Murderer: Nailed It

Hiya, pizzaroll. Pan sidling in to fry up a quick review. Seeing as this is a fairly short piece, I'm going to go throughit chronologically and give you my thoughts section by section. I'll also cross out any words you don't need and insert small grammar changes, if relevant, in blue.

Thirteen minutes it's been following me. The truck, that is. I'm on my tedious way home from a late shift at the country diner. It's half past eleven. My home is still twenty minutes away. I start to get nervous. The vehicle follows me through the next two lights and under three bridges. My phone is off and tossed in the backseat so I won't be distracted while driving. Bad mistake number one.

Pretty good opening. I really like the first line - it throws me into the action and makes me immediately question what's going on in the story. One thing I do notice about this section is that it's very tell-y, by which I mean there isn't much about the writing that really draws me into the narrator's experience. They tell me they're nervous, but they don't give me any insight into how those nerves feel. Are their hands clammy on the steering wheel? Is their heart thrumming as fast as the engine is? Don't go overboard with the description, but I'd like some kind of evidence about the sensory experience of the nerves.

A rumble of thunder appears from the sky, dissipating just as lightning sends flashes. For a moment, the world is illuminated and in screaming color. I decide to pull off into a lot to lose track of the stranger, filled with planks of wood and construction tools. A new supermall is being built six stories high, in its early stages. It's still got the last layer to go.

A few things to note here:

1) I love the phrase 'screaming color'. It's nice and abstract, and it really gives a sense of savagery to the scene.

2) My issue with the 'filled with planks of wood' bit is that, because of how the sentence is constructed, it sounds like you're saying the narrator is filled with planks of wood rather than the lot. You could eliminate this oddity by phrasing the line like this:

I pull into a lot filled with planks of wood and construction tools, hoping to lose track of the stranger.

3) Watch out for unnecessary words. There's often no need to say 'I decide to run' or 'I decide to sit' - just say 'I run' or 'I sit'. The action itself shows that they've made the decision without you needing to clarify it.

4) I am seriously questioning your narrator's intelligence at this point. Who the heck pulls into an empty lot when they think they're being followed by someone? Why would you think you could lose them in there? Why wouldn't you try and drive somewhere full of people? If this is a supermall being built, I assume they can't be miles from all civilisation. It just seems beyond dumb to drive into an abandoned construction site and get out of your car when you think someone is after you.

You'd need to give them a reason to stop here. Imagine if the car was low on fuel, for instance. Imagine if they'd forgotten to fill the tank up when they left work and now it was almost running on fumes. They'd want to drive to somewhere more populated, but they'd know the car wouldn't be able to manage it, that it'd conk out on the side of the road and leave them stranded. So they'd take their chances on foot in the supermall, because it's better than no chance at all.

The truck pulls up behind me just as I leap out with my keys, locking my car as I sprint to the building. The rain becomes heavier but that no longer matters to me. What matters is staying strong. Alive. With survival instincts,I swivel my head back when I cower behind the wooden frame, out of breath.

Think about verbs more. In my opinion, verbs hold much more descriptive power than adjectives, and they're much more subtle about it, too. Take this example:

The man moved across the room.

Here we have a very base form. A man moves. We don't know how he moves. Let's look at some alternatives:

The man scuttled across the room.
The man bolted across the room.
The man swaggered across the room.
The man strolled across the room.

By simply changing the verb, we get a completely difference sense of the type of movement the man is exhibiting and - even more importantly - what might be motivating that movement. If someone scuttles, they could be embarrassed. If they stroll, they're probably in a casual mood. 'Swaggering' not only suggests that the man is carefree, but may actually tell us something about his personality

My point: verbs tell us a lot, so they should not be wasted.

Getting back to your piece, you have the line 'the rain becomes heavier'. That is wasteful, because you're pairing what is essentially a very bland verb (become) with an adjective, even though you could create a more powerful image with a verb alone. The rain slams down. The rain drags at my hair. Just think about verbs. Always ask yourself if you can find a more appropriate, evocative one for what you're describing.

A tall, dark man dressed in only black slashes my tires with a silver machete as air hisses. He turns to look at me, a frail, young woman who has one less way of escaping. There's no going back.

He runs in after me.

We race up the stairs.

Thump...thump...thump. Scaling the loose stair boards, I climb up level after level, darting around holes and trying to avoid scattered, hazardous items. Boxes of nails collide with discarded beams. Hammers and measuring tapes and hard hats litter the sides. I can only hope I'll survive.

With carnal fantasies and beastly wishes, the man seems to devour all hope left in the air as he stomps his way up, always a flicker too late before he spots my shoes scuffling upstairs. Primal growls stutter from the killer's throat as I remain a few steps ahead of him. One point for the soon-to-be victim.

This is fine. I'm not sure about the choice of 'carnal', seeing as that usually connotes some kind of sexual desire, and we don't necessarily know that his motivations have anything to do with that. I generally don't much like the whole 'with carnal fantasies and beastly wishes' bit, because it suggests that the narrator is speculating about what the man wants, even though I doubt they'd even be thinking about that. They'd just be focusing on getting the heck away.

