Talk:Noel/@comment-25148755-20151224193304

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:   I liked the way you jumped back and forth from the present with Erik making his trek to face the monster and the past with Alexandr. Unfortunately, there were several instances where your verb tense got jumbled doing this. Additionally, you have a habit of using the same word multiple times within a couple sentences of each other making some of the lines feel repetitive and unnecessary. It improved, but the initial couple paragraphs read pretty choppy and kept me from immersing myself fully into the tale   7/10

Originality/story effectiveness:   A decently original take on the classic concept of a sort of inherited ability to slay a monster. Again, I thought jumping between the present and past as an effective plot device although there were several plot holes I had questioned about. There doesn’t seem to be anything about Erik personally that would draw the monster to him, making me wonder why he doesn’t just get rid of the dagger (since that seems to be the only thing that would be causing this.), or move from Alaska. Also, the monster doesn’t appear to be powerful enough to complete the kind of destruction that is attributed to it; you’ve got Alexandr fighting it hand to hand by himself in the first encounter, then having it destroy an entire village during the second encounter. Detonating the cave at the end also seems like a sort of Deus ex Machina:   it takes a decent amount of preparation to set up C4 and the first we hear that Alexandr even has that as an option is when he’s trying to run away from the creature out of the cave...in that regard, since he’s so sure the beast couldn’t shift the rubble he ultimately dropped on it, why didn’t he just blow up the cave entrance in the first place? (sorry if I’m picking that apart…I actually use the ‘running out of a cave and blowing up the entrance to escape a monster’ bit in my story The Soldier, so I’ve had a good bit of time thinking about all of the details surrounding its use). 6/10

Creepiness:   This starts off good with the first couple parts of the story, building suspense, but then fails to deliver a payoff. You skim around what the beast actually does during the flashbacks and the plot holes I mentioned further take away from the menace he presents. Also, your description at the climax of the story, that he looks confused and childlike, detracts from the scare factor. 6/10