Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28462129-20160515030655/@comment-26007602-20160515075021

Alright, the major problem with this story is the intent. You've based the story around the murderer instead of placing a murderer in a story. It's obvious that you creates the murderer first and the story second. This causes the story to suffer greatly, as it lacks any kind of suspense, flow, or build up. You spend a paragraph describing the killers childhood (more on that later), and a few paragraphs detailing his thoughts (more on those later as well), but they don't culminate to anything. It just ends abruptly with the detective dying. How's the detective telling this story if he's dead? It doesn't work in first person stories.

Additionally, the detective is bland, not developed in the slightest, and lacks any personality. That's not always a necessity, but in most stories, were supposed to emphasize with the narrator, and his quest to catch the killer. If any character was present, we might care for this guy when he dies.

The story itself is all over the place. There's no real horror here. You can't just name the story "The Gas Mask Murderer" and expect people to be frightened because it's about a murderer (Side note: does the gas mask even mean anything in this story?  Because I don't think it plays into the story at all.  It's mentioned once or twice; why is this the guys defining characteristic?). You describe murder, but it just isn't scary at all on it's own. Readers are desensitized to violence. You need to complement the violence with build up or tension.

Let's talk about the killer. He is the most cliche guy imaginable. Soooo many creepypasta characters are bullied and come from unrealistically cruel households. He also has the clichéd schizophrenia trope; real sufferers of the illness do not go out of their way to listen to "the voices", nor are they as unstable as you depict them. They have a grasp on reality, though warped it may be. My point is that there are more ways to build a killer than the unoriginal mental illness and shitty childhood tropes you use here.

I don't really delve into grammar too much, but know that yours could use a touch up, as it is worded so very awkwardly in many places. The story is also absolutely riddled with run on sentences, so much so that very other sentence is a run on.

If you want this story to succeed, then you have a heavy rewrite ahead of you.