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 Review #3789525 |
 Welcome to WDC from "Newbie Welcome Wagon" ! Title: Uncle Vincent's 60th Birthday Party Author: sphinx2537 Type: Short story Well, your character reminds me just a little of a young Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Both that that same sense of superiority, and while it turned out that Bateman’s taste was suspect and superficial, it may have turned out that this young killer’s taste was just as superficial. The story takes a dramatic twist toward the end, one I doubt the reader is prepared for. It is such a short tale that it is difficult to make that twist work properly. At first the young man just seems like a teenager who is trying to assert his independence. He dislikes things that most teens do and also like most teens, he sees his relatives, no matter how nice they are to him, as unsophisticated Troglodytes. That seems to be the extent of his issues, until we see he has some deeper, unsocial, uncharitable thoughts, and maybe that should have been a red flag, but it wasn’t and I assumed he was just a young man with a lot of angry and lustful thoughts in his head. Still, thoughts are not actions, and so when he goes into the bathroom and kills his Cousin Elena, it’s both sudden and unexpected. But it is so sudden that it is jarring and improbable. For such a thing to be believable, I think you needed more time, more story and certainly more character description. The killing comes quickly and without detail. While I certainly didn’t want a minute explanation of the murder, some anticipation would have made for a much more powerful denouement. You could have showed his emotions as he crept into the bathroom, the intensity and mixture of being tense and excited. You could have shown Elena hearing a noise, looking around and when she was reassured that it was nothing that is when he struck. What I am trying to say is, instead of just telling us he killed her, show us – not the killing but the anticipation that lead up to it. There is a lot of emotions that must have gone on in his head: anger, sexual deviance, pleasure, joy – all kinds that you could explore. The writing is solid, though you have a typo (“has” when you mean, “his) in line one. And that is all the more reason why you should rely on your ability to show readers the action. In the last paragraph there is another minor typo, a “to” when you want, “too.” But other than that, it seems pretty solid. Your ability to paint his family was well done. There was some great images there, which we saw through his eyes. How truthful his view was is suspect, but all the more intriguing because of it. Though it had its gratuitous moments, it painted the young man as flawed and so not many readers can picture him as a hero, more like an anti-hero. They won’t flock to him with some measure of adoration for you showed his flaws, and to a point, his madness. There are some good parts to this story, like the early descriptions, the unique point of view and the mood that your writing creates. The main flaw is that attack with comes way too soon and without proper preparation. It is just implausible without more of a set-up. 
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You responded to this review 11/25/2012 @ 8:43pm EST