Critique #116 — Alphonso Warden
Kevin Andrew Murphy February 8th, 2007
     “Oh my god-I need an ambulance,” the terror-stricken man told the 911 dispatcher on the phone. “There’s blood everywhere. My next-door neighbor-I think he’s been murdered. I saw-I saw a man just run out the back door.”
     “Sir, everything is going to be all right. I just need you to calm down a bit. Your call is being traced, and an ambulance will be there shortly. Now, just tell me: Are you sure the man is dead?”
     “His face, it’s all burned away-some kind of acid, I think. And his shirt-oh my god, I have never seen so much blood in my life. The smell, the burning.I think I’m gonna pass out.”
     “I need you to stay on the line for a few more minutes. Can you do that for me? The ambulance is a block away from the house. It should arrive there any second now.”
     “I’ll.try-” uttered the man as he quickly lost consciousness, the scene before him simply too horrific to bear any longer. A few moments later, an ambulance, along with a squad of police cruisers, arrived at the estate.
If someone’s calling an ambulance and talking about blood being everywhere, there’s no reason to report that he’s “terror-stricken” as it’s implied. Only give unusual data such “oddly calm” or “suspiciously gleeful.”
Disbelief is snapped by the dispatcher not asking for the address–call tracing isn’t immediate, and even if it is, in the era of portable phones, just because the person is calling from his landline doesn’t mean he’s in his own backyard. I can take my portable phone over to the neighbors and it still works, and if there are neighbors on both sides, they’d like the address. Besides which, more and more people use cel phones now.
I’m also confused as to where the caller is standing when he’s making this call. I was guessing his own yard first, since he saw someone run out the neighbor’s back door, but then he’s talking about all the blood, which would hardly have run out with the assailant. And then there’s the description of the burnt head, the bloody chest, and I’m thinking, well, it’s either aliens, witchcraft, or a nasty accident with a home meth lab, which is what I’m thinking is most likely.
I’m turning the page because I’m intrigued at the situation, but I’m probably not going much beyond that because of the unbelievablity of the dialogue on the first page.
Since you’re going with an omniscient narrator anyway, why not just let us know more of what’s going on rather than pick it up from the dialogue? Either that or set us up with the viewpoint of the dispatcher so the blinders make more sense.
 Also, you’d need Chloe on 24 to tell you that an ambulance was a block away, so that’s not very realistic. Moreover, you say that this is an estate, rather than a regular city or suburban house. Estates generally have grounds impressive enough that the neighbors can’t just casually look in and would need at least a bicycle to get there. And in any case, estates are not on blocks (found in cities and suburbs) but on drives.
There’s not much to add since Kevin has already pointed out the problems that caught my attention. (Kevin, cell phones–at least, my cell phone–has a built-in GPS in that 911 can access. I’m not sure you’d call that “trace,” though)
It’s a nit-pick, but the sentence seems to indicate that the man is talking at the same moment he has lost consciousness. Perhaps you could take out “quickly” if you want him saying the words as he slides into unconsciousness. Or perhaps drop the “as,” put in a period, and make it into two separate sentences.
In the last two sentences, you slip out of the man’s head and into omniscient viewpoint. Iow, if he is unconscious, and we are experiencing the story from his viewpoint, we can’t know that the ambulance and all arrive on the scene.
Whenever you shift viewpoints, especially from right inside their head as you are for almost the whole first scene to omniscient, it gives the reader a chance to slip away. If you keep us inside his head — have the scene fade away as he loses consciousness and then things fade back in and he doesn’t know where he is… or whatever… then we are more engaged.