These were a wee bit better than the ones I had to deal with yesterday. Makes me wonder what kind of idiot would want to entangle themselves with Pacione, but many people are just desperate to be "published" in any form.


The Blood Letter
By Derrick Edgar James
The description is choppy and lacks ambience. It is boringly repetitious. The idea that the final ‘victim’ would turn out to be a vampire has been done to death. The use of weak adjectives and adverbs over strong verbs and nouns further weakens the narrative. Characterization is non-existent.



Screaming Walls
By Casey Gordon
http://www.fictionpress.com/read.php?storyid=1662988

A trite tale of a haunted house. One of the largest problems this writer has is an attention to trivial details such as "she waves." "He waves back" Ad nauseum. The sentences are very plain and full of commonplace overused descriptions. The writing has no verve, no glow. The characters are unsympathetic and don't really communicate. They're very wooden.

Incarnation
By Ceara Jaen Baxter
I couldn’t find the story, Incarnation on her site, so instead, I’m going to review Reflections, which is on there instead. The prose is uneven with too much joe explainer text and info dumps to make me happy. Her word choices frequently grate and the characters are not clearly enough defined. At this point I would say she’s the most readable in the collection. For a solid horror story, it lacks one of the most important things: Ambience. I did manage to find a few good lines in it. She needs to rethink many of her metaphors and similes and smooth it out more. However, she shows promise and I have to scratch my head to as to why she would want to tie herself to someone like Pacione.