(Also, what do you mean by 'one point for the soon-to-be victim'?)

Shards of glass embed themselves in the soft tissue of my arms as I cut through the floors, scampering in a frenzy to throw off his urge for brutal carnage. They disintegrate into my material clothing fibers and give me numbing scratches as I flee. My spine is tingling with fear, adrenaline soaring through my body as I can't stop shaking.

The rain falls. Drip...drip...drip.

My last line of defense is up. In my dislocation of reality and total isolation, I realize there's no way out. He's cornered me in a little nook, where my options are to risk grabbing a weapon, fight back, or give up. Where I come from, there's no giving up.

Again, it's generally fine, but I don't like this whole 'his urge for brutal carnage' business. It feels like you're trying too hard to impress on the reader that this man is a horrible monster, rather than just showing us his actions and letting us decide it for ourselves. Don't tell us he wants carnage when it's already obvious from the fact that he's pursuing the narrator.

"It's over. You've lost," says he, with a vile smile and a cackling laugh louder than the booming thunder. The whites of his eyes are tinged red. We're mere inches apart, his machete glistening against the stark blackness.

Fighting back vomit, I swallow hard. "I... I haven't lost yet -" My voice is laced with sheet-thin ice, consumed by unadulterated horror itself.

Cocking his head, the stalker's bone-chilling cracks (what do you mean by this?) explode through the room. His buggy eyes land on me, as he clasps his hands together over and over. "Shut up, wench! I'm going to kill you, slowly... painfully." As his murderous machete is poised, certain to end the terrifying game of cat and mouse, lightning irradiates the stranger with killer eyes. Ominous tension fills the air.

This is where the villain tips into pantomime territory. In kids' cartoons, the villain likes to monologue about how evil they are and what they're going to do to the protagonist, and this has echoes of that. You're trying too hard to make him threatening, which actually has the opposite effect. Truly chilling villains don't talk about what they're going to do to people. They don't give their prey time to prepare. They just strike.

Uproariously tossing his head back in what seems to give him whiplash - and therefore averting his gaze - I take my chances. There's no giving up. I can't quit now.Thrusting my sweaty palm into the box of nails, I enclose four nails simultaneously and rip them out, hurling them angrily at the stalker. He looks down from his gregarious, sinister chuckles to meet nails inevitably penetrating his eyeball.

Stab...stab...stab.

The iris is a perfect target. His vision fractures as he realizes what I've just done. I took revenge.

The issue with this is that the pacing doesn't match the speed. When you spend a whole paragraph breaking down and describing the motion of something that should happen very quickly - grabbing and throwing some nails, for example - you take all of the swiftness out of it. The writing isn't as fast as the story is, so it's not as exciting. Try to condense moments like these into as few words and sentences as you can get away with, because then you'll get a better alignment between the rhythm of writing and the rhythm of the scene.

A strangled cry comes from his mouth as a gurgle of blood spurts out from the eye. Splinters of oxidized iron and pure metal sprinkle into his burning cornea, one of the most macabre sights I've been unfortunate to lay eyes on. Whipping a wet hammer from the floor, I smash his forehead to pieces, hearing the grotesque crack of his cranial skeleton shattering internally. With a burst of momentum, I forcefully slam my hands against his chest. My stalker tumbles backwards, hitting an overturned pile of lumber. The four corners and sides of the room have been built, but the floor isn't complete.

A blood-curdling scream echoes from the stranger as he falls through the slippery level, his hands grasping at his gouged-out eye, creating gaping holes in the other five stories and plummeting to his death.

I breathe a sigh of relief, whispering to myself.

"...Nailed it."

1) Your verbs are definitely a lot better in this last passage, but I do think the language in general is almost overly detailed. It sort of relates to my previous point - because this is happening so quickly, and because your character is zonked on adrenaline and barely thinking straight, it kind of doesn't feel right for them to be using really specific language like 'oxidised iron' and 'cornea' and 'grotesque' and 'cranial'. It's not the language I'd expect a panicked person to use, because your brain would hardly be working at full capacity in a situation like that. Simple language is better for action sequences.

2) How do I feel about the ending line? Well, some people might really like it, but I'm not a big fan of characters saying just the right thing right after they've delivered a killer blow. It's very corny-action-film-esque. I can't help but thinking: 'yeah, what they'd really do is probably vomit and burst into tears'. But then again, taste is a thing. Some people like that sort of stylised action sequence.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, I think this is a pretty decent short story. It held my attention and did entertain me, but it strays quite far into horror genre clichés (most notably the demented villain with no clear motive) and shows a lack of realism in places. I don't always believe your character's panic, either. I feel like if you had a clearer sense of the characters and a specific idea in mind for why the man was following her, this could be a more interesting story. It's a bit of a rough diamond at the minute, but I'd be interested to see how you could reinterpret it.

Keep writing!
~Pan