it goes a bit heavy on "different kinds of feelin' bad." That said, the vibes and images were very good.
The reveal was good and foreshadowed, but didn't really land for me. It just felt like a very straightforward "oh, yeah, that makes sense" reveal. Not everything in the WL needs to be epic steam punk urban fantasy told in the form of alterative haikus about the lost love of a ghost of a samurai warrior etc., but the utterly mundane, if horrific, nature of the situation fell a bit flat for me. This is just my own personal inclination, not a reflection on the quality of the story.
Overall, I think that this sets out to do what it intends, even if it's not my thing. The prose was thoroughly enjoyable, and the journey to the end was worthwhile. +1
I'm really delighted at this piece, giving us a world where the haunting of the house is an internal force that stuns us into observance rather than battering us with imagery. I think it needs just a bit more— more oomph, more vagaries— but the prose work is exceptional and the vibes are impeccable. Delightfully sour with a hint of zest in the aftertaste.
-Avalon
I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust
Love the structure of this piece, and how suffocating the house feels here, drip-feeding us information all the way throughout to create a very solid piece with a setting and format that I really enjoyed reading.
+1~
Creepypasta is so back. I second what Rume says about the rhythm, though. Another nitpick: "His body once again moves faster than his mind, and he finds his fist at the center of a hole in the wall like the exit wound of a 20mm round." It's giving "small boulder the size of a large boulder".
something that often strikes me when i read your stuff is the clarity of language. you have such a maturity behind your prose — an understanding of how the pieces fit together, of how to make your sentences work for you. it's always really great and really solid stuff. and yeah, the pit in the stomach feeling was real when i read this one. nice job. +1
While I did leave this wishing for some sort of motive or a look into a warped explanation, I still enjoyed the experience here quite a lot. It's a pretty interesting take on the haunted house prompt and the prose is definitely solid. I was reading it with Jaximos and it was a very fun moment when we both realized what would happen and we turned to each other and said "oh nooo," for me it was the dirt rectangles and for them it was the burying in the forest lol.
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