May 17, 2026
To:Kaisei
I hope you don't mind me just dumping my full thoughts in this comment then. There were two things that stood out immediately to me from the start.
First was that the prose flowed exceptionally well, for the most part. Sure, there are passages that had a few typos, and a few that seemed to be obviously rushed to meet the deadline, but they're the exception. For the most part, the scenes that shift to Rosalyne's world as she sees the black mold do its thing where fantastic. I'd read them, they'd paint vivid pictures in my mind, and when I got to the end, I'd realize that the prose had become largely invisible. I'd go back for a second read just to appreciate the word choice. Look, everyone praises you for your prose, and deservedly so, but I felt that there were passages in here that topped your previous contest entries.
That's why I'm so impressed by the 2-3 week timeframe.
Second, this felt a lot more like "real literature," for lack of a better, less-pretentious term, than what normally gets posted on this site. The unreliable narration may be responsible for most of it. My biases may be responsible for the rest of that feeling. Honestly, I kind of fell out of love with literary fiction decades ago after reading Slaughterhouse Five. I absolutely loved that book. Going back to reading other books just felt like such a downgrade. Obviously, re:deskny is its own work, but both feature unreliable narration as a result of PTSD, and so this old man felt some of the same things he felt as a teenager reading Vonnegut. (And as such, the forth wall breaking didn't seem out of place to me. I didn't even consider it might be contentious until it was brought up in the comments.)
But while I may have personally loved that, I fear you may be excelling at the wrong aspects for this particular contest. This is all speculation on my part. I have no idea how your work is evaluated by the judges, and you've made finals multiple times, so you my perspective may actually be less informed than yours. However, my observations from past finalists and winners is that the bar for prose is far below this level. That suggests to me that it's not the most important aspect when it comes to judging. What they're looking for is probably a minimal ability to write coherent English, the ability to plan and properly pace a plot, adherence to the prompt and rules, and market fit for their sponsor.
NOVELOUS doesn't post the HF winners in their usual format, using avatars instead of character names for dialogue. But it's very easy to see that this story wouldn't work at all in that format. Admittedly, I don't know exactly what they're looking for when it comes to psychological horror. Maybe this hits the nail on the head. And I don't want to imply that their target market is unintelligent or wouldn't appreciate re:deskny. But I worry that it not being "light novel" enough could hurt your chances.
The unreliable narration, in particular, I think could potentially end up being an issue. You flow into Rosalyne's world from more mundane scenes so naturally that I think there's a big potential for less-engaged readers to get lost. Yes, technically, we're always in Rosalyne's world, it's just that it often overlaps with… let's call it a more normal world. The reader's world. Like electromagnetic waves on harmonizing frequencies. But then those waves aren't completely harmonic, and as they drift further apart, there's bits of destructive interference, if that makes sense. There were still times I failed to notice the transition and had to back up and read again when I got confused. Personally, I enjoyed that, and once I realized that this was going to be a constant throughout the entire story, I adjusted to be on the lookout for it. But it doesn't exactly make for "light" reading.
As far as the prompt goes, this is definitely psychological horror, but I worry it may not be "horror" enough at the start. Psychological, definitely, but the only real hints of horror we get are the snippet of conversation about the deaths in the first chapter and a couple of paragraphs at the very end of the third chapter. That's fine for the genre in general, but I worry it could be considered too much of a "slow start" for the contest.
Having got all of that out of the way, I'd like to focus more on this story as opposed to comparing it to your other work or talking about the contest.
I was a big fan of the way Natasha's name was handled. I'm generally a sucker for playing around with how character names get incorporated into stories like that. But I think it really heightened the impact when Natasha did come over to Rosalyne's world. Another story may have symbolized that by the face alone, but the inability to see faces is Rosalyne's struggle, so it's not perfect for Natasha breaking through hers.
As for that moment itself, as an Utena-head, how could I say anything other than I loved it? I think with a bit of a longer story, you could have a longer runway to build up to it, which would allow you to place some more bumps on the road to bring them closer, push them apart, and bring them closer again. I think it would feel a bit more "earned". The word limit and the deadline prevented that here. Potentially, you could have dedicated more words to interactions between these two and less to the fantastical descriptions of the black mold. But that's not a clean trade-off in my book. Some readers may find that those passages become repetitive by the end of the story, but I don't think you could remove enough of them to give you a better word budget without ruining some of what makes this story work so well.
And besides, from the first library scene, I had a pretty good guess that's where the story was going, so maybe it didn't need to be belabored. Then again, maybe I was just *hoping* that's where the story would go.
But I did feel that a lot of the plot points ended up being predictable. Why Rosaline's parents hired Mr. Caraway. Who Destiny was, who the Electromagnetic man was, who was doing the killings. Caraway knowing Professor Medea was a big tell, as was Professor Medea telling Rosalyne that she knew her brother.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't think it detracted from the story much. After all, lots of readers love to feel clever when they get to the conclusion just ahead of the reveal. And that kind of predictability maybe makes it a bit more appealing to an audience that enjoys psychological horror?
If I had to list any big disappointments here, I think the extremely tight focus on the story from Rosalyne's POV, along with the short length and rushed deadline really prevented us from getting a good sense of the other characters in the story.
I'd say this affects the film club the most. Sure, they're the mean girl group intended to be an obstacle for Rosalyne and Natasha to overcome, but I think making them so pivotal in the end would have worked better if the reader had a chance to connect with them more. It lessened the impact of their defenestrations, and then it felt weird that they survived when other students previously died. Sure they were named characters, but they weren't so special that they deserved that kind of plot armor. Not having a greater understanding of the characters also made the "what do the waves sound like?" argument seem inevitable. But it was also very abrupt. Perhaps if we knew something more about these characters, there would have been ways to resolve the situation that were unique to their circumstances.
This general problem also affects Mr. Caraway. We get more characterization of him from his dialogue, but I don't think we really appreciate how far he's trying to go to put a stop to the EMM cult until he shows up with a gun. (Which, by the way, it doesn't matter if he has an occupational license for because America, babyyyyyyy 😭) And it made the final scene ring just a tad hollow. Because ultimately, he wasn't that important in resolving things, she didn't really need him to begin with, and the reader didn't have enough of a connection with him.
But that's a really difficult problem to solve from a first-person perspective. Especially when the MC is so interesting and the story is so focused on their mental state. Who wants an extended break from the interesting stuff to follow that guy around for a bit?
Anyway, I hope something in there was helpful. Feedback isn't as helpful when it's focused on what you liked instead of what could be improved. And most of what I thought could be improved was more related to the contest than the work itself. Plus, I went on rambling tangents and talked about myself even when I was trying not to. I still think this was damn impressive to be written in less than three weeks. It's the kind of writing I'd love to see win the contest. I just have no confidence that it will.
