He is a starboy. He used to climb the olive trees and watch his neighbor decapitate chickens to feel the satisfaction curl in his belly. He is a farchild. He used to sit in the backyard to try and pick apart the constellations from the haze of light pollution. He is alien. He is words that are not of this world.
He is a starboy. He used to wander the bike paths at night, miserable for reasons he couldn’t place until he looked up and wished he could be home. When he finally did come back, late in the night and drained of all his spark, he climbed into the bed he shared with his human mother and slept.
He is a starboy. He wishes to return back to the void of space where he belongs.
He’s tried. Home means two handfuls of pills in the park and fifty-five phone calls to six different people. It means away from the feelings of choked isolation and overwhelmed control.
Overwhelmed control. The feeling that he gets when his mind is swamped with homesickness but he can move, breathe. His human friends talk about being so overwhelmed that they cannot speak, cannot move. He can move just fine and therefore has no right to be overwhelmed.
He is a starboy. A farchild. He is the center of his own universe, lost within the pockets of his skinny jeans. He used to plan ways to return to space from the solitary singularity of his earbuds, crammed into his ears and blasting sound because the human children on the bus fought and screamed and wailed.
He is a starboy. He used to hold the tip of a kitchen knife to his eye and wonder if maybe he carved a hole into his head then he would be able to see his real parents. When he voices his feelings of homesickness to his human therapist she sighs and calls in his human mother.
The hospital is good for you, she says.
It will help, she says.
But nothing about the bare, white, enclosure helps relieve the longing for space. He’s trapped here. The realization that’s been bubbling up for years has him reeling in his cage. He spends days coloring between the lines of mandalas and listening to humans talk about coping mechanisms. He doesn’t know how to speak, to begin to relate the problems he knows are there. At night he stares through the metal mesh and glass of his windows and can’t see the stars he calls home.
He is a starboy, he finally tells his human psychiatrist, exhausted. He is a farchild. He is not of this world and belongs with the distant galaxies.
You are human, the psychiatrist says. She writes something down on her notepad and he feels the wave of helplessness wash over him. We can give you a DNA test, she says.
You are human.
You are.
He is a starboy. He tests out piano keys in the dayroom, toying away at the glossy instrument that sits against the wall. He presses one black key. He is a starboy. One white key. Farchild. Black key. Starboy. White key. He is not a human. Black key. It is not possible.
He bites his nails ceaselessly until his fingers bleed red human blood. He’s been here for over two weeks now. They’re talking about residential treatment. He needs support, they say. He clenches his fists and smears red over his palms.
It is not possible.
He presses one hand flat against the screen of his window and tries to will himself away. Anything is better than this. He wants to return to where he knows he belongs.
The psychiatrist scribbles another recommendation for the day nurse. More medication. He is human. He will learn. We can help him.
He is a starboy. He doesn’t understand what is wrong with that. He hasn’t hurt anyone, nor is he planning to. He’s just homesick. He isn’t bothering anyone. He isn’t. Why do they have to bother him?
Human. The psychiatrist says. You are human. Look at you. Can you prove that you are otherwise?
He cries human tears in his room because he cannot see the stars.
Human. You are human.
His fingers are covered with band-aids. He presses one piano key down and they ache.
Human. You are.
He’s so tired of this. This choked isolation and overwhelmed control.
Human. You.
He presses one hand flat against the metal mesh. He thinks of his human family, his human friends, his human emotions. He pulls open the heavy door to his room and steps out into the hall.
What are you doing up? The night nurse asks. How about you go back to bed. Night isn’t the time you should be awake.
He is a starboy. His heart cracks at the thought of being separated from his beloved space and the universe spills out, flooding the hall with firefly-like stars. He is a farchild and the longing he feels cannot be withheld anymore. The night nurse drops to her knees, eyes wide at the scattering of space around him. He is a starboy. He is not human. He stands with his back to the world, eyes looking north to the dancing lights of frigid space. He is words that are not of this world.
