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I do like that you're taking this seriously, but, I really disagree with your conclusion. People are leaping to 'hey this is lovecraft stuff right' because people don't expect an anticlimax. They don't expect, as you take them on a spooky rollercoaster track through this aboned building, as the weird wobbly wrongness builds on the protagonist, for the answer to be 'bad gas.' poo poo you even say the air is bad at the start. Its not that its not signposted, that there isn't evidence lying around for people to get that, hey, the air is bad. Its that it defies storytelling logic for it to really be just that. Pause for praise. Solid prose. Well edited imo. The tools of communication are there. But people start reading expecting a story and I'm noooot sure I actually see one, even as you explain what you feel you failed at, what it should have been, even in that it's still just some dude going into a place he's been warned is full of bad gas, meeting some bad gas, nearly dying. And yet its written like a mystery, its building tension and weirdness with nowhere for them to go but the anticlimax of 'some gas.' There's not a ton of character here. The dude makes a pragmatic decision to haul his coworker's corpse out. There's not a ton of personal tension there. We don't know Jeff ourselves or know the protagonist and his relationship to Jeff so that we can feel bad about that last moment, when he can't stop Jeff from going in. So, either you cut a lot out of the middle where he's just descending and worrying, build some relationships, or you mythologize, build a payoff to that worry, that descent, to the suspense-mystery this story presents itself as. Maybe you do both and maybe you get a bloody golden star outta the dome. But like If your opening sentence is a guy not listening to a warning, and the end is that guy realizing the warning was precisely accurate, and I don't even feel like I know the guy in question any better than at the start, uh, that is your problem.
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Sep 1, 2017 02:16
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In this case it means something like just running with the horror / Lovecraftian vibes your piece picked up. It can still be a story about well-intentioned people trying to save one another and only succeeding in making a chain of bodies. The threat can even be suffocation, or a gas pocket specifically, whatever. But now its from space. Or from some summoning circle. A hideous experiment left behind. Something that both brings the genre vibes, but also, allows you to layer metaphor or characterization onto the threat.
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Sep 1, 2017 04:43
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