Talk:The Cold Testament/@comment-25148755-20151224192716

Official Review for Shadow's Holiday Horror Contest Stories were graded on a ten point scale for each of three criteria: writing style/grammatical correctness, originality/story effectiveness, and creepiness Writing style/grammatical correctness: About average overall. Your descriptions were tight and I got a good feel for Elizabeth (before and after her transformation) and Samael. Some of the lines felt fairly choppy and messed with the flow of the narrative a bit. There were also some minor grammatical errors and incorrect word usage throughout that take away from the score here. I wasn’t a particular fan of Elizabeth’s dialogue, not because I don’t it when authors write the way people talk, but because the way you wrote it made her sound like she had a cockney accent in my head (which she probably wouldn’t have, coming from New York) 7/10

Originality/story effectiveness:   Definitely an original take on a classic concept, one I can’t say that I’ve ever seen quite like it before. I’d be interested to know where you got some of the background for your ideas (is the Nekelmu from something?)   My one criticism is that Elizabeth’s turn didn’t feel organic…she went from freaking out to killing someone accidentally/in self defense to wantonly murdering an entire family on a whim (the father I could, sort of understand, but the wife and kid posed no threat.)   The turn just seemed to happen too quickly. Giving the homeless man the bounty at the end seems like a good turn, until he tries to pawn the jewelry and gets picked up by the cops for murder and robbery. 7/10

Creepiness:   Pretty solid. Your description of Samael was gave a sense of imposing menace. The murder scene had me cringing. 8/10

Overall: 7.3/10