h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Seagulls - A58269757
Author: purple-sea-donkey - U14155599

I don't like seagulls, particularly when they are breeding. I really have been dive-bombed by them and it's not a nice feeling!
Creepy little buggers!

I like the way this develops, from straightforward realism to nightmare.

Yes, seagulls can be alarming, as can crows. But in the case of seagulls, it's partly our own fault as their traditional diet of fish has declined, while the amount of rubbish available in our cities has increased.

I would prefer a traditional paragraph structure, with connected thoughts grouped together in paragraphs.

In the third line, I would avid the repetition of 'names'.

Good story telling there. Sounds almost real.

Thank you for your comments; I've ammended the offensive duplication. Good point.

A dissenting voice here, I'm afraid. I find this story a bit too much.

Although it might not be if there were more build-up. I spent the first part merely resenting this self-righteous person whose 'solution' to a bird infestation did not involve calling the wildlife authorities. If the story had built from sympathy to skepticism to growing horror, it might have worked for me - although that fellow is a VERY unrealiable narrator, and that needs to be hinted at from the start.

I don't think the eyeball business will work at all unless there is a deepening of the story. You need at least some cause for the narrator's relentless murder of the seagulls to go over the top - tug at our heartstrings about the chicks a little, maybe - and/or a build-up of the imagined sentience of the young seagull. A slower sort of revenge, perhaps? (He escapes, returns the next year, this time is prepared to defend his nest...?)

As it stands, I think this suffers from being rushed from set-up to horror. We need more atmosphere to buy into this - at least, I do. More description of the seagulls from the narrator's skewed POV might help, as well - the ominous Stuka silhouette, the beady eyes...

Personally, I am quite fond of seagulls. Over here, they simply hover in the air as you toss them tidbits. But then, Hitchcock's 'The Birds' makes me laugh helplessly, imagining just how hard it was to train those birds to look menacing.

Yeouch!

There's a real power in this piece, and it would repay polishing up. There's something abrupt about the end, and unexplained as to how the narrator couldn't fight the young gull off.

That last line is weakened a bit by the 'as' and the 'all I could do'.

I like gulls, but they do make very bad close neighbours!