Talk:Hanging Man Hill/@comment-5288783-20140418000121

Ok, so writing style complaints: I had minor problems reading certain dialogue because it was difficult for me to think "yeah, a ten or eleven-year-old said that." Outside of that tiny complaint, the usage of the word 'had' just killed me. When I see it twice in the same sentence, it's a bit bothersome. When I find myself reading a load of sentences with multiple uses of the same exact helping verb, it gets on my nerves, kills the mood, and just turns me off from the story in general. I ran a search on-page and found the word 'had' fifty-one times. It's a relatively short story; I don't think you need to write so extensively in the past perfect tense. Now here's my real meat with the story: It's not scary. Like, at all. At the start, it had a well-set establishment of decent exposition and I found myself prepping for some legitimately scary scenes. Then the first scene at the hill came. I was surprised to find that you were following the unorthodox method of a serene setting for what was obviously going to be a gory ending. After I got over the hype of hoping for a unique ending, I noticed a huge plothole. If the traumatic experience of losing his grandfather was so horrible that Terry undergoes a complete change of character when he's at the hill, then why is it that he's staying up late with his best friend just to see this guy? He knows that one of them is going to get strung up and killed, and he is the out-of-shape one. I'd see childhood curiosity as a viable excuse if the duo was much younger. These two kids are ten to twelve; at this point, simple curiosity is not enough to get them killed. At this point, I started to take the story a whole lot less seriously, which truly helped me ease my way through the anti-climactic ending. Granted, there was no real buildup to some legitimate excitement towards the end, but I assumed that it would be one of those stories that starts with a little fizz and ends with an explosion. Instead I was treated to a meat sack on wires throwing more wires around. Sorry if I sound like a pompous ass here; I'm just expressing my opinion in a ridiculously lengthy review. There's some potential, but you have to vary your word choice and spice up the plot a bit.