Talk:A Noel in Black/@comment-25148755-20151224193630

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 writing style remains as crazily over the top as always. Dripping descriptions and fantastic word choice along with realistic character descriptions and dialogue provide a unique and worthwhile reading experience. I also appreciate how you change up your style, going from a general narrative, to more stream of consciousness during parts, as well as the use of carol lyrics (some cleverly applied) to transition throughout. 10/10

Originality/story effectiveness:   This is truly off the wall, an excellent example of the bizarro style you are emulating. I found myself caring for Caleb, even though he turns out to be a vicious killing machine. The ties to your other stories, The Gym Teacher and A New Man in particular, were also appreciated as easter eggs for readers familiar with you. The only stuff I can say this reminds me of are some of the comics written by Grant Morrison. The background research (Charlie-isms) is well thought out as always. Excellent work. 10/10

Creepiness:   Some of the descriptions of the werewolf killing people were definitely gruesome, but I did not find myself particularly scared at any point reading this. I think the overall bizarre, abstract nature of the story away from the horror by giving the whole thing more of a ‘dark comey’ feel (although I love your God, Easter Bunny, GoCP trinity…they could probably carry a series of stories on their own in a sort of MST3000 vein.)   6/10

Overall: 8.7/10