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The Howl in the Dark · Original Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 400–750
Show rules for this event
Over the River and Through the Woods
“Why, Grandmother,” I murmured just under my breath. “What big teeth you have.”

The thing that had been hiding under the sheets of my grandmother’s bed moved, uncoiling with a howl of rage as it leapt. If the feral beast had hidden anywhere else and jumped me when I first came into the house, it might have had a chance.

Trying to make a leap from a waterbed was its last mistake.

The sawed-off shotgun I had concealed in the picnic basket went off with a roar, dumping both barrels into the beast’s chest. Contrary to movie physics, the bulk of the wolf-creature kept moving in my direction, making me drop the shattered picnic basket and roll to avoid being clawed to death as it spasmed. The heavy Colt .45 felt like a feather when I pulled it out from the small of my back where it had been concealed, but the roar when it went off was just as deafening in my grandmother’s living room as the shotgun had been a few seconds ago.

I put three rapid shots in the spasming beast’s center of gravity where the combination of silver and cold iron shot had chewed open its chest, then cocked the heavy pistol and aimed. The single-action shot blew brains and skull matter all over grandmother’s clean linoleum floor, and the beast quit moving.

A second shot to the head was overkill. I did it anyway.

“Reload, reload,” I muttered, grabbing the double-barrel shotgun out of the remains of the picnic basket and scattering the paper-wrapped sandwiches and apples that it no longer could hold. Two shells from the holder on the stock fed into the action almost automatically and I snapped the action closed, placing it beside me as I reloaded the heavy Colt with gleaming silver shells.

“Grandma!” There was not much hope of getting a response, but I called out anyway. “Are you in here?”

Over the ringing in my ears, I could barely hear a noise which I tracked down to a nearby closet. Grandma normally stored galoshes and umbrellas in it, although after carefully opening the door with the barrel of the shotgun, it obviously now held a slightly overweight elderly woman, who was matted with blood and tied up.

“Werewolf,” she managed to say once I got the gag out of her mouth. Grandma spat once to the side and took a trembling breath. “Caught me outside. Foolish old woman. Harbinger said I should have never retired.”

“It was newly turned,” I said, trying to look in all directions at once since werewolves liked to sneak up when you were distracted, and my grandmother was distracting the heck out of me. “There’s an old wolf working its way up the valley, making spawn to cover its tracks. Cost us two Hunters so far.”

I froze with the knife just inches away from the bloody ropes that bound up my grandmother. She obviously knew why, because she rasped, “I can’t tell. It could just be claws.”

“Or it could be a bite.” It took considerable physical and mental effort to pull my grandmother out of the closet and get her up on the couch, still wrapped in her ropes. “I’ve got a medical kit for this,” I babbled. “There’s a injection in there and everything. It’s supposed to work at least some of the time—”

There was no way that I could meet her eyes.

We talked for a while that evening while I did what I could. She told me some old stories about Earl Harbinger, and her years with the agency. I told her about how things had changed since she retired. She made a few phone calls, a very few, with me holding the receiver.

She did not cry. I did not either.

Then the sun set.

The moon rose.

A wolf howled.

And a single shot rang out.
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#1 · 1
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So, we got a werewolf combined with one of the oldest tropes in zombie-related fiction (shooting someone who got bitten) and, umm... Little Red Riding Hood. That's quite an explosive combo, though I have yet to figure out if it's a dud or not.
#2 ·
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For a story like this, I'm afraid I don't have a choice but to compare it to the original. And, uh... I don't think the story of Little Red Riding Hood was missing a shotgun in the picnic basket.

The beginning reminds me of some fics I've read in the past on this site, where the protagonist is acting too cool for school before they've done anything all that cool, which just ticks me off in a bad way. Couple that with the fact that they haven't been shown to have many weaknesses (apart from reloading slowly once the danger's over), and it's tough to get behind them.

On top of that, I can't really consolidate the opening badassery with the emotional weight at the end. It's not the biggest jump in the world, but it's a tough one for the word limit here, and it probably boils down to the protagonist not having won me over yet.

