Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29015383-20160712171950/@comment-29015383-20160713135808

Thank you very much for the critique, especially on how you feel on the ending. I admit to very much being a vampire fan, and the original idea for this was that of a vampire using the Deep Web as his hunting ground. As you noticed however, I really struggled in working it in properly at the end (very much). I eventually went with changing the perspective to Alex' (by my knowledge this is correct as the s drops off at the end because of the x) where the initial one would've been from the vampire's, but I found that really fell flat.

As I want to stick with the vampire idea (unnecessary perhaps...but I love vampires...), I will definitely take your advice and try to work in small clues in the story to warrent the rug being pulled out from the reader's feet. If I'm not yet a capable enough author to succesfully manage that....then it will become a non supernatural deep web story! I'll be damned if I don't at least try though. Especially since to me it gives a feel of 'always a bigger monster out there'. Then again, I suppose the streamer giving his own viewers the spotlight as his victims also shows just that, along with keeping to the theme that in the end, humans can be the cruelest of monsters.

I'm glad you think I managed to find a balance with showing the torture part without making it the gory bloodfest. I was initially a little worried I wasn't showing enough of it and instead focussing to much on the twisted culture but your words put that to rest. Besides, it leaves a lot more to the imagination I feel, which is more powerful than anything I could hope to write.

I will work on the bits you pointed out as well as rewrite the description of the machine. Rather than an inspector Gadget idea, I was thinking more of the arms being akin to a spider's spindly legs. I'll be thinking of some better descriptions for this to make the machine a real nasty piece of work in one's mind instead of a GoGoGadget-TortureDevice.

Again thank you very very much for your honesty and critique (and the compliments. Can't forget those!). For now I will keep trying to keep the vampire part in to make it not feel randomly tagged on, but I will definitely keep in mind that the story as it is now will not suffer if I leave it out.