Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26695280-20150717204155/@comment-26007602-20150717214642

In addition to the formatting issues, this could use a proofread. There are numerous grammatical issues present throughout the story.

But there are larger issues with the story.

First off, the transition to the journal seems really forced. I can't see any good reason that the second half of this is written in journal entries. They don't add anything to the story and detract from it in many cases; I think this story would be best if kept in the first person past tense that the story starts with.

There isn't any emotion from these journal entries. The narrator simply tells us what's happening without giving any reaction to it. His cat is missing, then dead, and then the Russian dude is dead and the narrator just does not care. I can't emphasize with a bland and uninteresting character, so there's no horror at all here. You need to show us the narrator reacting to these events, as you're doing far too much telling and not enough showing. Show us how he reacts, show us the horror of this situation, don't tell us that this guy died and so did this guy and then this guy died. It's not scary and comes off as lazy writing.

This feels incomplete. There's no ending, no closure, nothing to tie the story together. If this is supposed to be the finished product, then you need to revise the ending because nothing happens.

The story itself is fairly ridiculous at times. Some dude is selling a vintage car for $500? No, no he's not. If our protagonist sees this and isn't worried that it's a scam or possibly a trap then he's a complete idiot and has no idea how the internet works. I thought this story would revolve around the car killing people (as most car stories seem to do), but what you have here makes little sense. Some guy is just killing people who come across the car? Why? There's no reason; you need to at least hint at a motive. The fact that he just kills them and stuffs them under the hood and the car still runs is ridiculous.

There's little horror here. Guy buys car from some Russian dude (it's never explained why the car is so cheap by the way, does the Russian guy want others to be murdered? Why), cat dies, Russian guy dies, and then friend dies. We don't have any connection to any of these characters so we don't care about their deaths. The cat is in the story for a single paragraph, the Russian dude at least gets some dialogue, and the friend is in the story for two sentences. None of them do anything or interact in any way, so we don't care about their deaths in the least. The story relies too much on "there's so much blood and gore in the car". There's no build up to the deaths, our narrator just keeps finding dead guys in there.

One final thing I noticed was an odd delay in the journal entries. This guy finds the host of his cat in the car and then waits two freaking days before cleaning it out. Doesn't that seem strange? Why wouldn't he clean out the dead cat parts immediately? Is there a reason he find his dead car and then says, "Eh, I should probably clean this up later"?