Young Writers Society

Why do you have so many epic reviews?! Errr, sorry. I just want to warn you that I really don't know if I'm going to be helpful at all here. That's what I get for taking ages to get to requests, I guess. Anyways, yeah, if you have any questions or comments about this review when I'm done, just let me know.

I've just had a skim through some of the other reviews and I think I might actually have a few things to mention that haven't been critiqued already. Before I get into that though, I'd like to say that I agree with a couple of things that have been said already--the whole confusion thing being the main one. I won't lie... I am the most unintelligent person ever when it comes to figuring out what things mean, for example, the end of this story. Considering others have mentioned it being confusing though, I don't think it is just me this time. Here are the main questions I have right now:

Who was the corpse? (I'm assuming it was the boy, but that just opens another load of questions).

What actually happened to the MC for him to be in the situation?

Why were the mother and the boy familiar?

What happened in the ending in general? (Obviously, Azila understood it because she's one of those weirdly smart homschooled kids. Oh! Hang on... You know when the MC was found by the ship, was he dead? Maybe that could explain some things...)

Also, why didn't the boy just, like, burn his mother's body so she wouldn't haunt him...? Then he could have ate her. Yum. (I know that would kind of like ruin the whole plot, but hey, I just thought I'd throw some logic in there. Besides, you could always just give the boy a weird obsession with his mother so he couldn't kill her because of that. Mind you, he seems pretty weirdly connected to her anyway...)

With most of these questions, I do have theories, but that's the problem. They're just theories and there are too many of them. If you'd maybe left one or two things a bit hazy, it would be okay, but it's a bit annoying for me because there's quite a number of events and questions that aren't confirmed. It's especially frustrating when I have 101 theories running around in my little brain. I'm not saying that you have to blatantly tell us everything, but a few clues and less haziness would be nice.

Before I get onto some deeper critiques, I want to bring up some nit-picky ones. I'll begin with the physical state of the MC. You started this off with him basically dying. (One of my theories is that the whole situation with the boy and his mother was a hallucination/dream because of his state, but that's one of my less likely theories. If that is true though, this next critique might not be as relevant). Anyway, yeah. Basically, he started off with zero energy, but by the end, he was blooming swimming. He hadn't really eaten or drunk anything during his time on the island, so I don't get how he had so much energy to be able to climb through the trap door various times, run from the evil woman thingy as well as swim away. He just simply wouldn't have the energy, especially judging by the way you described his weakness at the beginning.

Staying on the subject of food, I found the scene where the MC refused food from the boy. Well, I say food, but it was ashes (They were ashes, weren't they? Sorry, I have the memory of a dead goldfish). Still though, if the MC was as hungry as you'd described him at the beginning, I'm almost certain that he would have eaten whatever he could have. He almost seemed snobby to me when he refused to eat the ashes. Even if he didn't decide to eat them because of taste or whatever, I'd have that that he'd have at least tried them or something. I guess it just seems a little... unnatural and unrealistic?

Something else that I found a bit unrealistic was the dialogue, certainly in one area.

“A person always dies twice. The first is physical - you know about that. The soul departs from the body. The second is more difficult to explain. But you will know.”

“Give me a hint,” I pressed.

But the boy was silent. His eyes strayed back to the coffin. “Sometimes she would take me to a hill, far away, where the clouds floated just above our heads. It was beautiful there: we could see the meadows, the forests, the mountains. ‘The sun always shines here,’ she would say. And it did. We would spend days there, though it could have been years. It should have been years.”

“Can you take me there?” I asked.

He sighed. “I’ve never been able to find it again. I’ve searched for many days under the gray sky, but I can find only ruins.”

“What are the ruins of?”

“Many years ago, we built a kingdom here, my mother and I. We built for miles and miles, she the queen, me her prince. We were happy then. But eventually we came to a sandy shore, and there we stayed. Then I found the cave. I think she misunderstood. She would wander about the streets at nighttime, while I slept. I think she knew that I was only trying to please her. I...I cry sometimes at night, because now she haunts me.”

I was silent for a moment. “Why does she haunt you?”

“She hated me.”

“She didn’t hate you. She loved you. You know that. Why would have she hated you?”

Here's one segment of dialogue that I found a bit unnatural, especially that last line there. I mean, would you really say that to someone? The MC doesn't know the boy, so how would he know that his mother loved him? It just sounded weird to me. Another thing about this dialogue is that it seemed a bit telly to me. It was kind of like you were trying to give us some information (the people dying twice thing, the boy's history e.t.c.) through dialogue, therefore, making it unrealistic. Also, I found it weird that the boy was speaking so much here. At the beginning, he was answering with very short responses, but he spoke in long, detailed sentences here. It didn't match up.

You have this certain type of writing style... One that I see around YWS now and then. People like Azila and Tigersprite have a style similar to yours. A detached style, I suppose. That can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be a bit of a negative thing at times because, to put it simply, the emotions can often seem bland. I found that happening here. You were telling us how much pain your MC was in e.t.c. but I didn't feel a connection to him or his emotions. Take the corpse scene, for example. He noticed the corpse, walked up to it, said what it looked like, turned to look at the boy after he was tapped on the shoulder, realised the corpse had disappeared, but then never mentioned again. Not once. Excuse my language, but if I saw a corpse in a state like that, I would have shit myself. It almost seemed as though he just shrugged it off as though it was an everyday thing to see. Does that make sense?

