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House Of Justice: A Horror Short Story (2011)

by Vincent Bivona(Favorite Author)

2.98 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Smashwords

review 1: "House of Justice" reads like a rough draft of a junior high creative writing assignment. I wish the author had reread it and cleaned it up before publishing it. It has some promise, but the author just didn't seem to care enough to nurture the story beyond an idea.The writing is poor. In the first paragraph the house in which the story takes place is described and then we're told that it looks "scary", even though there was nothing in the description that would necessarily be scary. We know that the house needs painting and some of the wood is splintered. It's a bit of a fixer-upper, then, but not frightening. Further we're told that scary looking houses are usually haunted. I'm not sure why this was mentioned, since the house in the story doesn't seem to be haunted. If i... moret is, the author didn't mention anything about ghosts.The third paragraph is completely pointless. We know that there is an amusement park that is in competition against the House of Justice but they fail to draw the crowds, but we're not really told why.At any rate, we meet the Justice family, most of whom seem to be named for angels. We're told that they are "odd" and then told that one is a butcher, one is a dentist, one is a beautician and one helps around the house. I'm not sure what is odd about any of that.So, the story goes on and the Justice family starts torturing people in fairly predictable ways (fat guy likes to eat - make him eat his own flesh - mwah-ha-ha-ha). It's one of those stories in which we're supposed to feel that the victims deserve their punishments due to them being overweight or vein or neglectful of their teeth. And this is the haunted house. People come in and see real people being tortured. And no one calls the police. It's bad enough to watch that the haunted house passes out barf bags, but not bad enough to call in the law, I guess. Wonder what the dumb bumpkins in this town have to witness before they see it as a serious crime. Then a character gets bored with watching people get tortured and - guess who is the next victim?I might think about giving the thing two or three stars, but I won't. The story goes on a bit more and then abruptly stops. The story itself takes less than half the file downloaded (about 35%). The rest is a tiny message from the author, and lots of excerpts from other stories by the author. I don't mind when writers give us a tease of other stories. I do it myself. But, don't pad out your super short story with page after page of other stories. I was terribly disappointed to find that all this stuff about the haunted house was the whole story. I thought it was a set up for a bigger story.I really wish it had been longer and developed into a real story, rather than just a lot of meaningless blood and guts with no real payoff. Who is this Justice family? Why do they do the things they do? Why do they feel they have the right to torture people for being unpleasant (or whatever the reason was)? Why doesn't anyone seem to mind that these people torture and kill as amusement for the town on Halloween? Don't the families of the victims mind at least? None of this is addressed.
review 2: Not bad as an idea, yet lacking in execution.Unfortunately, I guessed what the story would be about as soon as I read the beginning of the third paragraph. And I was right.All in all, it's not bad. The language is quite fluid. The descriptions are decent. But. The reader does not sympathize with any of the characters. Victims and killers are seen under the same light. Bam, boom, chop, chop. And they get trapped and killed. Question is, so what?There is an attempt to justify the actions of the killers towards the end of the story, where it appears that the victims are chosen due to their lack of ethics. However, this is not how we're introduced to the characters as they appear in the course of the story, and lack of any justification accounts for two dimensional characters. As a reader, since I didn't feel any connection, I couldn't care less why these people die or why their killers chose them. If I am not given any clues as to what the killers had in mind when they chose their victims, or what the victims had done (or not done) to deserve or not deserve what was happening to them, I couldn't care less. Therefore, I found the story flat. There's a lot of vivid, graphic violence. Unfortunately, that alone does not account for a good horror story.Generally speaking, I think the specific writer is on his way to mastering his toolbox of horrors. He has a decent level, all he has to do is master the tricks in plot setting and character making. I would like to read more of his work; I think he's going to improve. less

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