I'll break this down by chapter, then go over everything as a whole at the end. Also note that I read this once before starting the review, so sometimes things in later chapters are brought up earlier.
Prologue
When I was six, I saw through a crack in the door my dad bury his fists in my mother’s face.
"Buried" is accompanied by "in," not "into." Not sure why.
One punch after another, she cried for him to stop, and one punch later her face became more unrecognizable a bloody mess.
I'm not sure what's up with the end of this sentence; is it supposed to be, "...her face became more unrecognizable, a bloody mess," or are some words missing?
It was as if by demonic possession, my father had become host to this other persona, his face as well unrecognizable.
What other persona? "Some" would work better here. Also, the end clause is phrased rather strangely; either "his face also unrecognizable" or "his face unrecognizable as well" flow better, yes?
My mother, with her face a canvas smeared with blood, tears, and pain, used of her final breaths to utter that when they married, her life, her heart belonged to him.
Either the "of" doesn't belong here, or you're missing a word or two.
After a deluge of horrific events: increasingly deranged acts of violence, an outbreak of the most brazen theft, and a rash of teenage suicides that ravaged the hearts of this country’s people, Enjoyce’s drug was adopted at an increasing rate.
There is only one rate that is increasing, and a colon better suits this sentence's syntax.
Enjoyce is the fastest-growing and by far the most successful global company in the history of the entire world.
Post-Dophinimine crime levels are almost infinitely smaller than before due to its wide adoption and prescription.
I don't understand why the narrator speaks about this night in such cold and objective terms, with such constructions as "my ducts overflowed" instead of "cried" and the fact that "weeping" is in quotation marks. I don't know if this is because the prologue is intended as a reflection of the narrator upon the past, and since he can no longer feel remorse, he describes it that way. However, given that he went into the way his heart seemed to be writhing in his chest earlier in the paragraph, if that's the case, the portrayal of his emotion relative to the scene is a bit inconsistent. Also, even if he's looking back on the time from a Dophinimine-laced present, that doesn't explain why he should put the ironic tone on "weeping," as though the act were actually something else. Unless this paragraph is supposed to indicate that the narrator had serious emotional problems as a child.
The state of the nation introduced by the Dophinimine advertisement is extreme to the point of being rather unrealistic; it doesn't seem necessary to introduce that kind of intense anomie in order to make a drug that keeps people from becoming sad or violent very popular. In a society that plagued by social ills, even granted a drug that would supposedly keep people from committing crimes, there would be other radical changes visible even after the Dophinimine had gone to work, which aren't evident in later narration.
Heaven on Earth
...grabbed a day’s worth of Dophinimine...
“Don’t worry, we’ll be together again soon enough, room 116,” I said as I shut the door tightly and locked it.
...has created is for me everyday to observe.
...something's wrong with the last clause, there. I don't know if you left out some words, or left in some after a correction, but "is for me everyday to observe" sounds like Babelfished Japanese.
“Are you all ready for school?” My mother ran her hands through my short brown hair and kissed me on the forehead all while I scooped up a spoonful of cheerios and carefully filled my mouth.
You don't need the "all" in there, but if you want to keep it, there should be a comma in front of it.
When I left that morning for school, I heard a high note of anxiety and anticipation of new things to come.
I took a deep breath and exhaled some of those thoughts, and I continued on to work.
Mr. Gowlman had been my boss for five years now, and I’d never seen him this discontent.
This sentence and the one quoted above it are examples of compound sentences, where you have two independent clauses put together. Basically, they're two complete sentences combined into one. In the case of the first one, "I took a deep breath and exhaled some of those thoughts" and "I continued on to work" could both stand alone as complete sentences. In order to combine them into a single sentence, you need something stronger than the conjunction "and" alone--you need a comma before the conjunction, as inserted in the above quotes.
It was partially true in the sense that I had been lost in thought.
Because this story is written in the past tense, "had been" is used to indicate that the event in question happened earlier, because "was" just refers to the story's present.
...but I was happy regardless.
”Nice to meet you, Michael. My name is Nick.”
The first set of quotation marks is backwards.
“I don’t know what that is, sir,” Nicholas replied.
This is a list of those we sold to last week.
"Those" they sold last week? Maybe "what" they sold?
“What causes a man to lose his control and lash out in this way?” I thought.
