This week I listened to the Podcast This American Life. This week’s episode was a true story called House on Loon Lake. The story was about a man who, as a child, explored this abandoned house on Loon Lake in Freedom, NH. He spends many years trying to figure out the story of the family, the Mason’s, and why the house was abandoned. This story reminded me of a memory from my childhood.
Back when I was about 8 or 9, my family and I lived in a small, quiet suburban neighborhood in a town south of Boston. All of the families in the neighborhood were very close and all of the children used to hang out around the street, in each other’s yards. There was one house however, down at the end of the cul-de-sac that we had all been warned to never go near but they never told us why.
We, the kids, had known that at one point there was family living there with a boy around our age who always had seemed very nice, but now the house was clearly abandoned. We had always wanted to go down there but our parents had told us not to go down there.
But one day we decided to do down there. We looked into the windows of RV that’s had been sitting in the driveway for a while. At the time I didn’t know exactly what the things in the RV were but I knew that it looked disgusting and we didn’t actually go in there. Then we curious what the inside of the house looked like so we decided to try to get inside. It was pretty easy to get in seeing as it looked like somebody else had broken in. We went inside of the house; it was disgusting there was animal poop and needles. We looked in the refrigerator and there was a dead cat. We screamed and ran out of there so fast. None of us ever told our parents about that day.
My mother told me some years later the story behind that house. There was a couple with a little boy that had lived in that house. It turned out that the husband was the leader of a large drug ring in the area. When his wife found out she took the kid and moved to California to live with her parents. After she left the husband started using the drug , testing them on animals and he also started a prostitution ring out of that RV. He was put in jail after a huge police raid at that house. The police had been staked out at one of the neighbor’s house for a while. The husband ended up in and out of jail several times until he ended up getting shot. After he died his wife came back and completely cleaned up and renovated the house and sold it for a lot of money. My best friend to this day moved into that house and when they moved in they still found some of his needles in the yard.
Robert,
ReplyDeleteGreat narrative that responds to the original content. You have a solid grasp on story telling and the tools of writing. There are some minor issues with grammar and punctuation, but I am sure with practice those will work their way out.
You always have a great instinct for what to include. The needles all over the house, the animal shit, the cat in the fridge; these elements shock the reader and keep them interested. You also provide climax with the full explanation of how the house came to be what you and your friends saw.
One thing for you to work on is putting stories like these into present tense. This will help the action and suspense.
Although you describe most things well, there are a few instance where extra details would have helped a bit. For instance, after you looked into the RV you said it looked "pretty disgusting." Although you discuss a lot of disgusting things, instead of telling me it's disgusting, describe it in a way the reader will walk away with that same conclusion.
This is the epitome of SHOW DONT TELL and works well in any type of writing whether it's narrative or research.
Good work. Nice work with the paragraphs as well.
-F