All Comments on 'Lab Rat'

that's it? where's the rest???

And well, it doesn't appear to be quite finished. You had a good set up, with the cocktail celebration, and I expected it to build from there, but it didn't. It dropped, and you began a new story in the lab. When the sex finally got started, again, it fell flat. You would give lots of detail, and then it seems that you rushed, and the details were lost. It seems that there are two sorts of stories here on Lit. We either have a quick vignette that's short on extraneous detail, letting the reader fill in the spaces, or the long, detailed stories with the long build up and conclusion. Which one are you aiming for? It looks like you're stuck half-way between them.

It was a very good attempt; I appreciate the grammar and spelling. That's rare in some of the stuff lately. You had a few errors, but nothing bad enough to make the reader lose track of the thread.

This story has a very appealing, quasi-sci fi premise that's a combination of the film LOVE POTION #9 and a comic book (with hints of David Cronenberg's THE FLY). In this day of male enhancement and ED drugs, the idea of a hormone derivative that increases penis size and virility seems both credible and enticing. The problem is that you kind of rush things in the tale, having your protagonist develop this breakthrough in one night, use it the next morning, change his whole life and land the girl of his dreams later that day, learn of the potential harm the very next day, and lose everything before the work week is out. This could be a novel or novella and would work much better, as the transformation from nerd to stud and the inevitable consequences could be better explored in long form. As it is, it undermines its own believability by racing to the unhappy ending. I found some spelling and grammatical errors and a few sentences that could be reworked for clarity and flow. I also found your tendency to split events into so many short paragraphs rather than combining some of these details into fuller, more continuous blocks of exposition a bit distracting from the flow of the narrative. Your protagonist, though a scientist, is still a bit specific when describing the vital statistics of the people he meets ("5'11" and fifty pounds heavier than my 160"), something that can make an otherwise solid first-person narrative sound a bit too much like a Penthouse letter. Most troublesome, though, were the rather outlandish proportions of your hero's enhanced penis (if we had known how big he was originally, perhaps the increases wouldn't have seemed so extreme), and the almost nonchalant way that he accepts his fate when his dream is suddenly shattered. Not only has he lost the girl he's wanted for so long and spent a ton of money on a car he now appears to not even want, but his skill as a biochemist has to be in question (at least in his own mind), considering how dramatically his experiment fails. It's hard to imagine this kind of abject failure not having a more serious and profound affect on him. You've got talent as a writer and this is definitely a workable combination of male fantasy fulfillment and cautionary tale, but it is just a bit too expedient in its pacing and ends with more of a whimper than a bang.