Talk:Dolbeer in Winter/@comment-25148755-20151224192338

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:   Your writing style was excellent, as always, conveying a sense of fantastic imagery. Your descriptions were tight and the dialogue natural. Your pacing had me legitimately laugh out loud during the description of Pascal attempting to fix the leaky faucet. Nothing negative to really say here, I could see your style incorporated into a series of novels. 10/10

Originality/story effectiveness:   Full marks for originality as your characters are totally fleshed out and unique. The manic pace, witty exchanges, and humor remind me of Pratchett’s Discworld entries, or Adam’s Hitchhiker books. What you have was incredibly effective since, as I already mentioned, you had me literally laughing at one point. The biggest downside here is that this isn’t really a complete story, but feels more like several chapters in the middle of a larger book…there is no real closure for any of the several threads that are opened (even for the bloody faucet.)   I really want to give this higher marks since it is so well written, but I just can’t justify it due to the lack of any real conclusion (although I would be very interested in reading the whole story once you have it written down the line) 6/10.

Creepiness:   I recall from previous contests you’ve entered that you have been hit in this category, and that continues here, unfortunately. Your stories tend to be more ‘fantasy’ then ‘horror’ and, while incredibly good, they don’t tend to frighten. That being said, I was slightly disappointed in the snowglobe creature at the end: his introduction, suddenly appearing in the globe and scaring Pierard, lent an air of menace, but then when we get a closer look at the creature, I didn’t find him particularly terrifying…yet anyways. 3/10

Overall: 6.3/10