It's best to mark thoughts differently than you would speech; usually, this is done either by making thoughts italic or not marking them at all.
Sometimes I linger by my fire place, imagining what pictures would lay above it on the mantel.
"Lay's" a rather strange word to use in this instance; "stand" or "sit" would be more normal, as they make the pictures sound upright, while "lay" suggests they'd be lying flat.
...and all manner of upstanding citizens.
...one that changes my demeanor and facial expression.
"Demeanor" and "facial expression" are redundant.
There was only an all-enveloping coldness for me to feel and darkness for me to see.
"All" and "enveloping" are working together to form a single concept describing the coldness, thus the hyphen.
That’s because the love a mother has for her child is more than something that results in humane treatment or humane regard.
You're getting this, I think, out of the word "humanly," but the idea of "humane" is something different. This sentence doesn't follow from the previous one.
I couldn’t think clearly, I was overcome and overwhelmed by increasing sensitivity to emotion.
The comma here is incorrect. It's joining two independent clauses, and you need something stronger to do that. Either replacing the comma with a semicolon or adding a conjunction after it would work... or splitting this one sentence into two.
This paragraph gave me a bit of trouble:
When I left that morning for school, I heard I high note of anxiety and anticipation of new things to come. And my mother died just that week. The next school day, I left my foster home with a high note of anticipation of new things to be learned. And there was no deep, bellowing tone in between.
The chronology of this paragraph is strange. So, the kid's mother was killed within his first week of school. By the next day, he was already in a foster home, on Dophinimine, and excited to be back to school? At most, that's two days after the murder, if we say that it happened on a Friday and the kid went back to school Monday. The thing is... murders are messy affairs. In the prologue it was implied that it was quite some time before anybody even discovered the body; hours, probably... and then there's all kinds of bureaucracy that needs to be slogged through. They'd get the kid placed in foster care as soon as possible, of course, but I'm not so sure they're going to be able to find him a place and enrolled in a new school within forty-eight hours, not to mention getting him a Dophinimine prescription (as the 'fic has it treated as a prescription drug rather than OTC). Further, here you say that "there was no deep, bellowing tone in between," but in the prologue it was mentioned that that was the last time he was sad... while this paragraph implies that he was prevented from being sad.
The situation you've set up here seems a bit overblown. People snap and do crazy things at work, sure, but... trying to hold an entire room of people hostage in an attempt to get them to make just one more sale is strange. I'm sure something like it has happened, somewhere, but it doesn't seem like what a person in distress would do. Usually they'd be much more violent or irrational or just depressed. It's sort of like that thing in the prologue about how awful the national situation was; it's just a little too extreme to be believable.
Also, I agree with duncan on the "****" followed by "goof" thing... I know you acknowledged that criticism, but it hasn't been changed yet.
Exemplary Cases
He panned back and forth, scanning each cubicle.
Panning is a camera movement; it's not really something humans do. "Turning" back and forth, for example, would probably work better.
...and under the heat of those fluorescent tube lights...
Fluorescent lights produce very little heat; I don't know of an office setting where the heat produced by the lights would actually be noticeable, anyway, whether it had fluorescent or incandescent lights.
I'm sort of surprised that Dophinimine apparently doesn't interfere with fear the same way that it does with other emotions. After all, fear is definitely what most people would call a "negative" emotion, and it's the catalyst for many a crime. A fearful person isn't a happy person... but eh.
In the Pursuit of Happiness
“Nah man, I’m pretty sure it’s just you,” I laughed
“With that, my good man, I bid you adieu. There’s a woman in the corner of the bar with my name written all over her,” I said naively.
“Oh, I see,” he said, turning around to catch a glimpse. “Good luck.”
As mentioned before, rules of punctuation. There should always be punctuation inside the quotation marks, and when the text that comes after is dependent on the dialogue and neither a question mark or an exclamation point is appropriate, you use a comma. I'm not going to mark similar mistakes from this point on.
The bartender sat her juice by her hand.
I think you want "set" there.
But don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.
Hmm, you weren't so presumptuous as to call me 'Elle'...
The bullet whizzed through the air, tore through the cubicle wall and hit Nick right between the eyes. His blood splattered up and over the wall of my cubicle, landing on my lap, on my sleeves, on my face.
