Horror Flash Fiction: Scabs Commentary

                                                     'Scabs' commentary

 'Scabs' is based on the theme of Halloween. Its purpose is to entertain and horrify the audience. The audience this piece is aimed at is Year 7 to Year 9. 'Scabs' was written as a short story in flash fiction style for a competition.

Due to the influence of the audience, I used language that would creep out and scare the readers. everyone has had scabs at some point in their lives, and most would have picked at them. There is always the fear of peeling back skin too far and causing harm, so to have a character who loves to peel his scabs who make the reader feel disturbed.

I find that one of the reasons this story is effective is due to its links to childhood. The lexis 'scab' has a lexical field of wounds, clotting, puss, not healing effectively; these are the general connotations given when hearing the word scab. It also links to childhood effectively as many children pick their scabs. The character in this story even talks about his childhood and how his mother scolds him for playing with his scab. The reader should be able to related with the childhood feeling of being interested and enjoying something disgusting.

A phrase I used to creep the audience out is 'I smiled, I loved this part'. This has pragmatic value as it implies to the reader that the character has done the same action before, and shows that he enjoys the pain, being extremely sadistic.

The piece is extremely descriptive, as it gives comparisons to size using a metaphor 'had grown to be the size of A4 paper' and a very visual image 'was deep enough to put the tip of my finger in' to help the reader picture how large the wound he's made on himself actually is. The piece also has a brief description of the feel of the scab, and the feelings of pain that the character feels, which is intended to make the reader feel on their skin the scab and clearly picture how the scab would feel under their finger tips.

Also, describing the state of the characters nails as bitten; we can picture the character struggling to get a grip on his scab, and making a mess of it as he does so. Although the character doesn't describe it, its obvious the wound he has made is more than just bleeding, we know this when he implies how large its splitting and how deep its going. This is also obvious when he is dazed in his chair.

The fact that the character doesn't have a name nor gender assigned to him during the actual story (for commentary purposes I have labelled the character as a him, to make the description easier), It doesn't give the reader a pre-picture of how the character should look, which also isn't described in the story. This makes it easier for the reader to imagine their own person peeling off the scab, either by putting themselves in the story or by creating their own character. the only information about the character is a brief insight to an aspect of his childhood, he's old enough to work, that he travels to work by bike, and how he has a weird fascination with scabs.