Critique #1: Katharine L. Wilson
Katharine Kerr June 16th, 2006
Submitted June 16, 2006:
In class last night we cut open a man.
He wasn’t a cadaver. He wasn’t even close to dead, until we got through with him.
His name was Jim. He was tall, rugged looking…his dark skin was like leather, tough and hard to cut through. But once you got the knife in, it slid easily across his body.
He looked at me, just me, when he was rolled out to us, strapped to the table. Imogen, he said, Help me. I just looked at him. What was I supposed to do?
While I was cutting him, dissecting him and making my way through the maze of his organs, he told me stories. He bled slowly onto the table, not fast and rushed like you would think. Perhaps it was because we used such clean knives. They were sanitized, and sharp.
Katharine Kerr says:
You’ve used too many weak verbs, negations, and other such rambling constructions. Gore is not enough to catch an editor’s interest. Other problems: how does your victim know your narrator’s name? Rhetorical questions like “what was I supposed to do?†invite sarcastic comments from readers unless they have a context, which yours does not. We need a reason that the narrator cannot help the victim or some explanation why she’s willing to do what she’s doing. A simple sense of enjoyment would do, if that’s the case, or clues that she’s being forced into this if that’s the case. We also have no sense of where the scene is taking place. The last few sentences bleed their interest slowly but surely along with the victim’s blood.
I suggest a complete rewrite — do post it if you’d like.
Kevin Andrew Murphy says:
It’s a vivisection story. No prize for that–they’re old hat in the horror genre–but more than that, it doesn’t ring true. The clinically detached narrator, the strangely placid victim, the complete lack of any untoward spurting. I don’t buy it, even as magical realism, and as horror, you need to give us something more novel than a garden-variety vivisectionist if you’re going to shock anyone who likes the genre.
Maybe there’s more to it that that, but the first thirteen lines here only show the beginning of a by-the-number vivisection story.
I don’t read horror stories, so this probably didn’t have the same impact for me. It did ’shock’ me that the man was still alive, and that did capture my interest. The hiccups I had were that I didn’t know why he would just lie there if he was still alive. And that he was ‘tall’. It’s hard to tell if someone is tall when they are lying on a table.
I also felt that when he says, “Imogen, help me,” perhaps it should have been in real time rather than narrated?
As I said, not an expert, just my thoughts as a reader.