Okay, so Mr. Gowlman shot Nick... through the cubicle wall? That'd be an incredibly difficult shot to make... trying to hit anybody through a solid object, even if you have a reasonably good idea of their location (I guess Mr. Gowlman must be able to see *something* of Nick, unless his accusation of calling the police was made at random), is real tough. And if Mr. Gowlman has a line of sight to Nick, why didn't he angle the gun so that it he didn't have to try and shoot through a wall? And finally, I'm no forensic scientist, but I know that that's *way* too much blood for a clean head shot. I mean, that's about as much blood as you'd get if the dude's head
exploded, I think. There might be a little high-flying splatter that would make it over the cubicle wall, but it would be of no significant quantity.
The best part of this chapter was definitely the conversation with Mrs. Rische, as I'll address in the final wrap-up. However, her dialogue (where she talks about how you can't make something less scary by making people unable to experience fear) suggests that people on Dophinimine shouldn't be able to feel fear, which I mentioned earlier and which Michael's reactions seem to contradict. Then there's the fact that he's absolutely terrified at the beginning of this post, but then he starts smiling right after his friend gets blown away. I mean, I get that he can't be sad about it, but if he was frightened before, he ought to be
really freaked out at that point.
Reaching Rische
“My hand! Oh God, my hand!” he screamed in pain as different streams of blood ran down from his wrist, separating into different channels along their descent and falling to the floor along with his gun.
I'm guessing the first "different" isn't supposed to be there. I don't believe it should be, anyway.
And that’s when I knew we’d be plastered on the front page of every newspaper nationwide the next day. Man Loses Cool and Kills Employee.
I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and rubbed the blood off of my face with a warm damp cloth.
Wait,
seriously? He walked home covered in blood, and nobody thought that a little strange? Further, he didn't even bother to wipe the blood off his face until
now? That's not an issue of not being able to feel remorse--I mean, even if you consider that blood effectively has no more of a connotation than, say, paint, but if you got paint splashed on your face, you'd want it cleaned off right away, or at least as soon as possible, not hours later. Unless you put it there intentionally or didn't notice it.
I could toss away my tragedy with a pop of a pill.
The tense should be consistent with the previous sentence.
But I didn’t have the bliss of being ignorant. I now knew that things should be different, and I couldn't help but think of Michelle and her cranberry juice on a day like this one.
More tense shifts. You're trying pretty hard to break into the present tense, but you shift back to past in the next paragraph.
Her home was small and painted a deep blue that complimented the night sky.
Generally speaking, you should use "which" in instances where you'd use a comma, and "that" otherwise.
I could hear her unlocking the door, preparing to let me in.
After all, I was there to talk.
You would only use "here" if speaking in the present tense.
Sometimes you walk into a place and are greeted with a predominant color, some predominant sound or smell, but at once I was overwhelmed by the culmination of all things that made Michelle’s home what it was.
I sat down on Michelle’s couch as she walked behind it and into the adjacent room, which was the kitchen.
The ending clause is an appositive, which means that it exists only to give additional, nonessential information. Appositives are set off by commas.
Wide Open Eyes
You can never deny your humanity wholly.
This sentence sounds strange because the adverb is so far from the verb it modifies. What about "You can never wholly deny your humanity"?
The wall crumbles and the harsh winds of regret and remorse are free to grate the bare skin of their beating chest.
Their... "beating" chest? I'm not sure what that means.
They thought they were fine, but when they realized they weren’t, the weight of so much wasted time fell down on them like a pouring rain or any all-encompassing pressure.
Compound sentence, as I talked about before. Compound-complex, actually, but the same rule applies.
...throw off your yoke and learn when to yield to your emotions, or you can hang your head and trod forward with the yoke on your shoulder forever.
The "OR" thing is rather cheesy and makes the paragraph look like some cheap marketing ploy or a question on a test where they want to make sure you really, really don't pick two answers. If you want that much emphasis on a word, italics are more stylistically appealing and have largely the same effect.
Also, "trod" is the past tense form of "tread," so it doesn't work in this sentence. You need the infinitive form, and "tread on" doesn't sound right. Plod would work, though.
It led me to Michelle’s house, and it led me to this scenario.
Another compound sentence. Again, the rule is when there are two independent clauses combined into one, both a comma and a conjunction are necessary to connect them. I'm not going to mark these from now on.
