%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 Review #4756106 |
 | Charlie's Favorite Friends  [GC] Screams!!! Entry - 7/14/2023  |
| (4.0)  HAPPY WDC ACCOUNT ANNIVERSARY FROM "Anniversary Reviews"   First Impressions: I had a look at the ‘SCREAMS!!!’ prompt for that round and you did a great job with it. If the prompt wasn’t creepy enough, you added an extra spin and made it worse. Although it wasn’t the kind of horror that made the readers jump, it gave me a generous feeling of unease as I was reading. The narrator, a retired cop who came back to work on a specific case, seemed like a good guy at first, doing his best to find the missing children and having a hunch who might be behind it. But it all went downhill when his own son got abducted, and he didn’t have it in him to remain professional. You set the scene well, and there were some nice descriptions, for example this one when he came home and found his son and the video tapes gone: Nothing there at all but an outline of dust silhouetting the space the tapes had taken up. It gave me a good visual of what he saw. I also liked the whole backstory - his wife, later the girlfriend, the way he and his son made the video tapes. Even though some of it wasn't necessary to the plot, it all added to the depth of the story.  Suggestions: I noticed a few small errors as I was reading: a few minutes go. At first, I thought the son was maybe very young and mispronounced the word, but later you said he was seven years old so I’m guessing this was a typo, “ago”. We had a rough altercation her last night in my home There seemed to be a word missing. “during her last night”, maybe? the next mornng Just a typo, “morning”. I would also suggest including a link to the prompt in the story, so readers can see what inspired this story.  Final Thoughts: I have to admit, I don't think I understood the ending. So Leroy let the killer go on the promise that he would get to see Charlie again. Did he mean, on the video tapes? Or did the last one entitled “The Finale” mean that his son would actually come home again? I wasn’t sure I got the timeline right, but you said, I was able to find out that a certain someone still occupied the same address as they had those 32 years prior. So the 7 year old was now 39, or thereabouts, plus another year that passed at the end while the murderer sent him six video tapes? I’m sure I’m missing something here - perhaps just the fact that the father, the narrator, had gone mad and had clung to something that wasn’t going to happen. Even though the ending escaped me, I thought this was a well written story and a good read.    My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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You responded to this review 06/11/2024 @ 12:49am EDT