Sorry about that Author, but it's just my 2 cents. Best of luck in the contest!
#3 ·
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I liked that. It's badass, it's fun. It doesn't have to be taken seriously, the Author is playing with tropes (even the trashy retelling of classic stories is a trope itself. I believe there are already movies about Badass Little Red Riding Hood, Zombie Pride and Prejudice and stuff like that).

So yeah, I enjoyed it. There's the minimum necessary amount of references about setting, which is good: enough to hint about several werewolves and a Hunter organization out there, but not too much to leave the reader with unanswered questions.

My only concern is the rather abrupt change towards the end. We're still pumped up from the action scene when she's about to free Grandma, and then we only get a couple of lines of suspense, and we jump right into sad scene.
“There’s a injection in there and everything. It’s supposed to work at least some of the time—”

There was no way that I could meet her eyes.

We talked for a while that evening while I did what I could.
That was really fast. You're talking about a possible cure and then suddenly she's doomed and can't be cured.

But I guess you had to struggle with wordcount and time limit. And the ending was really good anyway, so I think it deserves mid-to-high tier.
#4 · 1
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I liked it. It was fun, and punchy.

But... as much as I appreciate the references to Monster Hunter International, this is supposed to be an original fiction round, not just not-pony-related. This falls pretty squarely in fanfic territory, which I think technically disqualifies it. If not for the mention of Earl Harbinger, this could have passed as generic monster-hunting as a genre.

As far as writing quality, this isn't bad at all, but there's a couple of things this story did that pulled the rug out from under its own feet. It lost a lot of the tension that it could have had.

Technical note: if you're writing MHI fanfic, your reader target audience probably knows enough about guns that your description of her use of the "Colt .45" seems off. Until they read far enough to realize it's a single action revolver, not a Colt 1911 semiautomatic.

And that places this story some time in the late 1800s or early 1900s? But then again, she has a phone. If it's set after WWII, there's no reason any well-equipped hunter would really be using a low-capacity, slow to fire, slow to reload cowboy-style gun. Regardless, I wondered if the little girl could have been Dorcas. (On that note, Dorcas was a minor character in a MLP/Beauty and the Beast/MHI crossover fic I wrote called Belle of the 7.62x51mm Ball.)

So, the tension.

I think the whole "rescuing the grandmother" thing would have had a bit more tension if we'd known before seeing her that there was another werewolf. Looking for grandma, oh, there's a noise in the closet! Obviously grandma... unless we know there's a werewolf using newer werewolves as a distraction already.

Why the extra headshot? Maybe mention the regenerative abilities of werewolves, show us the chest cavity starting to re-coalesce before the last couple head shots, or mention that silver stops the regeneration and that's why it's used in bullets. This could have been an extra layer of tension while searching for/caring for grandma.

And finally... the anti-werewolf injection. I don't think it was necessary. You already have the uncertainty from granny's wounds. Is it a bite, or just a cut from claws? Adding a possibly-helpful vaccine actually cuts down on the tension. Without the possibility of a cure, you know that a bite is a death sentence for granny, and we just can't tell what kind of wound she has. With the injection, we're just not as worried.

So, that's my thoughts. Solid little story, but not quite what it could have been.
#5 ·
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Hah. This is cheeky. I’m not sure Perrault would approve, but amidst all the perverted tales which stem from the original work, this one's not bad (although I prefer the one in which the Little Redhood teams with the wolf and they rob the various travelers at gunpoint to get enough money to buy the cake and the butter for her grandma).

So yeah, maybe the first scene drags for too long. After all, you don’t have much to put in. This is more a scene, or the idea of a scene, rather than a whole story. I think you should’ve kept it a bit shorter. As a rule of thumb, people are afraid that 600- stories will automatically be slapped, which is not true. Here it seems you really padded the first scene, to no great avail, since we immediately get what the scene is about and the piling up of gory details doesn’t add much.

But it was a fairly good read, especially the last twist.