Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-32764586-20180206223252/@comment-10502460-20180214230759

I must admit I feel rather out of my depth reviewing this, as I've always found the majority of 20th century rock and metal music to be very uninteresting. That's really the insurmountable problem I have with this draft, the song you were assigned does not appeal to me and I feel I can't really connect with the story as long as I can't connect with the song. This will be my problem with probably every other entry and it's the reason I didn't enter the contest.

With that said, I will try to give some honest thoughts on this, though I suspect this review would be very similar to the review I would give all the other entries in the contest because of the issues inherent to the contest itself:

1. If you removed the first five paragraphs that tie the context of this whole story to the song, this is just a narrative about a guy abusing and threatening his wife and son for her cheating, played completely straight and without a single twist or nuance. If someone uploaded such a story outside the context of the contest, we would ask them to give it some greater point, climax, twist, or something more to avoid deletion. But here, the greater point is the context of the song, which again, I don't really care about.

2. That said, I did take the time to listen to and read the lyrics for Don't Fear the Reaper, and I don't see how this story connects to the lyrics in any way. To be fair, the song doesn't give you much to work with. I've heard it said by music experts that rock and metal are known to be instrumentally rich but lyrically shallow. That is definitely the case for this song. But the problem I have with this story, and probably with most other stories that will be entered into the contest, is that it seems basically like an adaptation of the "theory" pasta genre with music instead of other media. Except theory pastas for TV shows and video games are actually able to present evidence, however flimsy and contrived, for their case, whereas here, again you don't have much to work with.

those are my criticisms. I'm afraid I can't offer much in the way of suggestions for what to change since this contest really isn't my thing. I guess the one clear suggestion I can think of is maybe try to give us more of a reason to care about Tommy (who I'm assuming is a fictional person) being in a relationship with the band. Say more than that he was just friends with the lead singer. Was he a roadie, or friends from high school, or someone who worked at the label, or what, and why should we care about him?