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This is the first chapter I landed on. More detailed criticism? Alright then.

To start off with you seem to be in the bad habit of appending most of your conversations with dry descriptors. It’s like someone is trying to paraphrase for me instead of paint a picture. He sounded raspy, He smelled the smell, He spoke slowly, so on and so forth. These are dry and matter of fact like you are writing a report for your insurance company. They aren’t florid or involving and they never change. It’s grey and it’s monotonous. You would have been better with something like, “Always, he rasped. The stranger’s voiced perfectly accompanied the stench of cigarettes.” There you get the meaning across with picturesque, but not baroque, language. You repeatedly say Lash thinks, Lash says, Lash didn’t, Lash thought, etc. Try relieving the monotony by using a descriptor or alias (if one is known at this point in the story). To use the proper name over and over is, again, monotonous.

At an early point you insert a joke concerning agent oranges use of the language, however that joke would have made much more sense after his string of nonsensical sentences that end with “My suitcase contains a tactical nuclear device.”

One of your own rules listed is to avoid abuse of capitalization however you have a paragraph that is filled with capitalization right off the bat. I am referring to the “Agent Orange read aloud…” paragraph. Shortly there after we come to what has to be an intentional satire of pulp writing, your slip on the ice analogies. There is no signifying context to let the audience know whether to laugh or grimace. Your character doesn’t remark on the absurdity of his analogy nor does the narrator. It would have worked better if you had made this analogy once and then inserted a pithy remark from the character or gave it more comical language. Oh, and screaming “Preemptive strike bitch”? I will trust that you know your audience but that is too sophomoric for my taste and seems to be out of place in the parody style you are using.

Some more technical points, at one point you end a sentence but then seem to continue it on in the next even going as far as you start the next sentence with “But”. It’s worth noting that one of your own posted technical rules is to never leave a line of dialogue unassigned. Yet you do so with success on this very page. I see a paragraph broken up into three when one would have made more sense. Oh, and your plot is meandering quite a bit in the course a few paragraphs. Comedic writing, especially parody, is always difficult to pull off without crossing the line from mocking a literary style to using it.

Further down we have more cohesive paragraphs but some of the same grey over-used descriptions. By the way, “as if it were dead” sounds much better than “like it were dead”. I can understand your fear of going overboard on descriptive language but you needn’t be terrified of it.

“He twisted his body, lopping his whip around a steam pipe so that he could leverage the dentist to safety” How do you cut a whip around a pipe? Lop means to cut off, to remove parts of by cutting.

“The dentist was clutching his stomach, like he wanted to throw up. Lash did, too.” Again, this is the kind of descriptive language I would expect for my power-point presentation not a dramatic moment.

So far none of your characters aside from Agent Orange have a unique tone. Tone is more than “he said it like this”. Tone is word choice, sentence structure, message intent, and the impact on others. There is no difference between the dialogue of Lash and the Dentist and Agent Orange comes off sounding emotionless. If emotionless was the intent then you succeeded, but it is impossible to judge by Lash’s reactions how the tone sounded to others.

The comedy of the dream sequence is hit and miss with throw away one liners and good comedy timing with the “battering ram” joke. The onomatopoeia would normally be a bit much but since this is a parody of a super-hero genre it works though isn’t used to comic effect.

You seem to be better at using descriptive language for items then for actions, good use of warm mahogany, ashen incense, and so forth. Oh, and a paragraph can be longer than one or two sentences, it will not scare readers away with text. However breaking thoughts into multiple tiny paragraphs does make the page feel cluttered and you expect a new thought with each paragraph only to find a continuation of the previous sentence.

Hope this helps and I apologize for my pissy attitude, I’m a jerk by nature.

That said, I have a suggestion or two — whenever Lash is thinking / describing himself (as in the first few paragraphs) you may want to make the language a little more erudite / arrogant sounding (saying Lash was “vastly smarter” gave me a bit of a giggle). I’ll read more of your work in the near future.

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