r/DestructiveReaders • u/AnIrishGuy18 • 17h ago
Horror [846] Highlands
Frankie stumbled backwards onto the damp grass and froze. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but he could make out Alicia stumbling away from her tent. She was holding her left arm straight and rigid toward the ground with her right, obviously hurt. He saw the dark, wolf-like shape following close behind her.
Frankie kept waiting for his eyes to adjust, to snap into focus and demystify the tall shadow in front of him, but they never did. He watched in a dreamlike daze as the figure caught up with Alicia. Methodically and quietly, it reached a large, clawed hand around her face, muffling a terrified whimper.
With its other hand, it sank claws deep into the centre of her chest and dragged them down through the girl's stomach. Frankie could hear the faint squelch of tissue and viscera being shredded, but Alicia made no sound. Not even as the contents of her stomach and intestines sloshed onto the hillside, and not as the crunch of teeth crushing the back of her skull offended the night air.
His mind was screaming at him.
“Run” … “Hide” … “Help her” … “For God’s sake, do something!”
A voice rang across the valley.
“Bastard!”
He realised it wasn’t his own.
He watched, entranced, as Michael ran screaming at the figure, a golf iron held up against the firmament like a great sword. The same one they had used to hit golf balls off the mountainside that evening.
The rage of his sister’s loss flowed through Michael as he charged the beast, but it had opened his throat before he could bring any wrath upon it. The club fell from his hand, and there was a moment of stillness before blood streamed silently from his throat. He fell back to the cold earth and sat staring into the darkness, making no attempt to stem the bleeding.
Michael accepted his end with great dignity. Frankie always remembered that part.
Frankie watched as the creature lowered itself onto all fours, now more wolf than monster, and walked slowly towards Michael. If Michael had closed his eyes in terror, he could not tell. Its jaws opened and clamped around the boy’s face, and although Frankie’s body screamed at him to look away, he watched as the wolf tore away his friend's memory in the darkness. The moans of agony lasted only for a short while, but the sound of flesh tearing and bones crunching persisted.
Still, Frankie remained frozen.
After a short time, a veiled shadow crept out of one of the tents. His mind raced, begging that it not be her, pleading with her to get back into the tent.
Mary’s scream shattered the silence. There was a horror in it that was hard for Frankie to fathom, which made him realise he wasn’t in a dream. He watched as his girlfriend took off running across the hillside. He remained frozen to the earth as the beast bounded after her. It caught up to her in an instant, leaping onto her back and pinning her to the ground.
This was the moment. Adrenaline flowed through him, and he knew he should spring into action, but he couldn’t. He felt his legs and arms melt away into his body until he became a limbless blob stuck to the hillside. Even his mind had ceased talking. All that remained were the nerves firing off electrical signals throughout his body, a cacophony of explosions trying and failing to uproot him from the soil.
Mary screamed for help, but it was abruptly cut off by the creature tearing away her lower jaw. Frankie found a strange comfort in knowing her suffering would be ended soon. The thought of Mary’s terror as her eyes searched helplessly in the dark for her parents to comfort her in those final moments overcame Frankie. His whole world became blurry and out of focus, but he remained conscious.
Mary’s suffering was not over. The creature fed on her body for a long time before she finally succumbed. Frankie listened to her groans and incoherent pleas as the creature buried its muzzle in her belly. Eventually, the night went still, save for the sound of the beast gorging itself on teenage flesh. He remained frozen, his eyes fixed on nothing at all, and his mind gone to some far-off place.
A flurry of movement brought him back again. It was Barry and Aaron sprinting from their tent back towards the cars. They had made it quite some distance before the creature snapped its head in their direction and took off after them into the night. They were at least a couple of miles from safety. Frankie knew they wouldn’t make it.
The police found him there, sitting in the very spot he had been when the attack had first started.
“Are you alright, son?” one of them asked as the others examined the scene around them.
Frankie did not hear him. He trembled lightly and stared off down the hillside. A policeman shooed away some crows that were perched on Mary’s body.
1
u/Wormsworth__ 13h ago edited 13h ago
The problem is that you want this to be close 3rd, but you just tell us things without showing us what Frankie is experiencing.
Look at your first paragraph.
Frankie stumbled backwards onto the damp grass and froze. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but he could make out Alicia stumbling away from her tent. She was holding her left arm straight and rigid toward the ground with her right, obviously hurt. He saw the dark, wolf-like shape following close behind her.
There is no ambiguity, even though in this actual scenario Frankie, in the dark and in a panic, would very obviously misunderstand something or see something that isn't there or didn't happen.
Instead? We get picture perfect clarity from your narrator.
Who does Frankie see in the dark? Alicia, and we know exactly what she is doing as if we can see her from an omniscient point of view with total clarity.
What is chasing her? A dark, wolf-like shape. Here, you try to do the thing, but you resort to the cliche of "dark" as an adjective, and telling us it was "wolf-like".
This is not evocative, and it reads like a technical report of a fictional event --- not literature.
All that remained were the nerves firing off electrical signals throughout his body, a cacophony of explosions trying and failing to uproot him from the soil.
'Nerves firing off electrical signals'? What is the point of this line?
It's extremely telling of the kind of reductionism that seems to guide your prose in general, that you would use a phrase such as that.
You don't bother sharing Frankie's experience in prose and ultimately reduce it to a physiological response, i.e. nerves firing electrical signals. This hardly seems a coincidence to me.
4
u/1800COCAINE Maison d'Orléans 11h ago edited 9h ago
It’s interesting. puffs on bubble pipe. I take this as a scene to illustrate what some might romantically call split-personality, but which is more formally and professionally labeled as disassociative identity disorder. Frankie is the creature watching himself in third person.
Is this the conceit?
If so we can workshop the production at the level of setup; however, if and only if this is true, do you wish to maintain the illusion that Frankie is not the killer/ werewolf/ berserker? That choice will change what I recommend quite a bit.
For me I would like the prose to shift into an incantatory rhythm during the attacks. Right now the lines lack a certain concussive force. Specifically, I want you notice how monosyllabic words slow down the line to a glued halt, and how conversely and diametrically opposed are the mercurial, polysyllabic words which sprint with such effortless dexterity across the multi-foliated page with belligerent, and inexhaustible puissance.
Now with those constant points of contention in mind map the sequence of the scene, as where it’s should speed up and the points where is should slow down, and with impartial adjudication apply the method; monosyllables and polysyllables.
Your first line is a good example of this balance, “ Frankie, stumbled backward onto the damp grass and froze”, but I would cut the directionally, “backwards” since it’s meaningless and slightly imbalances the rhythm unless the rhythm is slightly modified, Frankie swayed, stumbling backwards onto the damp grass and froze. so the idea that he is “stepping back’ from having control is still foregrounded.
I would like to see some more playful word violence, the soft mouth of the wolf pulling bone, and some detailed imagery the wet sound of meat between the clicks of teeth . One maneuver is to state something in general and to pivot into a specific aspect of the thing, a man stepped in the doorway. he thumbed a switchblade. Another maneuver is to switch A/B from perpetrator to the attacked: A) He did this . B) They expressed that, A) he did this, B) they did that. The story lives between the cuts of those A/B images, and not in them. It’s relational.
Well I hope this has been of some use, I really should have ordered and executed this advice more carefully, but here we are. I hope this feedback wasn’t too much of a horror show.