And in moments of idle-mindedness I some times think back to that traumatic moment in my life.
Sometimes is one word.
And I felt myself at that moment beginning to slip into a depression so deep, and so dark.
So deep and dark that what?
It said to me, “B[/color]e still. Your life is not over, it’s not worthless, it’s just different now.”
And when my withdrawal and my depression shouted
This line should be in the next paragraph with the rest of the dialgue, not hanging where it is now.
I clung to the whisper’s reassuring words amongst the constant pounding of negativity from every other neuron in my head.
"Clang" is an onomatopoeia.
This withdrawal sequence... it's very different from Michael's, which I don't have a problem with. Michael, after all, has much more violent memories that have been repressed, so it's natural that he would have respond more violently to the withdrawal process. However, Mrs. Rische's withdrawal seems to lack a real physical element. She has the initial feeling of cold, yes, and shivering, but she never really makes any real attempt to *find* her pills. She doesn't appear to have any real physical need for them, while if Dophinimine acts at all like advertised, it should have a very powerful physical component. It would expect to see some very serious physical response to a lack of the drug. I mean, just think of what people go through when they don't get
coffee... twitchiness, headaches, appetite issues... and this is hardcore psychoactive stuff we're talking here. Detox would last *much* longer than forty-eight hours and involve some very real cravings and physical torments. I doubt Mrs. Rische would really be able to go through it just lying at the side of her bed. I feel that Michael's reaction to deprivation from the drug, as seen next chapter, is much truer to what the experience should be like.
Conflict
When you’ve carried a weight for so long, you’re likely to have forgotten it’s even there.
"So long?" How long?
I opened my eyes to the still-glowing bulbs in the kitchen[color=red,[/color] but all I could see was the absence of Dophinimine.
I knew she heard me, she just wasn’t listening.
Another instance where you can't glue two independent clauses together with just a comma.
The rubbing didn’t work at all, I could feel their blood just beneath my eyelids, sloshing back and forth in my ducts.
...and same as the quoted sentence before. I'm going to stop mentioning these, too, unless I had already grabbed a sentence with one in it for a different reason.
I’d’ve never done it had I known how pointless it all was.
It'd look better if you wrote "I'd've" out partially rather than using a double contraction: "I'd never have done it..."
At the fork in the road, I found myself tripping over my feet, stumbling, panting to get to the cowards’ way out, unashamedly and unabashedly admitting defeat.
Why is this line italicized?
But I wouldn’t have her standing over me, helpless, holding my eyes open.
The placement of "helpless" in this sentence causes it to refer to Mrs. Rische, not Michael.
And so this is what “rage” feels like. This is that emotion that drives someone to murder.
A slip into the present tense.
Twenty-five milligrams of pure falsehood
It sounded like he’s spitting up blood.
I landed on it and grasped the doorknob.
But in no way sufficiently does knowing prepare you for understanding these things firsthand.
The "sufficiently" in this sentence is very out of place, as it doesn't appear to be modifying something. If I understand what you were trying to say correctly, "In no sufficient way" would be the correct phrasing.
The formatting in this chapter is a bit odd. The big, bolded "MRS. RISCHE" labeling the POV shifts is rather jarring in the midst of all the rest of the text. You can indicate what character you're moving to with their name, but centering it or something would be less intrusive than making it bold and allcaps. In truth, though, just a line breaker like the one you use between her POV and Michael's works and is much less jarring. I'm not sure why you go and label Mrs. Rische's stuff "Mrs. Rische" but don't bother to mark Michael's... neither is harder to discern than the other. In any case, the chapter wouldn't have come out looking as akward as it did if it weren't for the fact that there was just that little two-paragraph section separating the sections from Mrs. Rische's POV, which means that the bold name, plus the line, showed up on my screen all at once, making it look cluttered. I'm not sure why you just have that little bit in the middle there... it kind of looks tacked on. The formatting thing would be less obvious if it wasn't there, but either way there are more desirable means of handling the POV switches.
The ending of the chapter surprised me a bit, but I like it overall. Too often you have characters in stories who are very larger-than-life and always manage to make the tough decision in the end. The fact that Mrs. Rische wasn't able to stick to her guns makes her seem much more human and fallible, and I think that her reaction was quite understandable in this situation.
