A Comment/Review on Chrysostomon’s “Verified”

Time for another comment/review. Today, I chose Chrysostomon’s Verified. Synopsis below:

Colin goes to Ukraine to meet Sonja, a girl he met on an on-line dating agency.

I would like to start by saying this is not the first Chrysostomon story I talked about on the site. A while back, I talked about Red Flag but while that piece had a sci-fi vibe to it, this one veers towards the supernatural early on as Sonja is a vampire or, at least a creature similar to one. The designation itself is never used throughout the short writing (less than two thousand words) but she does have fangs, bites people and controls their minds so…

Anyway, one of the issues I had with Red Flag at the time is also present here. I found the overall prose to be quite simple and not much really happens. Descriptions are parse and not that engaging, there is a lot of punctuation missing in the dialog sequences and also an overabundance of dialog tags in key sections. Too many ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ don’t really add much to the plot, much to the contrary.

I love supernatural stuff so this could have been quite an interesting tale but, ultimately, I didn’t think so. It’s quite rushed, needs some editing and almost nothing of note happens. Sure, we get to see Sonja attack a man and then a woman near the end of the story, there’s a brief moment where she takes control of her now husband after they move to America but it’s all too quick, making the whole thing lack impact. More characterization would have been great. As it is, it strikes me as something with a lot of unfulfilled potential. A shame because vampires are sexy mind-controllers. With all said and done, Red Flag was more intriguing to me.

Thank you for reading.