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"Within"
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“The living has become the dead.”
A storm is brewing and Becca Hardwick is home alone with her newborn. Her truck driver husband Chad is running late and should have been home by now. As the winds pick up, things begin to go bump in the night. Becca soon discovers that they’re not alone, as a mysterious trespasser proceeds to terrorize her and make her unsettled “Within”.
A storm is brewing and Becca Hardwick is home alone with her newborn. Her truck driver husband Chad is running late and should have been home by now. As the winds pick up, things begin to go bump in the night. Becca soon discovers that they’re not alone, as a mysterious trespasser proceeds to terrorize her and make her unsettled “Within”.
Readability
This story was easy to read grammatically, but there are big stutter steps in the pacing. Structurally the story feels incomplete, which is ironic given the amount of information dumping contained within it.
Creativity
Structurally the narrative reads more like a screenplay (This happened but that happened, and when that happened then this happened). There is a lot of telling in this story and I was never left to wonder, or imagine for myself, what was running through Becca’s mind at any given moment all throughout. The info dumping was fulfilling at times, like when providing graphic detail of a gruesome scene, but at other moments it felt like too much information (tmi)… “He’d taken a drink himself on occasion, when Becca teased him with it.” *cringe
Delivery
“Within” has some gruesome gore with a haunting twist that goes off the rails a bit at the end of the story. Becca is a cliché slasher movie dope. She makes a lot of awkwardly stupid decisions in this story and overall is just a cringe worthy character. She does some things that are innocent and easy to overlook, like walking outside into the darkness of night while dressed in nothing but a loose fitting robe that blows in the wind on more than one occasion (seven different pages reference this particular robe, idk why). She discovers a trespasser standing in front of her porch and she decides to break the law by firing her shotgun at him, but then instead of calling the police she decides to just pretend that none of it happened and she just imagined the stranger. That was the biggest stutter step in the story’s pacing which essentially tried to shift the narrative back to tension building, as if Becca didn’t believe her own eyes or care that she just blasted a fuckin’ twelve gauge from inside her home. Sigh.
I also did not like that the ending just left me hanging on a paranormal concept that was never really touched upon throughout the story. I thought the story was either going to end as a straight up slasher, or as a psychological horror about a mother suffering mental illness. There was nothing in the story that even hints towards the significance of a paranormal element attached to Chad aside from weird scribblings that I'm told only the dead can read (language of the dead). So did he die in the accident? Who was the random mutilated body of the individual whose vehicle he hijacked? Did a spirit enter into Chad’s corpse, reanimating it as a serial killer, if so then what is this spirit all about? And how does any of that symbolically tie in with the Hardwick family?
This story was easy to read grammatically, but there are big stutter steps in the pacing. Structurally the story feels incomplete, which is ironic given the amount of information dumping contained within it.
Creativity
Structurally the narrative reads more like a screenplay (This happened but that happened, and when that happened then this happened). There is a lot of telling in this story and I was never left to wonder, or imagine for myself, what was running through Becca’s mind at any given moment all throughout. The info dumping was fulfilling at times, like when providing graphic detail of a gruesome scene, but at other moments it felt like too much information (tmi)… “He’d taken a drink himself on occasion, when Becca teased him with it.” *cringe
Delivery
“Within” has some gruesome gore with a haunting twist that goes off the rails a bit at the end of the story. Becca is a cliché slasher movie dope. She makes a lot of awkwardly stupid decisions in this story and overall is just a cringe worthy character. She does some things that are innocent and easy to overlook, like walking outside into the darkness of night while dressed in nothing but a loose fitting robe that blows in the wind on more than one occasion (seven different pages reference this particular robe, idk why). She discovers a trespasser standing in front of her porch and she decides to break the law by firing her shotgun at him, but then instead of calling the police she decides to just pretend that none of it happened and she just imagined the stranger. That was the biggest stutter step in the story’s pacing which essentially tried to shift the narrative back to tension building, as if Becca didn’t believe her own eyes or care that she just blasted a fuckin’ twelve gauge from inside her home. Sigh.
I also did not like that the ending just left me hanging on a paranormal concept that was never really touched upon throughout the story. I thought the story was either going to end as a straight up slasher, or as a psychological horror about a mother suffering mental illness. There was nothing in the story that even hints towards the significance of a paranormal element attached to Chad aside from weird scribblings that I'm told only the dead can read (language of the dead). So did he die in the accident? Who was the random mutilated body of the individual whose vehicle he hijacked? Did a spirit enter into Chad’s corpse, reanimating it as a serial killer, if so then what is this spirit all about? And how does any of that symbolically tie in with the Hardwick family?
#LFLR Indie Rating: 4/10
Edmund Stone’s approach to horror in this short story serves as a sample that shows his creative potential as a writer. I think he’s onto something by blending that campy slasher narrative with atmospheric paranormal elements. In “Within”, I would have liked to have had more lore connected to paranormal elements of the story buried somewhere within the content, for instance there could have been esoteric books within the Hardwick home or Becca could have been involved with the occult. Basically “Within” just reads like a cheesy slasher that has a paranormal ending that, not unlike Becca’s robe, doesn’t really seem to fit very well with what’s going on.
Edmund Stone’s approach to horror in this short story serves as a sample that shows his creative potential as a writer. I think he’s onto something by blending that campy slasher narrative with atmospheric paranormal elements. In “Within”, I would have liked to have had more lore connected to paranormal elements of the story buried somewhere within the content, for instance there could have been esoteric books within the Hardwick home or Becca could have been involved with the occult. Basically “Within” just reads like a cheesy slasher that has a paranormal ending that, not unlike Becca’s robe, doesn’t really seem to fit very well with what’s going on.
THIS BREAKDOWN IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE #LFLR NETWORK.
