In Summary

There’s a ‘showing and telling’ problem here. The author wants us to feel the otherworldly dread of the place and the situation, telling us that it is full of despair and terror and desolation and evil. But the description doesn’t seem that terrifying. We have to take it on trust. It’s like someone coming up to you at a party and saying, ‘I’m cool; you’re going to like me.’ Well, let’s see...

The solution is to make the reader see and feel these things. The dread must be a shiver down the spine rather than a sign on the landscape. We need justifications for thinking a knife is brutal. Does it have a serrated hook? Is it blood-smeared already?

Some of the description is vague and difficult to visualise, as when the hooded figures turn (where?) and move (in what way?). How does one of them produce a large variety of objects from his sleeve without rummaging about for them? In what way are the hoods ‘thick?” Where were the four new arrivals in relation to the original four? One of these questions might pass over a reader’s head, but so many in a short extract starts to look sketchy.

This piece feels like a pastiche of many other similar scenes. The hooded figure, the sacrificial table, the (usually) female victim, the post-apocalyptic or otherworldly landscape... They’re all well trodden tropes. This doesn’t mean they’re not valid in their genres, but they don’t work if they are just writing-by-numbers. It has to feel real and fresh. This opening section could almost have been reduced to, ‘The hooded monks received their unwilling sacrificial victim on the stone slab amid the forbidding desolation of the rock desert’ or similar.

Another serious point for attention is the inability to differentiate sentences. Commas are used as full stops throughout, which is impossible. This is the most basic kind of punctuation and needs to be addressed before any real writing can take place. Writing is made of sentences, which are demarcated by full stops, while sentences are made of clauses, which are differentiated by commas.

An obvious love of writing is apparent in the piece. It just needs a little fixing.