Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35711173-20190427100713/@comment-35911608-20190427143056

It was an interesting story, but it lacked in creepy sauce. Now I gotta ask the waitress for more, dammit!

The story itself could work fine, I think; the idea of being chased through the desert by drug dealers was already a tension builder, but the snake bite was where I really got scared for the narrator. Either give up and die to your hunters, or run and pump the venom harder through your body in an effort to live? That's pretty good.

The thing that kinda killed the horror aspect of this came down to how simple the situation turned around, and just how... plain the situation became.

There was one idea that immediately came to mind after reading the lines about "coyotes and mules never being truly evil," and this is entirely up to you. Snake venom can cause visual hallucinations, and your character is pushing the stuff harder through their body due to running. My thoughts were to have the narrator begin to hallucinate the drug runners as actual coyotes or some kind of creature; it's getting dark and it would make sense with the venom kicking in. (Perhaps as the MC gets closer to their car, the desert changes as well? That might be a bit much though.) And then, once he has the Arcus, he fires at and kills one of the "wolves" just before it reaches him, and then his vision returns, and he sees the drug runners like normal again.

Then again, if you're going for a more realistic approach, then I'd elaborate more on the fear of the situation. Everything does go a little quickly, and then the switch of power really turns off the fear.

The only mechanical/grammatical error I saw was in this paragraph: ''The course got harder as I ran up the hill, but I knew gravity and exhaustion worked even more on their nacho and beer guts than skinny me. I also had a secret advantage, hiking shoes instead of their slick soled cowboy boots. ''

I'd just change that comma to a semicolon in the last sentence.

Hope this helped. Keep up the good work :)