I keep thinking about the ending. I have a feeling the whole you'll know thing that was mentioned a lot has something to do with what was said about everyone dying twice. Oh! I think I might know now! Was the boy already dead physically, hence his corpse, but wasn't dead in, like, the other way? To let him rest in peace, he had to... errr, have the MC do something to do with his mother to let him rest? You might have to explain some things to me after this review...

Despite this review being way, way too critical, believe it or not, I really like this. I'm not a huge fan of extremely descriptive pieces, but this was definitely an exception. Your descriptions were wonderful, if a bit too much at times. I adore this plot, by the way, even if I don't quite understand all of it. I love a good eerie story, so this was definitely right up my street. Oh, and I'm sorry I've rambled... a lot.

Keep writing,

xoxo Skins

I didn't quite like this. Your MC doesn't make sense to me. First of all, he's shipwrecked, and he keeps on making the usual mental contradictions (that was my purpose... I have no purpose... blah, blah). And he's all anguished and everything and in pain and barely holding on.

Next thing we know, he has a couple of berries and BAM! He's ready to go and do whatever... even make a couple of snarky comments to the boy. WTF? I mean, I know this is going to sound petty, but berries ain't enough. A human can go three weeks without food, but only three days without water. Which, I guess is all right and everything because it sounds like he's dead anyway, from the ending. But he doesn't act like he's dead yet, so it's really confusing. And, were he to puke, it would likely be a dry heave because he doesn't have anything but the berries, and that ain't enough, as previously mentioned.

I think it's weird that he follows the boy or whatever. Why would he do this in the first place?

Also, why would the boy kill his mother anyway? The way the MC accepts that is just... odd. I would be like, "Uh huh, you're joking, right?" And, if I believed him, I might say, "Why?" But they just kind of stare at each other.

Also, I hate how the little boy knows more about everything than the MC. So the MC ends up looking like he's stupid and everything. Plus, unless there's a snarky comment that the MC can sneak out, he is completely and utterly obliging to the boy. Whhyyyyy?

Also, where does the MC get all this energy?

And why does the boy say, "You'll know" but we never get a hint as to why this man should know or even know if the MC wonders about these words. The dialogue is flat, and partly because everyone accepts everything and doesn't question anything.

And then, in the end, the very fact that he was a sailor whatever has no real bearing on the story as well. It's like, the beginning was just a gimmick to lead us in. Sure, his boat brought him in at the end... kind of circular. But it seems really odd and gimmicky. You might as well have him and his family get mauled by a pig and then have him angst about that. Then, at the end, his wife shows up with a platter of bacon and leads him home.

SO. If he's a sailor and stuff? MAKE THAT IMPORTANT. Maybe he can tie knots over the stone slab or whatever. Don't make him just passively go along. Make him DO something.

...I think that's the main part of the critique. O_o

... I'm getting a feeling that this is a delusion on Darrel's part. Me being me, I habitually see into works a bit (or perhaps a lot) deeper than the author usually intends. So, here's my version of what happened.

Darrel burned down that ship. This would make sense, since the theme of the source material is burying guilt. The boy here, then, represents Darrel himself, and the dead mother is the burned down ship. Perhaps this is why she can only be controlled with ashes? That's a tenuous reference, but it's solid enough to send shivers down my spine when I realized it. Anyway, they go into the room, they run away from the mother, and then they escape her in the ocean. The ending mirrors the beginning, it seems, when Darrel escaped from the ship, he also leaped into water. In this sense, the moral is pretty family-unfriendly: there's no point in dwelling on your mistakes, bury them, seal them off forever, run from them, and you'll be golden. I must admit that I'm a fan.

Your descriptions are absolutely breathtaking. Honestly, your style reminds me less of Kafka and more of Lovecraft. They are lush and viscous, pulling you in and holding you there. Though the question that begs asking is -- are they necessary in a piece such as this? Do they play a role, are they connected to what you're trying to say? The ruins certainly do. The boy, also. Darrel's (I keep trying to write Darren for some reason) pains throughout the story are a bit overblown, but they definitely have their place in the narrative. The description of the mother? I think, not so much. I mean, she's a ghoul, that's all we really need to know. No need to describe every nook and cranny of her cranium (forgive the awful wordplay).

Relevance to source material: The only part I really found jarring was that the child in the story appeared a lot more mature than how (at first) Sopor's child appears in his song. There, he says absolutely nothing until they reach the crypt. That makes me think of a little child, too shy perhaps to speak at first, but who nevertheless desperately needs the help of another. Then, after the dark events in the song take place, he cannot bear it anymore and breaks out in his monologue about just what happened to his mother, and what he's doing in this underground crypt. In your version, he is more of an omnipotent, haughty god: he replies to questions with "You'll know", "You'll understand", and so on. Upon finishing the story, it seems more like the child hoped that Darrel will know all these things, that he knew, relied even, on the fact that Darrel will understand the situation. But when I initially read the story, it seemed like the child was some deity teaching Darrel a lesson. Other than this, I most certainly see the relevance. Good job on translating it to text.

Contest results will be announced tomorrow.

Lyrics:


Your judge,
cC

whoa that is one hell of a story. Its awesome, your really talented mashallah, you should consider writing for a career i have to remind myself that its not a book and that its your written work. I know the end is confusing, but i also understand why i have read many short stories that end like that, and i remember getting angry at the book because i wanted to know what happened next. My short character description on Dylan is the same.

keep it up its magnificent