CharlesDonahue

Thanks for the nightmares

Well, you did warn me. I'm surprised at the amount of awfulness you've managed to pack into such a short work, so good job I suppose? I found your writing style excellent, the writing was smooth and easy to read (grammatically and stylistically anyway). I noticed a few spelling errors, but nothing that really grabbed my attention enough to note down. The plot itself is a bit messy, and by that I mean I found the out of sequence nature of the story a bit jarring. We begin with Dr. Spitzer's side of the story, and then after he meets Celeste we jump into the backstory. When you finish with the backstory in "Ensnared", I found the pacing a bit off. You rush over Celeste's investigation and watching of Spitzer fairly quickly and jump into her ambush and Spitzer's counter-ambush. This is a fairly short book, and I think you would be better served by expanding on this aspect of it. There's a lot of potential in that storyline, and I feel as if it's wasted to a degree. Spitzer's escape raised a few questions for me in and of itself. How did he know Celeste would drink the water? Wasn't he restrained and locked in a cell? How did he get out? Maybe I simply missed something, if so I apologize. I noticed in "Homeward Bound" the line "They spent the night hugging each other on the bed" is placed after the line break, I think it should be before.
Overall, I found the story very engaging, it drew me in from the beginning and held my interest until the end. You do a good job here of presenting the disturbing side of the story in a way that's extreme but not overwhelming to the point of being unreadable. My only complaint in that regard is the scene where Mark rescues Celeste, I found the sexual imagery there a bit over the top and unnecessary, especially because it continues over two chapters in a fairly short book.
I may have some trouble sleeping tonight and for the foreseeable future, but I'm glad that I read this, I found it very engaging.

Good concept

I've only read the first couple of chapters, but the plot seems pretty strong, and it's pretty clear you know what direction you're going in. I noticed some grammar mistakes, the main one being substituting "your" for "you're". I think there were also times where dialogue should have been separated into a new paragraph and wasn't. The writing itself could use some work. I didn't notice much description of the environment, and your main character's voice feels a little rambling. The sentences don't flow into each other as well as they could, and the writing ends up feeling kind of jumpy. I think you've got a great start here, and the plot moves at a good pace. You seem to have a good handle on the characters too. I think with some work this could be great.

Quite Shocking!

You've managed to pack quite a lot into the prologue, and I quite enjoyed reading it. You seem to have a solid sense of where the plot is going, and the pacing is well done. I made some comments in the story at places where I thought you could improve the flow of the writing. At times, it felt a little stilted, which I understand is part of the intended effect, but goes a bit overboard at times. The imagery was fantastic, I had a very clear picture of what was going on, and I thought that was the strongest aspect of this piece. This was a great beginning, and I'm excited to see where it goes!