Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-24248644-20170220222412/@comment-31288135-20170222073245

Grammar Issues: first off, your title needs to be properly capitalized. Also, you add an unneeded "'s" after dates (" It was summer break of 1990's..."..." The hospital was closed in the 1960's..." ). A dding the 's on the end denotes a  decade (50s fashion), and even then you shouldn't use the apostrophe (your grammar checker might get its panties in a twist, but grammatically adding the apostrophe is incorrect). You also have some bizarre wording issues (" The hospital was closed in the 1960's due to a high number of accidents and deaths in the building."  the hospital was closed due to deaths? That's not at all unusual). I'd recommend reading your story out loud to fix a lot of these issues.

In specific, I took issue with one sentence in particular: " It took all six of us (we were all athletic, btw) open the rusty gate." First off, the stuff in the parenthesis completely ruins the mood. Also, if you don't read the stuff in the parenthesis, you're left with "It took all six of us open the rusty gate".

It maybe needs another read-through, but the grammar was mostly fine.

Story Issues: The story lacks detail and description, which absolutely cripples it. Also, the climax is extremely anti-climatic and predictable. Its lack of description is really the issue; if it had been described as more horrifying, and more importantly, had an impact on our protagonist,  it would be better. Think about it this way: this MC, in the pursuit of some mindless fun, has had all of their friends murdered and just narrowly avoided death by not going inside the building. Write the story from the perspective of THAT person, and not a writer trying to tell a scary story. Finally, the last few paragraphs just bury the story. It just punches even more plotholes into the story. I think it's trying to be mysterious, but it's not. Sorry.

Random Thoughts: I'd recommend changing the title since it gives away the ending of your story. There's no reason we should get invested in the MC's struggle at all if we know that our MC is going to get out alive. This story is a bizarre combination of needing to show more than tell and needing more description, so much to the point I can't tell which problem is worse, or even more prevalent.

It's not awful, but it's not good. With some reworking, it'll be cliche, but it could still be effective.