Critique #99 — Adam B. Shaeffer
Kevin Andrew Murphy January 14th, 2007
         Stephen’s eyes opened and his brow furrowed, puzzled.
Something was different, but what? He looked around him, and his room
looked the same; all his furniture was in the right spot, the central
air conditioning and filtering unit was whirring away contentedly, and
. . . he could hear the central air being pumped into his room. He
had never heard that sound before. It had forced air into his room
for the past twenty years and yet this day marked the first time he
had ever heard it. Odd how something so simple can stand out all of a
sudden, he thought to himself as he got off the couch and headed into
the kitchen for a snack.
        As he stood in the five-by-five cubicle, his shoulders began
to shake, gently at first, but with increasing force, until a loud
guffaw erupted from his diaphragm.
I’m intrigued, but mostly by wanting to know who is watching Stephen. Someone can read his mind because the narrator is telling us what Stephen looks like in the first line (brow furrowing, which is nothing we ever think about ourselves, unless we’re watching ourselves in a mirror) and that last graf was definitely someone else watching him and reporting on what they saw. (I do think you could cut ‘from his diaphragm’). If we were really in Stephen’s POV, we’d see what he found funny before he fought against and then gave in to the laugh.
Ditto on cutting “from his diaphragm” and likewise ditto on the rest of what Sherwood said.
I’d also cut the repetition of “central” because it’s implied the second time.
What intrigues/confuses me is the 5 x 5 cubicle, since I thought he was in his home rather than an office, and I’m not certain if this is odd description or a way of describing the alien cell he’s being held in by some observer. I’d turn the page to figure that out, but if I didn’t find an intriguing answer on the next page, I’d probably stop.
I would turn the page to get the explanation for the 5×5 cubicle.
I perhaps might wish for a line or two of more specific detailed description of how the furniture in the room is in the right spot - that is, more visual detail since it seems to me there is a clue in all this somewhere.
Thanks for the commentary, I appreciate it