Hey, you got my hopes up saying you were Robert Zimmerman. That was mean. ;-P

This is good. I'm not sure where it's going yet, but I like it. You've got a lot of little recurring motifs in here, like souls, boys/men, self-analysis, self-consciousness. It's all pretty tight knit and it seems to come naturally. I do have a few suggestions, though.

First, I think you should vary your sentence structure a little bit more. There are a few bunches of consecutive sentences that are all the same length, and it seems a little stilted. I like the tension it creates, but you risk sounding a little cliche whenever you do that, especially with short sentences. The problem with being short is, you have to also be concise, your words have to convey a lot. Choose your words carefully, and think about what each one conveys.

Like I said, you already have a lot of this kind of thing going on thematically. Try to extend those themes with connotation.

Another problem is that you have a lot of vague pronouns-it, that, this-and it's not always clear what those pronouns are referring to. Try to root out that tendency.

One more thing: it's terribly unclear that Stirling is the narrator's brother until near the end.

Oh, and the general Rule: Show Don't Tell. A good way to exercise this is to avoid using words like "really," "very," "extremely," etc. So Sullevan isn't "really loud"-he's thunderous. Or something.

In any case, this has a lot going for it. It's murky. I want read more to find out what happens. But more significantly, I get a sense that something is already happening, and I just don't what it is yet. Those are the best kind of stories, I think.

wow i realy like this story so far i realy want to see how it goes

finkel

i love this. i really do.

I just started reading this, and I am interested.

I think in the second paragraph you need to change the did not to didn't, I think it would make things flow a bit easier.

I liked the way the chapter let out, and I'll keep reading what you write and review every other chapter.