The genre here is psychological horror fiction, and the style is first-person short story; so it’s reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe or Ted Chiang; but it’s not clearly condensed or tightly edited the way those tend to be, and the narrator’s style is prolix and euphuistic.
From an editing perspective, I think the question I would have is to what extent this is a lack of editing & killing-your-darlings, versus a deliberate unreliable-narrator stylistic choice in which the prose is trying to mirror the narrator’s brute-force piano style or perhaps the dystonia-inducing music itself (because it can be hard to distinguish between deliberately flawed writing and just flawed writing—especially in the vastness of the Internet where there is so much flawed writing). I expect the latter given Tomas’s other stories, but I think it’s not sufficiently well done if I have to even ask the question.
So that could probably be improve by more precise writing, or more ostentatiously musical structure, or some carefully chosen formal game; but also one could imagine making much more drastic revisions and escalating the horror in a more linguistic way, like a variant in which the narrator suffers an aphasia or dyslexia from reading a pessimized piece of text (revenge?) and the writing itself disintegrates towards the end, say.
The genre here is psychological horror fiction, and the style is first-person short story; so it’s reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe or Ted Chiang; but it’s not clearly condensed or tightly edited the way those tend to be, and the narrator’s style is prolix and euphuistic.
From an editing perspective, I think the question I would have is to what extent this is a lack of editing & killing-your-darlings, versus a deliberate unreliable-narrator stylistic choice in which the prose is trying to mirror the narrator’s brute-force piano style or perhaps the dystonia-inducing music itself (because it can be hard to distinguish between deliberately flawed writing and just flawed writing—especially in the vastness of the Internet where there is so much flawed writing). I expect the latter given Tomas’s other stories, but I think it’s not sufficiently well done if I have to even ask the question.
So that could probably be improve by more precise writing, or more ostentatiously musical structure, or some carefully chosen formal game; but also one could imagine making much more drastic revisions and escalating the horror in a more linguistic way, like a variant in which the narrator suffers an aphasia or dyslexia from reading a pessimized piece of text (revenge?) and the writing itself disintegrates towards the end, say.