Reader's Discretion Advised

The handwriting point would be great if the original tattoo wasn't in a Gothic looking script. Now, while it's possible for that to be the dude's actual handwriting, I find it highly unlikely that his default mode of scrip would be a Gothic script.

Beyond that, there are some cosmetic punctuation issues that slapped me in the face as I was reading.

The characters (all of them [!]) came off as flat, and therefore kind of hard to differentiate.

In Chap 2, the language gets really...stilted.


This story felt like a cop-out. It wasn't about the letter request; it was about the aftermath of the story leading up to it. I would have liked to read about Max's internal turmoil, since in this one, he's more reluctant to become the "Daddy's Boy" figure the letter's voice is written in.

It's like the entire thing that's hinting at a more cliche story that isn't really there.
In fact, it's so insubstantial that I'm having a hard time pinning down exactly why this story didn't work for me on so many levels.

The time skips are weird and makes it even harder to follow.


Even though the plot hinted at seems almost - but not quite - completely unlike the teaser in the request letter, with a little more consolidating, focus, and actual plot, it probably could have been "good."

Ah. I have an analogy for it. There are a bunch of stops but no journey. The stops themselves are enshrouded with mist, so you can only see so far around you, but for some reason, you feel like you're completely off track from where you're supposed to be. Then again, you're not really sure which path you were supposed to take, but you have a general idea that maybe it probably should be 30 miles farther northeast. Or was it southeast? Northwest? One of those ordinal directions. Wait. It wasn't north-northeast, was it? What if I got that wrong, too, and I'm actually supposed to go due east?
Et cetera.

Anyways, the parts that actually had continuity here read more like a postlude for the story than the actual story.

I really wanted that angsty tension, you know? I mean, if the author wanted to spin it the way xe hinted at in this story, then I wanted to see that tortured divide between what he secretly wants and what his conscious mind is stubbornly clinging to.

Instead, we just got pages and pages of vague meh.