Talk:25, 26/@comment-25148755-20151224192946

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 flow was decent and descriptions were pretty good as well. A few minor grammatical and spelling errors but nothing too drastic. At the same time there was nothing about your style that really made the story jump out at me. 7/10

Originality/story effectiveness:   The story takes a real hit here. There is really nothing I can say about it that strikes me as particularly original. The characters are not particularly developed, and there is no motivation given for the intruder at the end of the story. 4/10

Creepiness:   I had high hopes for this story as I really enjoyed 49,50 which held me in suspense and surprised me with the twist at the end. My issue here is the only ‘creep’ factor it contains is if you are familiar with 49,50 and the fate that the characters are about to be subjected to. This is essentially a story about a boy who is upset he doesn’t get what he wants for Christmas until the last paragraph where a home invasion/kidnapping is shoehorned in. Even here there is no particular buildup of suspense, as nothing in the story up to that point has provided any sense of menace. Had the abduction been handled differently, it may have been able to achieve a sort of visceral ‘shock’ factor by coming from so far out of left field, but it just wasn’t there the way it was written. 2/10.

Overall:   4.3/10