Review: The Sound of Children Screaming

Story title: The Sound of Children Screaming
Author: Rachel K. Jones
Link to story: https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-sound-of-children-screaming/ 

(Spoiler-free)

Good stories are rare as gold. Most fiction I read daily are just a-okay. Even the one written by the great masters (you know, the ones with covers labelled "best-seller" as some other crap), rarely excite me, and even if they manage to throw a bit of a punch with a plot-twist or a gimmick, the entertainment they deliver resembles 10-second cheap fireworks: short-lived and forgettable. 

But sometimes if you keep sifting long enough, you strike a dash of glimmer. With the first three paragraphs, "The Sound of Children Screaming" (TSCS) had me hooked. The prose is precise, provocative, powerful. Jones' command of the language is a surgical knife, cutting straight to your very centre of your heart without resistance, where doubt and fear lie. And Jones amplifies that discomfort to 11. 

Make no mistake. The main theme of this story is not novel. It is the OPPOSITE of novel. It is a message that has been repeated and broadcasted and told by so many people across so many media and dimensions that we have lost all abilities to react and respond to it. Your mind just fails to take it in, like the radio going non-stop in the morning and you accepting it as nothing but background noise.  So Jones retold the same old slogan, only in the most colorful and imaginative way possible. Every sentence oozes creativity. She carefully inserted the right amount of fantasy into the story, enough to enhance the plot, while not too much to overwhelm her readers and detach them from the main moral. 

The scenes depicted in TSCS are graphic and intense, yet the tone of Jones' voice remains blunt and honest. She does not exaggerate. There is no need to exaggerate. As I read the story, the emotions just flows with the progression of the plot, and I taste the dread and fear accumulating as the story advances.

TSCS removes the fog and reveals a problem at its core of the barest, purest form, and it does so in astonishing fashion, striking deep into our discomfort. In my opinion, a good story is one that freezes your mind after reading it, as you attempt to handle all the overflowing feelings swarming the jungle of your soul. A good story makes you feel, and TSCS achieves just that. 

Rating: 10/10

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