Discussion of "Skin Hounds (for the H.A.C. project)" by Persephonie

ya mom that is the best one yet i hope you win. Keep up the good work i know i will.

Hey? Are you onlione at school? LOL Thanks, sweety! I love u!

Okay...maybe it doesn't make your skin crawl....lol....I had to omit so mush due to the word limitation requested for this project....but I think I got enough in to allow you to get the jest of it.

What I like about it is that it is set in the here and now....today. A old family secrets comes full circle and finds new life in a young generation besought by homelessness, desperation and the never ending tyranny of it's extrended family members.

Truth be told, the legend of the Skin Hounds is real. It's been passed on through several discreet generations of my family and landed in my lap a few years ago, out of the blue.

I thought I'd make it a story to share with the world, adding my own twisted perversions to the tale. Bon appetite.

EW! This was awesome! What an incredible twist. I can't find anything to critique - 5 stars.

wow...thanks! I did make an error though....I omitted an "and" when she stands up "and" streatches....I had to cut sooooo much, and I was moving so fast, that I made a boo boo. :) thanks for reading.

Thanks...glad you liked it. :)

A well written story and plot. Gripping and chilling. The intensity level is high.

This is very good. The potential is there, and you are quite capable of instilling fear. You dug deep like you did for TSNK.

This is compelling and good enough to make it in the HAC collabo. It is good to see you posting again.

The Skin Hounds is a remarkable story that I am glad you shared with us!

I was hoping you'd find this....although, I was thinking you'd be far more critical of this story, as I don't feel like I fully put myself into it...compared to longer stories. I felt really contrained with the word count! I was told that for the HAC project that all of the stories that make it into the book will be intertwined with a main story. So, I am hoping that there is just enough missing to allow this to happen. Some of the parts I had to omit were:
1-the family's decision process to move to the woods
2-a better description of the grandmother's conversation with the granddaugheter regarding the original skin hound revelation
3-conversation at the campsite
4-more history as to the extended family's verbal threats and the main family's true feeling of desperation due to it
5-the possibility of the grandparents being intermarried and the psychosis involved in that
6-the extended family showing up and how the kids and their parents got seperated and drugged to sleep, allowing the capture of the parents without the children knowing
Anyway....thanks! You got me back into the game!

Hey guys...this is not fo the current contest...it's for the HAC collaboration and I just happened to post it during round one. If you all like it and it wins, run with it, but that was not my intention! :)

That was one of the creepiest stories I've ever read. Well done!

Graci! I love your work, too!

Thanks, Wolf! Glad you enjoyed it. :)

Other than some narrative errors, this was pretty well written. The story was pretty good too (though you gave away too many clues about the rest of the family, so you knew they were either dead or restrained).

You should repost it with the stuff you took out for this contest, since it seems to be missing a lot of detail. It wasn't until I read your comment regarding why that I could overlook its lack of detail - totally understanding now though!

I had already voted this is a 4 before your rampage across the site of unfair scores, and I leave it at that. Your story was nor perfect and ready to publish, so it was not a five, but it only had a few errors/problems that did not detract from the story itself, so it was a 4.

Please ignore everything I said above exceot for the fact the story was good and desrved a 4 - I was being immature!

No worries...I take the good with the bad....I learn from it. I enjoy knowing what people really like and even what they hate...because I like to write for the enjoyment o the reader...and what better way to find out what people dig then by getting all sorts of feedback, right? I don't take it to heart, but I do try to extraplilate all I can so that I can improve. :)

“That wasn’t very scary!” My nephew pouted.
Yeah, my sentiments, as well. I thought the climax obvious from very early in the story but then, at the end, I didn't understand whether (some of) the relatives were dead or dying; or, how they came to be that way. Sorry, wish I could've voted it higher, but a 3 is all I good give.

Question - was this meant to be the end of the story? I know you didn't intend for it to be in the contest, but do the HAC ones get mashed too?

From what I understand, this is supposed to be a complete story....not a chapter to be mashed. The concept that was presented to me months ago was that each of the winning stories would be intertwined with a main story woven throughout by another author or two. For me, it's hard enough to write a single chapter in under 2000 words, let alone an entire story! So, I feel that with what I had to omit that there was no way in hell I could give a real intense build up and give all of the info I wanted to to make it a great project from me.

