Hi Max! Welcome to YWS!
All in all, I thought this was a really solid piece of writing. There are a few things I want to quibble about, which I'll get to soon, but overall, I thought it was a strong hook, and I am definitely intrigued to learn more! I'll try not to repeat anything that Nobunaga has mentioned in the review below.
The tone for this piece was established really well, I thought, and right from the opening sentences, the writing had a vibe to it that remained consistent throughout the rest of the chapter (I noticed below you said it was a chapter?). Personally, I wouldn't say that creepy is the word that leapt to mind, but there's definitely an eerie, mysterious quality to your writing that came across nice and strongly here.
I think the imagery was also great! As someone who struggles big time with description, I'm a teensy bit jealous. All the memory/ghost people were vivid and super easy to picture.
One thing that did stand out for me was the fact that we don't really find out anything about the narrator (aside from the fact that they can see the memory-people). Which, is not necessarily a massively bad thing - yet. A bit of mystery is cool for the opening chapter, and obviously I haven't read anything else of this story, but the fact that we have no connection to the narrator may be a bit off-putting for some readers, and might delay them connecting with the story. It's clear here that the focus is on what the narrator is seeing, which you don't want to distract from with too much info about the protagonist, but I feel like having some more personal reactions, rather than description, could help the reader connect with the narrator more strongly.
Sometimes the sentences felt a little choppy, which I think came from the fact that a lot were fairly similar (often on the shorter side) lengths. I'd suggest playing around with your sentence lengths, and maybe reading aloud so you can hear the rhythm of how the writing flows.
I'm not sure what time period this is set in, but I got some definite old-timey vibes. Sort of circa Victorian-era, maybe just before or just after. If that's what you were going for, it works! If not, we can potentially discuss what made it appear that way to me (basically it's word choice and phrasing, but I can be more specific) and what might make it feel more modern, if that's what you were going for, for example.
Sometimes the writing in this chapter felt a little too wordy. I think a few things contributed to this. Hopefully I can explain this without getting too rambly
There are a lot of adjectives in this piece. And adjectives are great, and definitely key in creating the great imagery you have going on, but there is such thing as overusing them. It felt like almost every noun was preceded by at least one adjective, which after a while felt a bit much for me. The writing didn't quite enter purple prose territory, but the abundance of adjectives did slow down the writing, and made some of the stronger adjectives you used lose their power. Moderation is key, so maybe go through and work out which descriptions add something really vital to the chapter, and which aren't so important, so that the key stuff really stands out.
As far as general wordiness that comes from sentence structure-y stuff, here are a few examples that I'll discuss:
A young couple engaged in pleasuring each other against the wall to my right,
his screams of anger caused my ears to ring
an impossible sight that caused me to shiver.
Obviously, everyone's writing style is different, and some people are more concise than others, and I'm not trying to make you change your style, but there are quite a few moments here where there will be a phrase that's a bit of a mouthful, and could be expressed less verbosely. For example, the 'engaged in' in the first example I've quoted doesn't add anything to the sentence, and could be replaced with 'were', or just 'pleasured' (just to go off on a slight tangent, but 'to pleasure' as a verb always makes me cringe. I would suggest 'embraced' to keep with the tone of the writing, but my dislike towards 'to pleasure' might just be me). The extra words make it feel a bit clunky and affects the flow.
There's something else I noticed in this chapter, and feature in the last two examples I've quoted, is a tendency to structure sentences in a way that results in having verbs in their infinitive form (ie to shiver, to ring, etc). (Incidentally, both use 'caused', but they're far enough away from each other for repetition not to be an issue). This appeared quite a bit, so it's something to keep an eye out for, because whilst sometimes it's unavoidable, it does make the writing feel wordy and choppy.
...And that's about it from me! There are a few areas that could be worked on, but in generally this was a fab effort. If you have any questions, feel free to give me a shout!
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Reviews: 260
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