Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29458657-20160808110436/@comment-29015383-20160810085441

The first thing I noticed reading this is that you switch a lot between past and present time at times even in the same paragraph, which makes this a bit of a difficult read.

example:

I ask him about a local musician and he doesn't even finnish his sentence, as there is knocking on the entrance door. Gregory gets up and goes to the entrance to open the door. I raise and go to the entrance and find Lissa. She says that Joseph invited me to go to his flat for us to talk. ((present tense)) As this guy usually doesn't want to talk to me, I started going to his apartment in a hurry as this had to be interesting. ((past tense))

There are several more instances where you switch but if you reread it a few times I'm sure you'll find them all. I also feel there's some awkward wording here and there but since English is not my first language I'll leave it to someone else to help you on those.

As for the story itself, I think you have an interesting setup here with the partially abandoned appartment building and the rising tensions, but I also think you don't do enough with it. It's all told in a fairly 'matter of fact' manner instead of invoking emotion. Since this is first person you have the opportunity to really explore the depth of paranoia and fear, and how far this can push someone. To this end, perhaps it is better to tell the story in something of a dairy/journal format. People put their inner demons on paper, allowing us an intimate look into the protagonist's mind.

The ending doesn't really impress me to be honest. It feels rushed and unsatisfying. I don't feel that the murderer needs to be a creature/zombie. It doesn't really add anything besides the potential that the paranoia toward one another was ungrounded. While the potential is there, there's not enough investment from me into the characters to make this pay off.

Ending on a "protagonist gets killed" note is rather clichéd as well. And why would they be cursed? Did they all have a common link somewhere? Someone they all pissed off and that person happened to be into witchcraft? A dead tenant that holds them responsible for his/her death? Switch things around. Why not have the killer be a human that they all believed had moved ages ago.

Please don't take this feedback as me tearing your story apart! Like I said, I really believe there is the potential here for an interesting story about paranoia and how quickly it can make people unreasonable. Try to play up the atmosphere of fear and growing animosity toward one another more. A journal style would work well for this I believe. We'd be able to follow the protagonist's descent from normal human being to completely nuts because of the fear for his life. Hell, maybe the protagonist ends up killing everybody else just to be certain he wont be killed, only to then find out it wasn't any one of them in the first place!

Good luck!