Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25329900-20141119082320/@comment-25701413-20141119193622

Good writing, and though the concept is a little rough around the edges, there's a solid idea here. I'm a fan of atypical takes on stories, and this has the twist on ghost stories as well as the unusual tactic of forcing an identity onto the reader.

However I feel that, while the writing is good, it shifts its tone too much at times. For the  most part the woman is rather formal, but occasionally she slips into "Yeah, ___" and similar kinds of phrasing, which comes across as the language of someone younger than she is meant to be.

Additionally Peter, while occasioanlly reacting, doesn't seem to do much apart from accept tea and listen quietly as the story is told. Door to door salesmen, in my experience, wouldn't behave like that. Some more reactions to his actions would definitely give him more of a personality, perhaps stopping him from interrupting to bring up his product or, by the end, getting up. The absence of his actions is especially noticeable due to the title putting emphasis on the fact he is a salesman.

Finally, I think the story is a bit too long for its own good. When the twist is a single line, you want a buildup that reaches its most interesting right when the line is thrown in. When the buildup for a horror story is an eternity of a woman talking about her husband, your reader will catch on to the fact that he's probably dead (or worse), and may lose interest. On the flipside, about halfway through the the length of conversation made me think the tea was poisoned and that she had killed her husband, so if that was what you were going for I'd say you succeeded, though I'd still say shorten it a bit.

Overall, good concept, good writing, execution just needs a little bit of work and it'll be good to go in my opinion.