He is a starboy. He takes the firefly-stars with him above the atmosphere to be where he belongs. He is a farchild and he knows that he is not human. He has proved them wrong. He is not a human.
He is a starboy.
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140,771 Literary Works • 673,688 Reviews
I'm tryna put you in the worst mood, ah
P1 cleaner than your church shoes, ah
Milli point two just to hurt you, ah
All Red Lambs, just to tease you, ah...
Okay, okay, I'll stop. You probably don't want to hear me talking about random pop songs. But seriously, it can't be a coincidence that you've named one of your works after a recently out song, even though the subject of both pieces are completely different--I imagine there's at least a bit of inspiration from the title, but of course I can't know for sure.
Now, that was my introduction. Straight into the fray, then!
The Beginning
While I understand that the ending is probably more literal than it looks, reading from the beginning, I thought I was reading a young boy adamantly denying his own humanity, possibly because he was suffering from a mental illness (as far as I've researched, paranoid schizophrenics often have delusions where they've done something terrible or think that something terrible is inside them, when they aren't afraid that someone or something isn't hunting them down). I think it speaks somewhat of how difficult it is to tell apart metaphor and canonical truth. However, if you asked me, I'm much more fond of the possible metaphor than of the literal Starboy interpretation. I'm a cruel man--I'd prefer to think that the boy somehow killed himself and the stars he was talking about was actually blood. It just fits my narrative better, I guess. But that's an entirely different story.
Back to the topic: This beginning. I think it's probably one of the reasons why I continued reading this work (other than the fact that it's named after my current obsession), because of how strange and intriguing it seemed. However, while it definitely was quite a hook, I'm not sure how the part in bold would've fit the rest of the work. My best guess is that the boys' morbid fascination with animal violence is a foreshadowing for his later tendencies, but that's quite a stretch, and it also brings unnecessary attention to another aspect of the story that isn't quite addressed--where does the boy live? Is he living in the countryside? Are there any nearby psychiatric wards where he lives? Or does his parents drive him to the city in order to get him psychiatric treatment? Or maybe he lives in the city and just so happens to live beside a butcher of chickens? That's a more feasible explanation, but it required a bit of thinking to understand, something you don't want your readers to go through. Don't get me wrong. Readers should always be compelled to think. It's just that they shouldn't be obsessing over little details before they finish the whole story. It disrupts the flow, and overall cuts the experience into little pieces.
The rest of the beginning, as I said before, is pretty compelling. If you want to replicate the effect one day, I think your formula is quite simple (I follow it on more than one occasions, actually)--you started with a statement, and then you described that statement. You continue to repeat that statement afterwards, but with darker and darker images associated with it. By the end of the work, you repeat the statement one more time, but the seemingly innocent tone of the beginning is subverted by everything that has happened in the story. (Chuck Palahniuk calls repetition like this chorusing, but he wasn't the first one to create it, of course). I think the work lost a bit of it's power once you started with the disturbing image of chicken heads, but not by that much, really. You could start it with a boy simply dreaming about being something else, and it wouldn't make much difference, but it does make the impact a little stronger overall. Just a suggestion.
Main Criticisms
Now, with that out of the way, my other rambles.
-Returning to something I mentioned in the beginning, I mentioned how I didn't think it was a supernatural story at first. I still stand by that, but now I think this might actually be intentional--it's certainly an interesting mix. Who knows, maybe you actually did intend it to be the way I described it. However, if it isn't, the ending doesn't match with the rest of it.
I like to think that all works have a sort of tone that they carry through until the end, a question or a message that lingers above the readers' head eternally until they finish the arc. And, at first, it seemed like the message your work was going to make is "You Are Human." See, that's a very interesting message to make. It not only comments on the character of the protagonist, but the character of all humans, to some extent. We make gods because we want to feel 'chosen', or 'special', and we make demons that eternally try to tempt us because we feel like our sins are more earth-shattering than any other. We don't just want to be human. We want to be prophets, we want to be monsters, we want to be God and the Devil alike--we want to be anything, as long as we aren't human. So "You Are Human" has hefty implications on its shoulders, and the endings are quite limitless. Even the ending you have currently actually molds well. It's just that, after an entire story discussing that message, the ending feels...anti-climactic, in a way.