I think this could benefit from some tighter pacing - this is a horror short, but it takes us until the very end of the chapter to get that.
We're first treated to a lot of backstory that seems mostly extraneous. Do you see the dead grandmother being important later on? Is the fact the she used to be a mortgage broker crucial? The way the story is now, the narrator simply informs us of these facts, languidly. I get that you want to set up the conflict between the family in the woods and their extended family, but it's always better to show conflict (or anything) than inform us of it. Rather than first discussing the fact that her family hates them, and then having the family show up, bring the relatives to the woods first, then let us *feel* the tension. Horror is all about tension.
Likewise, the Skin Hounds story that she tells to the kids is very "Tell, Not Show": first, we get a long backstory followed by a tiny, not very vivid, description of the Skin Hounds. "And then the legend of the skin hounds was born" It's good that the Skin Hound couple's situation parallels that of the protagonist and her family, but it needs to be more eerie, less historical lesson.

I agree with your comments,Lily...like I said though, it was a complete story , not just a chapter, and with a 200 word limit (which actually went over), it was hard to keep in all those details, (whicha re in my original text). I wasn't sure what age groups would be reading the published book (IF my story was added), and wanted to keep some of the gore down. I actually have had quite a few comments from family and friends via email, stating that they would be more apt to purchase and share my work if I toned it down...I am "too graphic", as illustrated in TSNK. So, I was trying to listen to my readers. Maybe I can find a happy edium one day. I'll keep working on it. :)

2000 word limit...gawd, can i even type?

I liked how you kept the gore down - I've always preferred understatement, since the reader's imagination is a lot more capable than most writers give it credit for. Like in the movie Signs - the aliens were stinkin' CREEPY all through the movie, and then at the very end, where we finally get a real, full view of the alien? It just wasn't scary. Leaving stuff to the imagination makes for a much richer story, I think.

Maybe I'm just not very smart, but I didn't realize that the family was dying the way others did, and the bit when the aunt arrived and you reveal that they're dying and hanging on hooks - it was a surprise to me, and I rather liked it. I had a bit of trouble getting into the story at the beginning, which could be part of why I didn't pick up on the clues other people saw. I agree that the bit about what she used to do for a living, and about all the things Grandpa taught her, felt unnecessary to the story. Those parts were the main reason I had trouble getting into the story. I was also a little confused at the beginning about who all was present in the scene - she made some comment about her and her daughters that led me to believe the husband wasn't there.

I did really like that the young relatives didn't realize what was actually going on, or that the 'not so scary story' she told them was actually a description of what was going on. Your story wasn't scary in terms of 'make my heart pound out of my chest,' but it was definitely creepy in its understatement, and the way she, her daughters, and her husband were so calm and laid back about killing their family members helped amp up the creepiness factor in a delightful way. 3.5

Persephonie, I made a mistake in the above rating. I'm changing my rating to a 4 - I was in a bad mood the day I read this and got all nasty. My apologies, and good luck in - well, both contests! :-)

This seems like a modern setting, but what does her husband do for only fifty bucks a week? Also, there are some awkward sentences:
“We’d spent many afternoons together before she passed only four years earlier, sharing stories and family secrets…we bonded over the fact that she understood me….she and my grandfather having been ostracized by his family for their marriage, as well; having to do it all alone.” Ellipses are generally used to indicate an interruption that isn’t picked back up immediately, sort of a trailing off effect, not to break up a sentence. That makes the example above a run on so you should probably break it up into two sentences. I spotted a couple of other run ons too, so watch for that.
Could be rearranged to read:
“Before she’d passed four years earlier we had spent many afternoons together sharing stories and family secrets. We bonded over our forbidden marriages and having to do it all alone”
The timeline is a little screwy at the point where the kids are sleeping in the tent and then suddenly gathered around the campfire a few lines of dialogue later. I got the impression that it was night time, but then one of the kids asked to go to bed and another one asked for breakfast so that part needs to be clearer. Overall this is a good premise, but the same story is basically told twice. Once being the actual story and the other the story the narrator tells around the campfire. Give your readers a little credit and allow them to piece the story together for themselves as opposed to banging us over the head with it. The bodies in sheets hanging in the trees though, very creepy image. You did a good job with the setting too and over all the story had a pretty sinister feel to it.

thanks, HG....I will keep your ideas in mind the next time I am writing. I feel this is by far one of my lesser works....live n learn, huh?

Where would the fun be otherwise;)

The writing was great, but I really really don't get into gory stories. I do like the dialogue writing. It sounds natural (even if the topic is yucky).

The beginning of the chapter gives us a lot of information--almost too much to be taken in so soon in the story.

Proofread, proofread, proofread! Small errors can be very distracting.

I see where you're going with this, but I'm not in love with the execution. So far, it feels like there's too much background and exposition--we need action!

Overall, good job!