isis: (Default)
Isis ([personal profile] isis) wrote in [community profile] concrit_x 2020-08-20 04:45 pm (UTC)

The Devil's in the Moon

I liked this a lot! I only read the first five books in the series, but I always liked the idea of this OT3 even though I never got particularly into the fandom.

I realize this fic was written for a small-minimum exchange, but I feel it could have benefited from a great deal of expansion, not of scope but of detail. The canon is very visceral, with fairly intense imagery; this story cries out for a deeper and more evocative Shaw POV, particularly because the idea of werewolves carries with it the possibility of a wolf’s enhanced senses, and I think that having more than “a blur of noise and pain and a tang of blood in the air” would help ground the story in its setting as well as get us closer to Shaw’s head, and make his condition more present to the reader.

I also wanted a little more in his perception of where he was, and why, the next morning, partly for the grounding in setting, partly because the paragraph beginning ‘He woke up the next morning’ feels a little abrupt and short, hard to parse. I feel it would benefit from being slowed down, his mind going clearly from ‘why am I here’ to ‘safety, I think of Benjamin January’, to (and this is missing) ‘why do I perceive him as safe, even as a wolf?’ to ‘safety in one respect, fear in another’ (which, I love the phrasing you’ve chosen, ‘the house he never let himself stay too long in for fear of what he'd do.’)

(I should add that I think that you got the hillbilly cadences of Shaw’s speech/introspection right – that’s a really hard voice to do, I think, without overdoing it. Well done! I thought Rose and Ben were great, also.)

One tiny bit that threw me: the lines ‘When Ben came running down the stairs, supply bag in hand, he was flat on the floor shivering. Cold in the middle of a New Orleans summer—not a good sign. ‘ felt as though they were in Ben’s head, not Shaw’s. I would maybe have said something like, ‘Even he knew that to be cold in the middle...’ and maybe add ‘but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering and his lungs from breathing out short, frantic puffs of air’ - both to keep things firmly in Shaw’s head, and to again up the visceral sense, make the reader feel it.

A place where I think you nailed the description is ‘Shaw shut his eyes and felt deep in his gut for the last bits of the wolf that kept its claws in him until the sun rose...’ That’s great imagery and very fresh-feeling.

I also feel that you needed to have maybe a bit more fever-dream-ishness around his blurting out the revelation, and to have his speech more clearly delirious (in delirium veritas!) just to make it more believable.

I like the fairly unadorned ending, making the dialogue do the work of painting the pictures, which works well at this point of the story in both a literal and figurative sense – their hearts are stripped bare for each of them to see and acknowledge.

(So to address your questions directly: I don’t feel the ending’s too abrupt, and I feel you need more description.)

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