Hi William Stafford  ,
I've just finished reading your short story, "Fog"  , and I'd like to offer the following comments. This review is in affiliation with "The Rockin' Reviewers" . It has been gifted to you from murphyco as part of my Chocolate Emporium.
Please remember these are purely my own opinions, and any advice given is with the sole intention of being helpful.
My first impressions: This is a great story! I love how you build up the suspense by focussing on the density of the fog and how your main character can see nothing but keeps thinking they hear a voice or see a shadow. It's all very creepy. Using fog is a great way to create that suspense. Take away the characters' main sense—vision—and they are helpless.
Plot: This is a creepy tale of two people caught out in the fog ... with a murderer nearby. But, who is the murderer, and who his victim? It's nicely written. I love the end, where we learn that your main character has spent the whole night in the truck with the dead body of Bobby without realising it. I like how you say, "As I slide in, I feel something wet." when she climbs into the truck. This tells your readers exactly what is going on, and puts us one step ahead of your character.
What I really liked: The suspense. I held my breath the whole way through the story, waiting to find out what would happen. I did wonder whether Bobby would turn out to be the murderer. But, no. He was the murder victim. A lot of the suspense is created through your excellent use of sensory words. You really do 'show' us the story from the inside. By describing the damp, cold, dense fog, your readers can feel it as though they are there. It's a great tool to use.
Readability/Grammar/Punctuation: I have a few suggestions which I have put in this dropnote ...
Grammar Suggestions/Typos ▼
"The fog was almost a sickly green color like the marsh had evaporated." - Firstly, I'd place a comma after color. Secondly, to say the colour is "almost" a sickly green doesn't work. It's vague, and it would work much better if you described the colour of the marsh exactly. Like, is it pea-green, dirty-green, mossy? Describe it, then say it now seems as one with the fog.
"We stopped again to listen." - You switch from the present tense to past tense here. Change stopped to stop.
"Squinting to through the thickness, trying to make out any familiar shapes." - Firstly, thickness is not a good descriptive word. I've tried to imagine what it conjures up in my mind, and I've got nothing. You want us to picture what your character is seeing, so I would try to find a more descriptive word here. Also, this is a sentence fragment which doesn't make sense on its own. If you changed it to, "I squint through the thickness, trying to make out familiar shapes." it would work.
Suggestions: I had a bit of trouble with the dialogue. It is good and believable, but it's not always clear who is speaking. I think you need to add a few dialogue tags or to show some kind of mannerism or action immediately before or after some of the speech to tell us who is saying what. The first line of dialogue, I had to go back over a few times to figure it out because you've been speaking from your main character's viewpoint, then this dialogue is from someone else—Bobby. Maybe, you could write something like:
"IS SOMEONE THERE?!"
My heart leapt to my throat at the sound. "Bobby! You scared the crap outta me!"
Final thoughts: I really enjoyed reading this story. You hooked me right at the start and kept me hooked the whole way through. I had to read everything because I had to know who would die and who I could trust. There is some great suspense and some great description here. Great work!
Keep writing!
Choconut
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My review has been submitted for consideration in "
Aside from the prizes, the actual challenge itself is fab. You always have a wide variety of contests for us on offer. There is always at least one poetry and one short stories contest. So, really, there's no excuse to not take part, is there? Plus, you allow us to catch up with months we have missed, which is a lifesaver. I should know. I think I wrote seventeen entries in a couple of months last year. 
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