Talk:The Sweeping/@comment-25567883-20141022105842

Not bad. Made me think of a mix between 'Under the Dome', 'The Purge', and the first Silent Hill movie. The religion felt forced, in part because this is such a short story and many elements (for example the religious factor and the town's gradual descent into madness) weren't as developed as they could have been had this a bigger word count. I wish you had desribed the layout of Wheatly itself more. I had trouble picturing it (what's it's infastructure like? what was town culture like before the Sweeping? did they have a movie theatre, a bowling alley, anything? Population size says a lot, but not everything.) The 'America the Beautiful' bit was also pretty corny.

Lastly, I have to wonder, how does the narrator know about the coverup? Is it just common knowledge amongst the town's folk? The narrator seems to know a lot, like that the substance isn't on the periodic tables, but how? Did the CIA tell the town that? If so, why? If they're trying to keep things under wraps, wouldn't revealing any information of that sort be risky? This is assuming the Nixon administration could even coverup something this big, which, given they couldn't even coverup Watergate, I doubt; cameras were popular in the 60s, so somebody passing by probably snapped a photo, made all the more likely when you consider the Sweeping went on for MONTHS. Plus, the fact that the narrator not only knows all of these classified facts, but is casually explaining them to the reader, suggest either a.) the narrator has a death-wish, or b.) the coverup only lasted a short time, or isn't worth threating over.

But enough with the complaints. You have a nice brisk style, and while I didn't always like your descriptions ("a fallout shelter on steroids") you got the job done. This was a fun, quick read. Your use of different perspectives, in the form of transcripts, spiced up the prose and made it come alive for me. The story went in directions I was not expecting, such as the ash snow poisining the livestock. The context made zombies intereting for a moment (which to me is a miracle these days.) And while I criticized the religious element feeling, you still managed to make it creepy.