Critique of "Automatic Firing Squad" by Amy


Posted by Splay on June 20, 2004 at 13:01:38:

If you like tits and machine guns and how they interact, this one's for you.

The "story" consists of a single long "paragraph"...no, that's giving too much credit for form. What we have here is a sketch, and a pretty good one even though it's as riddled with illiteracies as the aforementioned tits are with bullets. Amy has a talent for description, for setting a scene, except when she tries too hard (a cat stalking its prey moves very oddly--a lion pacing its cage around mealtime moves better). She sticks to the point, too, and keeps a certain auctorial distance that prevents her writing from developing that leering stink you too often get in pieces like this one.

Amy has managed to get a mental fantasy down on the page fairly coherently, and if you think that you can do better, let's see it.