Made a new years resolution to do more story critic requests on this competition, so let's start living up to it!
@Alex Horman (Do the spaces work now? How do people do that!)
To address your initial concerns, I think Jmack hit the nail on the head that the main thing from a story perspective is that there's no major conflict that the protagonist is working towards. That said, there doesn't have to be. Like Jmack also noted, this was a really fun narrative that drew pretty large smiles from me by the time I got halfway through, and entertaining is the ultimate point, right?
I would say that the bigger issue for me was the start. This could be in part because when in critic mode I tend to be harshest on openers, but what I found was that the initial encounter with the zombie lulled me into a false sense of this being more of a horror or serious script than what it turned out to be. Once the autopsy took place and the humor started to come in, I was a lot more engaged and at ease with what I was reading. That line about there being no chips as a followup for what a mess the kebab shop was actually drew a laugh!
If you were looking for a conflict or exploratory narrative, zombies are always fun as a metaphor for everyday life, and I think you touched on that a bit with the reveal that the seedy kebab shop has his army of zombie workforce in the back. So whereas Jmack gave a good example of how to direct the narrative towards the protagonist into a character conflict, I think you could have gone the other way and veered the story more towards a satirical overview of modern life with this zombie population with no real ambitions who blindly buy into and follow whatever they're told no matter how false it may be.
In terms of the smaller things that niggled me:
- There were a few situations I thought sentences were fractured. A good example of this is the first two sentences in the second paragraph, where linking them with a comma would be better. This is stylistic though, and were i not critiquing, I probably wouldn't have cared too much.
- '"Taser!" I called out, and puled the trigger.' I didn't get why he yelled Taser as he pulled the trigger, unless the weapon is voice activated :p.
- 'his reanimated nervous system vulnerable to such a shock.' This is a line you could cut to save on word count. I would say it calls into telling rather than showing, because all it's doing is clarifying why the first half of the sentence (the showing side) is happening, and it's not necessary.
- 'He toppled, dead for a second time, into...' I thought the comma insert here fractured the sentence. I'm of two minds on whether you need to state dead for a second time, but if you did, I think it would have flowed better on the end of the sentence rather than splitting the toppling and what he landed on in two.
- 'Now he's filthy and bleeding as well as dead.' It felt like you were trying to dramatise the death a bit too much here. The statement doesn't make sense, namely because you don't really picture a zombie as 'clean', and the initial graphic description of his head injuries make any suggestion of glass cuts to be trivial.
- 'no way I could get a partially shredded corpse...' See above. I wasn't sure where the shredding came from. If you wanted to go that route, then I would have had the Taser shock have him explode into two parts. But even if you did that, surely moving a cadaver in two pieces is easier than moving a complete corpse? Whether the thing is in multiple parts or whole, the mass is the same, right? So I couldn't understand the protag's struggle here.
So yeah, if you needed more space to work in the conflict, you could have cut a lot of this section away to allow more words later on.
- I shared Jmack's confused frown over what purpose the coroner wanted the brain intact. Especially considering the opening made a point of describing said brain already oozing out the creatures head even before the protag interacted with it.
- 'He offered me a handful of innards... ...doesn't mean I want to go around fondling people's lungs.' This is another section you could have cut back. In terms of humor, it works. But something that is commonplace with humor is that it often comes about by degrading the seriousness of the situation. This is a funny scene, but it's only funny because the coroner is coming off as rather incompetent in order to draw out an overdramatised quirk from the protag's character.
In serious terms, there's no reason a coroner would notice a crucial bit of evidence in a body and then ask the investigator in the room to extract it. Likewise, it comes off a touch contrived for Will to be selling up a revulsion of innards right after proclaiming his pride for the lungs of one of his kills displayed on the wall. So I would have changed one of the situations to complement the other, and if I'm being honest, it would probably have been to sell the revulsion for the lungs on the wall, as the humor side of this story works so much better.
- 'and accepted his offering.' This is another few words you could have cut to make word count. It's unnecessary and feels rather posh and polite in light of the setting and tone the rest of the story takes.
- 'A cheap engagement ring...' While this makes sense in the context of the revelation at the end, it did leave me wondering why the team came to a conclusion of a diabolical smuggling operation based off a cheap ring. This probably fell into your plotting concerns where you were trying to conceive a reason for the protag to go to the kebab shop. But in this case, simpler is better, where the find of the menu and why this zombie is in possession of such a thing is enough reason to investigate without the red herring of the story possibly evolving into some nefarious gang operation.
- 'though I was already forming a rather different opinion.' From a personal reading perspective I hate lines like this. It comes across as a cheap sales pitch to read on, which 9/10 times is exactly what it is. From a PoV perspective, the protag supposedly makes these revelations based on information they have from living in the world longer than we've been exposed to it. From a writer's perspective, the line is dropped in simply because they want to coerce the reader's curiosity to read on and learn the big development. Except, if it's a good story, we
expect there to be a big development/twist coming, no?
Later on, it sort of happens again when Will states how what he saw in the kitchen will scar him for life. Now, this is actually a very funny statement. But it would have been more powerful had it been Will's reaction to what he'd just seen, rather than a prelude to what he's about to see. Had this line come after he choked back bile, it becomes a funny complement to his character after what was a ridiculously funny opinion on how zombies preparing food is quite possibly the worst thing he's ever known. But where it is at the end of a scene break (an unnecessary one, by the way), it becomes the proverbial carrot of 'read on to find out what he saw! You're not going to believe it!!'
I'm not going to say this technique doesn't work for some readers, but for others (like me) it's a huge turn off mainly because it throws me out of the story. The reason for that in the first example is because the logical conclusion of why the finger is in the zombie is exactly what Will said: he ate someone. So when he says he's forming a different opinion, that encourages me to think back to earlier events to see if I can reach that same conclusion. Except I can't, because none of those details were ever presented, since the line is not asking me to think back, but rather trying to encourage me to go forward, so it's having the opposite effect of what it intends.
- 'Dai's Dive was one of the' There are people that would probably criticise this section for show don't tell. I'm not one of them, as I think chunks of exposition in moderation and at the right times can help develop the characters, since if done right, they are essentially insights into how the character views the world.
That said, I do think this section would have been better to come after the character has walked into the shop and looked around. Possibly after No CCTV. So first we get the showing of the setting, then we get the exposition where Will gives his opinion on such establishments and their role in society, and it segues on to noticing the man behind the counter and the scene begins.
So in conclusion, I enjoyed this story for what it is, which is a fun escapism. The ending does come about a bit abruptly, but that's normally a sign of a writer writing off the cuff. So going back to your initial concerns, the structure is fine: you have the beginning (the zombie encounter), the middle (the autopsy) and the end, (the kebab shop). All you're lacking is the punch on what the story is trying to say, and to resolve that all you need to do is take a little extra time to think more on your setting, protag, and fantasy elements, and work out what they say about day to day life when you combine them all together.
