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Para's picture

Overshadow

By Para in Scare Us

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Description

Daisy is going to meet Jim's parents for the first time, despite having only been going out for a short time. On the way, Jim makes a mysterious pit-stop that unleashes a profound darkness on their relationship. The mysteries compound and the toll rises as they fight to keep their connection on this plane in tact.

Are you afraid of your own shadow? Because you should be.

Comments

Sean Joseph McCann's picture
Sean Joseph McCann from New Zealand! is reading NOT The Hobbit July 2, 2012 - 11:32pm

This story has a lot of potential - I love tales that twist the weird and inexplicable around like this.

The first thing that jumps out at me, though, is that this reads very much like a first draft. You change tense several times throughout the text; I'm not sure if this is intentional or not, but it's quite jarring. You also use adjectives to describe emotional states where you could be describing more - a Show, Don't Tell, situation if ever I saw one.

I'd suggest lingering more on the shock of the accident, too. It should be a powerful moment, but it reads more like a bullet point in a list on the way to the really weird stuff. Get us invested in that moment, and the things that follow on will be far more powerful.

Para's picture
Para from Chicago is reading Tell All July 3, 2012 - 9:24am

Hey, thanks for reading.

Truth is, I learned about this contest yesterday and sat down at a Caribou for a few hours and churned this puppy out. read through it thrice before submitting... There are def two tense confusions I didn't mean to make, along with a couple name transpositions. However, I definitley wanted it to be in past tense throughout and to be told by a fairly cold, objective narrator.

Whether it is the right choice or not, I almost wanted it to be read more like a story report than a detailed, emotional piece. I was trying to play with the meta disconnect readers of horror have from their subjects that parallels how people handle very horrific news reports. If you care too much about the character in a horrific environment, it can shift to drama or tragedy. As is, I felt like this story is more para-normal than horror anyway. Genres are a tricky business!

 

 

 

Jane Wiseman's picture
Jane Wiseman from living outside of Albuquerque/in Minneapolis is reading Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks July 7, 2012 - 6:30am

The concept is intriguing, but you're telling it to us, not showing. I think we need a lot more show, a lot less tell. The problem starts early with the word "maliciously." instead of telling us this with an adverb or adjective, show it to us via your choices of verbs and nouns. The other thing to work on is point if view. In one small space, pov veers wildly from character to character. It really is ok to write a short story using an omniscient pov, but in that case, I think you'd need a more unified narrative voice. I hope I'm not being too critical here. I had my own huge problems with pov in the story I entered in this contest. And I think your characters and premise have real potential.

Robert Blake's picture
Robert Blake from Glasgow originally, last wee while Manchester is reading The Sea Hawk (Rafael Sabatini) August 7, 2012 - 5:04am

Reading your own comment, I decided to treat this as a synopsis rather than a story

With that limitation, this has potential, though I would really need to read a version you had time to work on to judge.