Lyceum
Self-Published
Community Rating
Description
Gunshots cry across the school halls. Their echoes herald that nothing will ever be the same.
This was originally a contender inWriTE's Halloween Contest.
Cover artbyjellyfishly.deviantart.
This is acompletedshort story. Check out my fictionAvatar: The Wild Lands,a medieval retelling of Avatar: The Last Airbender withWater Vikings, Fire Knightsand all the good stuff!
Information
- Status
- Hiatus
- Year
- 2017
- Author
- Media in Sanity
Royal Road Stats
- Rating
- 3.5/ 5.0
- Followers
- 4
- Views
- 735
Chapters(1 total)
Reviews
No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!
Community Reviews(1)
- TophicakesRoyal Road★★★★★ 5.0Lyceum is a subtle horror short story. You will not recoil and feel the urge to close the tab or look elsewhere. Instead, the horror of the novel lies on the frustration of our heroic aspirations. We are thrust into a terrible circumstance of impotence and can do little other than wait for death.
Style
The great star of the short story. The school shooting is often referenced as a spectacle for the shooters. The style of Lyceum is fast and rich in meaningful (albeit short) metaphors that translate the gore of the massacre into a work of art, thus allowing us to see through the eyes of the shooters.
As the violence grows and more people start following the events in the school, the metaphor thickens and the spectacle becomes more complex.
I don't know if this was the author's intention, but it DID work.
Grammar
I've seen no mistakes.
Story
The story is the novelization of what seems to 40 minutes of a school massacre plus brief glimpses of how the world is following the events.
Characters
They're shrouded in mystery and the story suggests a lot more than it tells. The horror maximum of 'Do not overexplain the monster' does wonders for the shooters and leave us with hints of who they are and what are their motivations without any need for expository dialogue.
The same thought does not benefit the victims, however. While some of them are the embodiments of usual fantasies that people nurture about massacres (what if I fight the shooter back / what if I convince them to stop / etc...), only a few have more complex backgrounds. I think it was a poor stylistic choice because when the characters do have a backstory, it's excellent and when we do care for them.
Conclusions
I think Lyceum should not have been a short story. The story follows a documentary's perspective instead of a protagonist's. While the style is fantastic, the absence of a character for whom we care about more than all others does hurt the novel. Most of the drama of survival that should come from a situa