I think this is short enough to be called a novella, so I’d like to know how this got a publisher, because I’ve got some novellas I’d like to submit.

There’s some beautifully written prose in here, but at the cost of narrative flow. The dialogue keeps getting interrupted with some observation, facial tic, or other analysis of the narrative.

That means the story gets no chance to flow. Barry Lyga says “Small, insignificant actions like ‘looking’ or ‘blinking’ or ‘swallowing’ or ‘narrowing eyes’ distract to the reader and make the story unnecessarily longer.” This is coupled with there being too much telling about the characters, not showing, because the narrative is told through a single POV. This means I forgot who they were half the time, even though there are only five.

The more horror I read, the less I like it as a genre/medium. It gets too metafictional. Too self-aware. I guess it’s hard not to have the characters realize they’re in a horror movie when there are so many tropes. But it all comes off like a repeat of Scream. Plus you lose all the timing of the scare and the visuality of the horror.