A spooky tale with lots of promise
It’s nice to come across a classic style of horror that is not dependent on guts and gore to convey a sense of dread and unease.
The author has clearly spend time trying to set the piece correctly in its time frame and to get the right feel for the story.
There is a lot left unanswered as the story unfolds, which is always good in a horror. It leaves you wondering just what was really occurring, and how it all began in the first place.
I did feel this story could have been expanded into a full novel, and it was slightly limited by the short story format, it would benefit from a longer word count to give it a chance to really fly and develop all the elements.
One of the short falls of short stories is the need to keep everything very tight, each nugget of information has to be relevant to the story. There were some elements in this tale that could be considered background information and could probably be removed to tighten up the story. However, if the story was expanded, those elements could be explored further and bring more depth to the overall plot.
On a purely practical note, the last chapter would benefit from some further proof reading. Due to this I did have to drop a star for the grammar/punctuation. But it is an easy fix.
I consider this a confident, bold and intriguing work, that shows great potential in the writer. I hope to see further stories, as it will be exciting to see how they develop and I am sure there are a lot of good things to come.
Read the story now