I just love creepy, haunted stories, so your brief description pulled me right in for the read.

This is an interesting story. I love the idea that an old piano in a shadowy attic was part of the story. Antique musical instruments are fabulous subject matter for horror stories because they have the history of those gone on who have left their mark on it through their playing. It's beautiful to imagine delicate hands touching the keys.

I can see this was written for a flash fiction contest with a very tight word count. However, even with a stringent word count, the story has to have a logical flow connecting it together. Thus, I got a little spun around when the character headed down the steps, calls her husband and they both end up back in the attic.

Observations:

The reader wants to know what happened within those moments of searching the secretary for an address book, (which wouldn't be a great place to keep addresses, in the attic? Why not in the main part of the house in a drawer closer to where the need for it would arise.) and then ending up on the third step down while she called for her husband?

The husband and she end up in the attic. She does not call him out of fear and beckon him to come see something in the attic, they just end up there. There is no mention about hearing the piano playing, before she tells him that, thus no foundation was placed for that so the reader could feel the gooseflesh and then know she called her husband out of fright. (You were trying to tell the reader something happened that they were not aware of, even though we were in the attic with her, hence telling and not showing us the scenes as they unfolded.)


The husband was pretty laid back, but then the emptied secretary drawers startled him for some reason, enough so, to consider moving back to the city.

You see, in the story you have the wife searching through the secretary for the address book. The reader has to think twice about the ending because the husband doesn't bother to question his wife about the drawers being emptied, especially since she was just up there.

This story has excellent potential. However, it does need a little more structure as it stands, so the readers aren't left with so many unanswered questions. We are led to have to use guesswork to fill in the missing parts rather than just coloring in a little with imagination.

Thus you need to fit-in clues. Why waste words on a secretary when the story revolves around the piano, where the prompt words would fit in? Keep the piano as the focus, forget about the secretary and address book, those are just red herrings, and you don't have time for them in a 300 word count entry.

With those nonessential elements out of the way, you could bring all the tension and attention on the piano, its moving keys that shed the ivory veneers, perhaps finding a fresh rose on top of the piano when entering the attic. Now the reader has the spook factor hitting her psyche.

This is the hardest thing writers have to do, they need to cut out all the unnecessary distractions that are not prime focus of the story, and build around that scene with as few words as possible.

Keep on working with these types of contests. They are excellent practice for all of your story writing. As I stated above, this story has the potential to be a fine ghost story. Once the contest is over, you may want to develop this spooky house story. You won't be confined by the word count restriction.

You responded to this review 08/22/2016 @ 9:25pm EDT

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