The problem, at least in my opinion, is simple; we never actually see the boy interact with the firefly-stars that carry him away in the end. It feels anticlimactic because it's never built up properly. The closest thing you have is his obsession with the stars, which is actually pretty close--but if he truly believed he was a Starboy, he would've spoken to the stars, or tried to communicate with them in any other way. Or, alternatively, he would've thought that the stars were talking to him. That way, the ending makes more sense because the audience recognizes the third entity involved. A simple fix, really, but the reasons why are a bit lengthy.
-Your violence needs to be better choreographed. You can't just throw random acts of self-harm or blood without some sort of justification. The chicken one, for example, isn't exactly justified (in my opinion) without a bit of a stetch. However, the nail-biting and the eye-carving is justified because there's a point to it--it's very clear that the Starboy isn't comfortable in his human form and wants to destroy it. That's fine. But even then, I still think the eye-carving had a better reason than the nail-biting, because it actually had a compelling reason.
Not all things must have a clear-cut justification. It can be hard to decide when an act is more powerful silent or explained, but I think in this case, the eye-carving actually did require an explanation to be as powerful and sentimental as it was. I'm not sure if explaining the nail-biting would help (I honestly think it wouldn't since it's related to the eye-carving explanation), but the chicken-head could definitely use a better explanation than "Because it makes him feel satisfied for some reason."
A tip I usually use to decide whether I should explain something or not is to ask myself, "Does this make sense out of context?" and "If not, have I left a strong enough trail for the readers to understand what's going on?" A minor example from my library is Michael Connelly's Gods of Guilt, said Gods being the jury in a court case. Now, I won't tell you the plot of the story, but instead summarize the ending. In the ending the main character, a defense attorney, forces a cop to admit to the corruption involved with his colleagues, and the crimes that the cop committed to cover up that corruption. The cop tells the lawyer that he was forced to do this because another officer threatened to interfere with the cop's divorce case, possibly cutting custody from his son. At the end of his testimony, the cop tells the lawyer, simply: "My son is older now and he'll be okay (without me.)" And then he pulls out a gun and shoots himself in front of the jury.
See, without the information about his son and why he did what he did, the audience would've been left with the idea that he had a change of heart, or that he didn't want to go to prison--in my opinion, not nearly as powerful as the reason Connelly gave us in the end. In the end we realize that this cop, however bad, had a family and a reason to live, and once he realized that they would be better off without the trouble he brings he finished his job, and therefore his life. Something like that really does require a certain amount of information added to make it more powerful.
And then we take a look at a separate example, To Kill a Mockingbird. If you remember anything from the book, it would probably be the part where the main character (Scout's) dad, a lawyer defending a black man who was accussed of rape, is crowded and threatened by some other townsfolk regarding this matter. Scout, a small girl who just happened to be there, swooped in to greet his father and the townsfolk. Perhaps in a situation like this, begging or pleading for mercy would've been an ideal reaction. But since Scout was young, she didn't understand what was going on. So Harper Lee, proving herself a more worthwhile author than her 2-book bibliography list suggests she is, has only one thing happen in that scene: Scout talks. Kindly. To the people who were threatening his father. And the townsfolk, in a surprising turn of events, talk kindly back. The sentiment is clear, without an explanation. The audience immediately understands. And I think if Harper Lee decided to describe that situation in great detail, and go on a lecture about how children can sometimes put men in their places with their naivette, it wouldn't be nearly as powerful as it was silent. Because the audience gets it.
With that said, info-dumping is usually a big no-no. When I say 'explained', I usually mean 'explained in less than two sentences', or something along those lines. Everything else can be built up from the story.
