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Solace
How It Rates
Description
On the eve of his grandmother's death, something is stalking Kevin outside of his house.
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Comments
I like the way you set up the main character with the sympathetic backstory before he exploded in a blur of gore.
I also liked how the drunken stranger was selfish and escaped, made the gore more significant because it lacked any morality - the selfish guy escapes.
A short, entertaining read.
Not much I can suggest as improvements/changes. It would be cool if maybe the grandma mutters some foreshdowing quote on her way out at the start, but only if it doesn't give away the randomness of the later brutality.
The grandmother offering some foreshadowing is a great idea. Thanks for the feedback.
I bet Dad is going to be surprised when he picks Kev up later!
I enjoyed this freaky, random monster attack. I almost wondered if Kevin was going to wake from a bad dream after consuming the vodka, but I'm (guiltily) glad he didn't. I have to say that, having had a close relative waste away due to cancer, your descriptions were very powerful. I did sympathize with Kevin and his Dad, which really helped pack a punch at the end. It was gory and frightning; just the kind of story to get your heart pumping when you're reading it alone at night. Nice work.
I liked the story. I especially liked the set-up and there were strange (thankfully unexplained - I hate too much explanation, it makes the reader lazy), quite unnerving parallels to be drawn between the grandmother and the creature - almost as if the grandmother's anger at being left helpless and fearful in her final moments were being embodied in what, for all other accounts, seems a random attack (or maybe I'm over analysing - I have a tendency to do that).
The creature was creative and unusual. I'm not clear if there is a connection between the grandmother dying and the creature's brutality. It could be better if that were further expanded upon. I found the sentence structure detracted from the story at times, but found it enjoyable overall.
Needs a bit of polishing with some punctuation (missing a few commas) and missed letters/words here and there. I had to reread the first page a couple of times to work out the relationships here, and who the woman was. I felt the present tense was a bit of a stumbling block.
The description of the creature on page 4 is a bit clunky and you start 2 sentences in a row with "A pale...". However I was still able to picture it, and it's awful and horrifying. One of my favorite creatures in the contest.
Very open-ended, and I don't have a problem with that. I'd love to know what happened to the dad, as I suspect the creature is tied somehow to grandma's fate.
Entertaining read, thanks for sharing this!
Thanks for the feedback. I'm definitely going to be working on fine tuning and language structure for the rewrite.