Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35711173-20190427100713/@comment-9041013-20190427234023

Here, the way it is now; it'll never work. It's just not enough classically horror related. It will work as it is on Reddit's Nosleep however.

If I'm being honest, It read like a light version of a Quentin Tarrantino film script. It had a bloody premise that was entertainingly ridiculous. It reads more like a western with the added edge of a horror themed thing. It's not horror however.

I think you could possibly stretch the encouter a bit, perhaps to a few hours where exhaustion the snake bite take a toll on the narrator's psyche so much so that he begins to envision his chasers as horrible monsters or something.

I know you're not the type for it but if you want this to keep a somewhat light spirit around this and give it a horror edge. Have the narrator get bitten by a snake, wonder around, get dehydrated or slightly heat stricken before encountering the narco-bandits that intended to let him go, or never even noticed him, only for him in his torn up state to mistake them for something awful and kill them. Added effect for both humor and grimness could be achieved if in the ending the narrator discloses the realization that he killed them for no good reason.

Might as well make it a little bit like Pulp Fiction where the narrator just gets into all sorts of consequitive troubles in the desert, you can play on the effects of snake bite, Fata Morgana, and other oddities; even up to the confusion of people with none human things that lead to accidental murder.

But it's up to you really.

I do have to mention that the title doesn't seem to represent the story too much, the whole gun scene kind of kills the potential it had for me, because it feels a bit like Deus Ex Machina. The Narrator seemed doomed and then boom a gun appears in the plot. Why wasn't he wearing it on him? Because plot!