Ooh, creepy and morbid- two of the things I love most in books. Your character was well developed, but she wasn't super-biased [read: emotional], and so the narrative flowed well. Pretty cool. ^_^
A few things to discuss:
- I'll drop the big bomb first. Here's my personal opinion- most horror books written like this aren't very scary. Why? They start off horribly- no, not badly written! I mean that they're already scary, straight from the beginning.
One of my favorite horror stories of all time is by Stephen King. I can't think of the title at the moment, but I know that it's about a boy who meets "the Devil" by the riverside when he's fishing. Why is it so scary? The story starts off with a little apprehension about bees, but mainly it's just a normal boy and a normal dog going fishing, normally. And then all Hell breaks loose- pardon the pun.
That's something you could use to your advantage here, and better take hold of character development. Instead of dropping us right into yuck, start normally. Pretend we're in a hospital, and then we find out that, oops, maybe we're not.
- One thing you want to watch is the number of clauses in a sentence you've got. I know, I sound like a broken record- I write this in every critique. But! When you use several sentences with the same number of clauses in a row, the reader knows what the rhythm is going to be like and thinks that it gets kind of boring. This is an important tip to remember when the large majority of your story is narrative, because readers see long paragraphs and assume that they're all boring.
You want to shock people in several different ways with this story- with both how creepy it is and how good it is, even without much dialogue.
[Speaking of dialogue, make sure you start each new line on a new line. It just makes everything so much cleaner.]
- This character has both a gift and a curse- she's verbose, but she also can be melodramatic. It's kind of odd, because she's not very emotional, but when she does slip into Melodrama Mode...things get interesting.
"I giggled to myself, then closed my eyes as a fresh wave of nausea buried me in my misery."
Here's the thing- you don't want to describe emotions as being nouns. I rambled about the Photoelectric Effect in someone else's story- you know, about how Einstein suddenly announced that light behaves like particles, and everyone freaked out? Same thing here. People are going to freak out if emotions start acting like things you can touch.
Instead, describe things without much metaphor. It's also a good idea in horror to go for a stark and real feel, because when you use really flowery language the whole story is softened. When it's plain and realistic, it's very, very scary.
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Good story, wildlove! Feel free to PM me if you've got any questions, or want me to take a look at something else. I'd be honored. ^_^
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