"Nightmare" Response

          Damien is troubled young man who, upon visiting his boyfriend, Stefan, suddenly discovers Stefan has been unfaithful and impregnated a girl. Distraught and shocked, Damien slips into an episode of delusion and murders his boyfriend’s lover, convinced that she has tricked or drugged him into a relationship. 

I admired how physically grounded all the protagonist’s emotions were in this work. By that, I mean that, instead of simply stating the character’s emotion, like fear, or anger, physical symptoms were supplied that helped the reader discover the emotion for herself. For example, instead of stating Damian’s shock at discovering the girl in Stefan’s apartment, the work has “My throat closed up on me and my vision blurred.” However, some of the physical reactions to emotion were overdramatic, as I’ll discuss later. 

Unfortunately, I had several problems with this story. Most of the issues I found had to do with the form, rather than the content. The exact repetition of the opening scene at the end was an interesting parallelism, but as soon as I realized the conceit, I had no interest in reading the end, and skipped over it entirely. Using the scene at the beginning worked to peak interest, but it detracted heavily from the end. I found the use of italics in the story to be distracting and excessive. Disregarding the opening scene, from page 5 onwards it seemed like every other word, including unnecessary ones, was italicized. In dialogue, the extra emphasis made it seemed like the characters were constantly shouting. In addition, the bolded demarcations of time before scene transitions were overly explanatory. Rather than outright telling the reader how much time as passed, I would try to make that clear through details within the story itself. The female character was very stereotypical, more of a screeching, annoying harpy than a real person. Because she is so obnoxious, I felt no reaction and little shock when Damien finds himself standing over her dead body. Finally, many of the reactions within the story seemed overdramatic and unmerited by the severity of the situation at hand. For example, on page 6 the protagonist seems to be experiencing a complete mental and emotional breakdown, complete with sobbing and nausea, over a revelation that, while shocking, wouldn’t merit such an extreme reaction. That same kind of melodrama occurs again on the next page, especially in passages like: “I could barely stifle my cries and hiccups with my fist and bloody knuckles, though the heavy rain helped.”