In intriguing premise. And while I really like Vincent's voice in the intro, his credibility is undercut a little by all the exclamation points. Several sentences that you've chosen to end with an exclamation point would be far more effective and consistent with the voice you've established if you simply ended them with a period. Save the exclamation points for the actual exclamations.
And after the intro, once you've begun the actual story, the narrative voice you've chosen isn't just undercut by the use of exclamation points, it's knocked to the ground, stabbed repeatedly, and left for dead. Example: "... In them was a blackness so dark to even glance at it would be too lose your soul!" This is a nifty bit of description by itself, but the exclamation point makes it cartoony.
Your words, and how you arrange them, will be all the emphasis you need. You seem to have a solid ear for the flow of the language. Trust that ear, and don't rely on punctuation to express your emotions.
A few technical notes:
This piece needs some pretty extensive proofreading. There are several spelling errors, some that can be easily caught by a spellcheck, but others that aren't so easy, and require you to dig in a bit deeper.
Like contractions. You use "it's" quite a bit in this short piece, and every time you do, you've chosen the wrong homophone. You're using it as a possessive pronoun (something belonging to "it") and as such, it should be simply "its" with no apostrophe. Every time you come to that word, expand out the contraction to its full form, "it is," and see if the sentence still makes sense. If it doesn't, then use "its." (There's also one similar instance of "your" mistakenly used for "you're," in Vincent's bit of dialogue at the end.)
And the overall format of the piece could use some smoothing out. A large block of text with no breaks between paragraphs is hard on a reader's eye. There are two pretty easy fixes for this: indentation and line breaks. People have their preferences (I'm an indent man myself), but neither one is necessarily better than the other.
Both, however, provide the reader with a clear delineation of paragraphs, and, in essence, a clear delineation of your thoughts, which makes the reading that much easier. When a reader has to constantly adjust their eye to make sure they're not skipping a line, the mechanics of the format have intruded upon the world you've created. Make the physical act of reading as seamless as you can for your reader, so that they're never jarred loose from the story.
Let me know if you post any future drafts of this piece. I'd love to read them.
happy writing,
stacy |
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