Jul 13, 2022
15 chapters and 26k words is a lot to catch up on, but I’m glad that I did. It won’t be a full-on review, but I think there’s plenty here worth talking about.
First of all, your premise is fantastic. Throwing every single criminal into a prison where they have to play death-games for their freedom is borderline absurd, but in a way that works. The setting is bizarre, some things aren’t meant to make sense, and that’s fine. When Zain punches people through walls and Rex suffers horrific injuries, I take it in stride because you’ve set up that sort of expectation—some of it even furthers the setting’s development, like how quick Rex’s recovery is.
On the topic of Rex, I think you’ve done a good job with his mysterious nature. More than once now his innocent façade has slipped, and we’ve seen that he can be exactly as calculating as Zain and the Wardens, sometimes even more so. He might not have the brawn, but he definitely has the brain. What remains to be seen is if he has the heart, or if that’s an act, too.
Zain is mysterious in his own right. His reputation for essentially running a place called “the infinite prison” is immediately hooking, and you understand that he’s earned his title in the very first chapter. I think there are times when his development isn’t quite as solid as Rex’s (for instance, the progress of their relationship at times feels unearned, especially in the later chapters) but I attribute that less to a flaw in his design, and more to the pacing. We haven’t gotten much “down time” for them to interact in, and that’s something I would really like to see more of.
The Wardens are all sufficiently evil, and each one is unique. Particular shoutout to Jack for being able to match Zain’s aggression with raw arrogance, even after getting punched across a room.
As far as criticisms go, I think the biggest hurdle for me was some of the prose. Overall your paragraphs are well-written, and they do a good job of visualizing what we need to see, but at times that turns into over-visualization. There are a LOT of adjectives, especially towards the beginning, and I did find it affecting the readability for me. Some places have an amazing rhythm, and that makes even the big paragraphs slide by beautifully, but others get really gummed down in descriptions that don’t feel they add as much, when we could be keeping up the pace. Your action scenes are intense and engaging, and as much as I want to be there immersed in them, this does occasionally take me out.
The other issue is minor but more prevalent: dialogue. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the dialogue itself—in fact, you’ve done a fantastic job of capturing each character’s individual voices not just through accents like Mitch’s, but also in general demeanor, word choice, brevity, etc. I can usually tell who’s talking without even needing to see a tag, which I love.
Those tags are the actual issue to me. At times they’re overused, especially when, as I said, you’ve already done a great job establishing who’s talking. Mostly though there’s this recurring thing where a character will say something, and then the tag will jump us back to before they started speaking to tell us what they were doing. This is usually what happens when the word “Meanwhile,” shows up after someone says something. For me, this entirely breaks the pacing of a scene, be it action or conversation. Jumping back and forth like that can be jarring, and undoes some of the work you did in establishing a good flow.
Those are my main thoughts. Your setting is fantastic (to echo what someone else said, I love how contained it is) your characters are intriguing, and the plot works. I’d love to see more development between our protagonists outside of the games, and bit of restraint in the descriptions, as well as more fluidity in the dialogue tags, but all in all, I’m in. I got to the end and want more, I want to see where these two end up.
Keep up the great work!