Main Praises
Now, onto the fun part.
-Let me put all the notable quotes here in the spoiler and then specify why all of them are interesting generally.
Spoiler
2. "He is the center of his own universe, lost within the pockets of his skinny jeans. He used to plan ways to return to space from the solitary singularity of his earbuds, crammed into his ears and blasting sound because the human children on the bus fought and screamed and wailed."
3. "His human friends talk about being so overwhelmed that they cannot speak, cannot move. He can move just fine and therefore has no right to be overwhelmed."
4. "At night he stares through the metal mesh and glass of his windows and can’t see the stars he calls home."
I ordered them from best to good, but I think all of them share a common thread with each other--in a way, they communicate a sense of inhumanity that the entirety of the work is trying to portray. Whether it's by contrasting the wonders of the cosmos with the corrupting nature of man (1 & 4) or comparing oneself with something far greater than the physical realm (2 & 3), there's a sense of jumping into the heavens, yet not quite reaching the clouds. There's always an attempt to make something more divine than it actually is, but it's always clouded by the reality of the scene. It really does give a good contrast, and I feel like you executed it extremely well.
-Out of fear of repeating myself, you really do know how to convey an emotion well. I already mentioned the subversive repetition, but this also applies to the dialogue between the boy and the psychiatrist, and how everything he says he is is always undermined by physical things. DNA testings, mirrors, a woman who acts like she knows how he really feels but doesn't. There's a sense of solitude and fear that is potent in this work, and it transcends the text in a way that someone like me can very well appreciate. Well done on that front.
Final Words?
I usually have a highlight section here, but I think I've highlighted all the things you need to know. I'm interested in your style of writing, and if you ever post something in the green room I'd probably jump into it. For now, though, I can't review your previous works because I want to keep a promise and listen to the green room first.
Happy writing.
--Elliot.
Well, I promised you a whopper. I accidentally gave one of the biggest whoppers I ever gave, and it's not even for a negative review.
I blame the To Kill a Mockingbird and Gods of Guilt references.
Let's hope this doesn't get a review before I'm done with mine. I have a bit of a whopper planned (a good one, don't worry) for you.
ooh I'm excited! thanks!
Hello there, geoffles. I am BlueSunset.
Before I start any small piece of this actual review, I would just like to point out that I haven't written a review in such a long time, so please bare with me.
For me being enthusiastic about writing poems, I feel like this short story has some relation to poetry. Your beautifully crafted way of using words helped guide this story.
I was intrigued by this sentence, actually. It gave some intensity, as compared to before this.
What makes this so interesting is mainly the second sentence. After you stated this in the paragraph, I am really desperate to know how he got to Earth in the first place. Why is he there, anyway? Does he just think he has been there for two weeks? I want some depth in this, because it seems as though you have carried on with more ideas regarding it, that still could be written.
To add on to this quote above, I like how you included him biting his nails until they bleed, because that adds more thoughts to me (as the reader) of the idea of him being an alien, human, you get the gist. Nevertheless, this does spark some confusion for me, but in this case, it works. I'm glad that you are not just carelessly telling, as the author, who this starboy is and what his identity means to the human race.
I love the imagery here! Well, in the aspect of using descriptions to create imagery, that is. I think the thought of this starboy in this particular scene is interesting, the least (a little gross of a thought, though).
In terms of grammar in this piece, you are in good condition - thank you for that.
Overall, I love what you did with one simple, main point in your mind. When I think about it, this does go in deeply to importance, and covers much more than just what is written in this short story. Each and every one of your sentences contain a great element of surprise, beauty, and relevance. I think you did a wonderful job.
I am sorry if this wasn't quite as much as I thought I would review, but I need to get back in reviewing and this piece was perfect to help me restart.
Happy writing & more,
Blue
thank you for your review! I appreciate your kind words! And~ I do greatly approve of your Allura avatar. ;D
Great!
And thanks, Allura is very amazing <33