Talk:Red Christmas/@comment-25148755-20151224192037

Official Review for Shadow's Holiday Horror Contest.

Stories were graded on a ten point scale for each of three criteria: writing style/grammatical correctness, originality/story effectiveness, and creepiness





Writing style/grammatical correctness:   Your prose is good for the most part, and you have some fairly effective imagery. However, there are several instances where the heavier vocabulary you use to describe a scene is different enough from the language surrounding it that it becomes distracting. Several minor technical errors (sentence fragments, incorrect capitalization, switching gender and number of pronouns in the same sentence) also take away points. 7/10

Originality/story effectiveness:   This story did not do much for me, coming off as a simple vehicle to introduce your OC. We are not given much in terms of his background, other than he apparently has a history of murder around Christmas time and likes to sing carols. That being said, there was nothing else about him that particularly made Sirius Nightshade ‘pop’ as a character to me. The other unfortunate part of this was that the rest of the characters in the story, all unnamed, effectively took on the role of props in the background; I didn’t find myself caring about the woman, her husband, the kid, or the cop at all. There just wasn’t enough of a story here for my liking. 5/10

Creepiness: Again, not really much for me to go on. The only scare of the story, the reveal of the head in the box, was fairly predictable. The description of Nightshade was decent, but because there was no buildup to his actions before we see him, since there is nothing to connect him to the missing man, it didn’t give me any of those good old fashioned spine shivers I’m always chasing. The character has definite potential, but just needs more buildup and payoff. 5/10

Overall: 5.7/10