User blog:DoctorBleed/"Clockwork: Your Time Is Up" Review

"Clockwork: Your Time Is Up" is not so much a horror story as it is an unfortunate byproduct of the short-lived craze created in the wake of Jeff the Killer's popularity, which spawned an entire subgenre of creepypastas where sexy teenage killers with silly gimmicks murder people who genuinely deserve to die anyway.

Clockwork is the story of Natalie Ouellette, who has a name so french it shits frogs, laughs way too hard at Jerry Lewis, and has serious problems with radical islam. The story focuses on her descent into madness and inexplicable magical abilities. That's pretty much all I can tell you about her character, because there's really nothing to her. Natalie has no personality whatsoever, and aside from the fact that she likes drawing gore and has suffered trauma. Aside from the fact that she's significantly more fuckable than Jeff the Killer, she really has no redeeming qualities of any kind. She would be "Jeff the Killer With A Vagina" if that title weren't already taken by Jane the Killer, who is from an even more terrible story.

None of the other characters in the story get any kind of development. There's Natalie's father, who might as well be the bad guy in a lifetime movie for how over-the-top and ridiculous he is. Then there's Natalie's brother, Lucas. Lucas is a boy who read one too many Japanese hentai comics and decided he needed his own IRL loli imouto waifu. So naturally, like any anime fan, he decides to rape his little sister before crying on prom night. Natalie tries to tell her friends, but they all make fun of her on Facebook and call her a whore. Which is totally something nine-year-olds do all the time.

Now I don't know about you, but I've seen enough episodes of Dr. Phil to know that when a nine-year-old girl says he was raped, people take it pretty damn seriously. Unless it turns out some fat ugly white bitch coached her, which instead ends said fat ugly white bitch failing a polygraph test and losing custody of her kids. But enough about my second ex-wife, let's get back to the story.

I could go on retelling the story point-by-point, but nothing of interest or importance happens at all, other than Natalie's family continues to be horrible when they're not busy being complete flat non-characters, Natalie's boyfriend breaks up with her, and she self-harms a Jeff the Killer smile onto her face. Natalie is taken to a mental hospital where she is experimented on by 1950s Sci-Fi movie doctors. Suddenly, her magical time powers are awakened after a surgery goes horribly wrong, and she freezes time while dodging bullets and killing all the guards. Realizing she is now basically a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure character, she has the exact same idea my Uncle Greg had after his final divorce hearing and murders her whole family.

The exaggerated and over-the-top gore and brutal deaths of all the extremely flat or hateable non-victims in this story seem to be an attempt to shock and horrify the reader, but instead, they just make the story feel unrealistic and cartoonish. The author was going for "Cannibal Holocaust" but accidentally got "Itchy and Scratchy" instead.

From a technical standpoint, the story is somewhat competent, but not enough for a passing grade. The prose suffers from minor tense swaps and unexplained changes in perspective and narration. The narrative often feels rushed, awkward and disjointed. But by far the worst part is the gratuitous swearing. The author is very clearly young, as they talk like a mall goth struggling against puberty while screaming at a mall cop. This, coupled with the very obvious fact that the author's original language is French, not English, should all serve to make the story downright unreadable, but the story somehow remains fairly coherent in spite of all of this. Although the prose is dull and ineffective, if the actual content of the story was decent, it wouldn't be much of a problem.

Overall, "Clockwork: Your Time Is Up" fails to be scary, and only manages to have a sympathetic main character because it uses emotionally manipulative tactics. You never really feel sorry for Natalie, you only feel sorry that rape, incest and child abuse exist. In fact, the MC is so sympathetic that she totally fails to be scary. Why should I be afraid of someone who only kills assholes? As long as I don't rape or beat children, I'm pretty much safe.

Clockwork serves as yet another terrible story in the long line of terrible stories Jeff the Kller left in its wake. If you want to read a better story about a young person brutally killing people, you're better off just driving down to Detroit and reading the local news.

"Clockwork: Your Time Is Up" ticks out with a tragically tired and terrible 3/10.