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The End is Really Fucking Nigh
How It Rates
Description
Enter the sands, and confront your fears, mistakes, and betrayals. A man, losing everything, escapes reality and discovers demonic creators lurking in the desert. Insanity always peering in our peripherals, will strike and leave us a bloody mess. (a much needed edit to "human disintegration.")
Comments
i realize a few edits need be done, but im pressed for time, please ignore the remaning mistakes and breath as he breaths, feel the cold steel in hand, dmt release, broad strokes, face painted in a grimace of murderous delight. enjoy, let the madness awaken the demon within.
While I won't say that wasn't still struggling at points to understand your true intent, I think this is a big improvement over the previous incarnation. The desert part is a little less confusing in my opinion.
From the very first paragraph, it's easy to see that our main character is bitter and angry. That he devolves later into murder and madness, is a logical progression--something served well by the prose style you chose.
Some brutal, disgusting stuff going on there. Based on your description from the previous thread, I think the one thing I'd say is still unclear is that, in the end, he's passing on an infection. I don't see that explicitly explained in the story. If Poe explained this better, I think your readers won't have to wonder why the main character is spitting in his wife's eye. As written, it just seems like's he's especially distasteful--spitting on her after he's already killed her.
A good copyediting pass will serve you well. Indent Poe's dialogue as you would anybody else's and cut out anything not necessary to tell your story.
Good work on this draft.
Really liked what you're trying to do with the style. The insanity following the acid really comes across in the writing. The machine-gun prose really has a gut-punch to it (I'm a big fan of James Ellroy so this sort of thing is right up my street).
Only a couple of quibbles (and they're minor). First off is some of the spelling/grammer. I'm not normally overly picky about this as it's obviously something that can be worked on, but with something so staccato in it's prose part of the enjoyment is to be swept along by the bedlam of thoughts and a spelling/grammer error sometimes just stops the flow dead (especially if it changes the meaning and makes you reread the sentence to get the original intention).
I also thought the pace lost something in the dialogue between the narrator and his acid daemon. No real problems with what was being said, just the way it was being said - the fluidity of the writing at the beginning and end didn't seem quite so polished here.
But as I say these are very minor quibbles and I probably wouldn't have been so picky about it if this was a lesser work.
Overall, really enjoyed and would really like to see some more of your writing.
I like the concept and the way the writing physically breaks apart as he goes more insane towards the end. Quite a brilliant technique.
Have to say that I found the whole daemon voice in the desert part a bit long, and also somewhat melodramatic in tone. Maybe could shorten plus tone down a bit? Might be more frightening that way.
Thanks for sharing this.