Talk:Hanging Man Hill/@comment-24019084-20140424113951

I dunno.. This just didn't really click with me. I felt the reveal of Roy Terrance wasn't conveyed very well. From what I could gather the kids were a fair distance away from the telephone pole where the man supposedly hanged, and somehow he ended up close enough to the fire for his head to fall in. I tried rereading that part a couple times but it just wasn't very clear on whether or not Roy's body was still hanging, whether he had walked up to them or even if they actually -were- a distance away from the telephone pole.

And with the narrator saying they looked back before running up the hill, that'd mean he never had a chance to move away from the fire. And if Roy was right there standing, again, close enough to the fire for his head to fall in, he should have been plenty close enough to grab the kids.

And, also, if his head came off and it and/or his body disappeared in a whisp of ash, as is stated, then how the hell did Terry end up hanging from the wires? Do the wires themselves do the grabbing? Maybe, since that part wasn't witnessed. It's also not explicitly stated how Terry's grandfather got strung up.

But surely Terry, being the local, AND having lost family to this curse, would have had the decent sense to ride the path back into town and go nowhere near any more wires or poles or whatever.. I just don't see how he ended up deviating from the path while fleeing for his life. Pretty big lapse of judgment.

It's well-written enough, even if the dialogue is a little mature for the age setting, but I feel the climax was a little rushed and not fully thought out. For pasta of the month, I was a little disappointed how all these small things added up to kind of lose me at the end after such a promising initial setup.

And really, just one final little nitpick.. While the marshmallow bag was a decent touch, again...fleeing for your life, on a bike, with both hands presumably on the handlebars, over precarious terrain, and finally strung up with telephone wires (either by posession of such or grabbed by the ghost)...I think that may have warranted dropping the goddamn marshmallows at SOME point before his demise. I can't be alone in that thought.