Talk:Penpal/@comment-27047956-20151005180811

Really enjoyed this. The plot as such was good. Not extraordinarily so, if you outline the events it's not that mind bending or innovative. What really does shine though, and is often lacking in pastas or amateur litterature was the skillful delivery and writing style. Telling the story in the form of childhood memories is an effective method of both building suspense from the fact that the character is vulnerable as a child, much more so than an adult and also by making it easier to get the reader to suspend disbelief, since logical fallacies and inconsitencies can be attributed either to the child mind playing tricks or to memories being clouded by time. Prehaps the most well known use of this style in the horror genre is plenty of Stephen King's more successful novels.

The author also used effective means to create emotional attachment, something notoriously difficult in a short(ish) story. He also keeps the reader interested and in attention by embedding lots of details and references throughout the story, which are easy to miss for a reader who is not paying attention, and they are often vague enough to force the reader to think and decide for herself what the meaning or significance is. Take for example the discussion on Josh's dissapearance, what the police had done etc. How many of you noticed the part saying that there was an anonymous woman urging the police to compare the dissapearance with a stalking case some years back. Was this the narrators mother recognicing the situation and trying to point this out without scaring Josh's parents?

There were of course the occasional case of the story being either to obfuscated, forcing to much assumptions from the reader to make sense of it and also the opposite, the cases where the text was far to obvious in pointing things out with to much effort or getting to lengthy in the description of mundane "fillers": Yes, it's important to expand the story to include side tracks not connected to the main story, this needs to be balanced carefully though.

All in all an impressive story, and the author is skilled enough to probably get far as a professional writer, something that os rare to see among this kinds of material.