Past the Stage of Making Amends
All the sacrifice associated with this is no more than fruitless punishment if at the end you can’t look back and say
"This" in this sentence doesn't make a lot of sense, because it's singular and you mentioned multiple trials in the previous sentence.
…but instead are forced to regretfully admit that you are where you are because someone made-you-make it.
"Made-you-make" shouldn't be hyphenated.
How could I have been so violent and so rude?
...he's worried about impropriety when he was threatening to do the woman serious physical harm? Seems like rude doesn't really cover it; maybe a different word.
I motioned for the bottle of Dophinimine carefully and slowly, finally grasping it in my left hand before I just stood there, still.
When you motion for something, it means that you're indicating that you want someone to get it for you. In this case, "reached for" would be better.
I came here with strong conviction, the well-defined motive of discontinuing my dependence on Dophinimine.
I’m afraid as I drive down this road that it’s too late to make amends with my former life.
Another sentence that's in present tense. I'm going to stop noting them after this point... suffice to say, this is something you need to watch out for.
I reached my hand up to clear my face, then-after drawing back a tear-stained sleeve.
It should just be "then;" there's no such construction as then-after, and "thereafter" means "from that point forward."
The chronology of the detox seems rather screwy here. Michael was starting to feel cravings for Dophinimine after about 22 hours, and went on his rampage after no more than thirty hours without the drug. However, when Michael is driving in this chapter, it's been well over twenty-four hours since his last dose of Dophinimine, and far from feeling cravings, he feels as though his previous dose is yet lingering.
Phantasmagoria
So what happened with the girl you met in the bar a few nights ago? I think a day or so before I got shot in the head?
I realize that this is supposed to be a dream sequence and therefore Nick's sense of time might intentionally be distorted; if that's not supposed to be the case, though, I'm afraid that this quote flies in the face of the story's chronology as it's been laid out thus far.
A quick scene of comradery followed by me coughing blood and stumbling through Michelle’s kitchen...
Had we come so far, fallen so far down our abyss of happiness that we didn’t know, even in our minds, what our hearts should feel, what was appropriate protocol, at least, for an occasion like this?
The appositive needs commas on both sides.
Ma'am, sir, are you all without?
It's a contraction of "madam." Most people would say "both" rather than "all" in this situation, too.
Where did these burdened groans and echoing howls of grief originate?
"Wherefrom" isn't a word.
Just as one sorrowful cry reached a crescendo, I shut my eyes, bowed my head, and all went black.
I mentioned the problem I had with using "crescendo" this way earlier; just pointing out that it appears here again.
My mind, as if it had been waiting on my body to heal enough so that I could bear the pain while awake, snapped back to reality suddenly.
That's if you want the word in the sense of "to withstand," which I think you do.
It’s the first thing you do when you sense something with one of the other four: open your eyes!
One of the other four what? This sentence doesn't have anything for "one of the other" to point to; although its meaning can be inferred from context, grammatically it makes no sense.
Walls made of splintered wooden boards, sticks of hay laying about the floor…
"Pieces of hay" is more the norm.
He was covered head-to-toe in a woolen olive-colored cloak and stood a diminutive five feet...
Numbers from one to a hundred should be written out in a narrative context.
How did I survive this? What he described was a dead man…
The injuries Michael was supposed to have had wouldn't kill you provided you got medical attention in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. before you bled out).
If you meant for the "old man" in this chapter to be an alakazam, you need to indicate that Michael can't actually *see* that it's a man, but only assumes that it is. If it
is an alakazam, then it's rather strange that it's able to "speak human," although I'm sure there must be some explanation. Right now, it's not clear that he can't see anything of the creature besides the moustache, if such is the case; "protracted hood" doesn't really mean anything, although I'm guessing that you meant that the hood was raised such that the creature's head wasn't actually visible. Even a hood wouldn't be able to hide how wrong the shape of its head is, either.
I'm a bit mixed on this chapter. There were some genuinely good aspects to it--the conversation between Nick and Michael was very natural and pleasant to read, and the funeral scene had a couple good moments, notably Nick watching from his coffin and the "tissues replaced with pill bottles" thing. However, if this is supposed to be a dream sequence, it doesn't really work... it makes too much sense. I mean, think about it--have you ever had a dream in which someone made a joke that you were actually able to understand upon waking? And in dreams, do you ever actually have any revelations about life that you're able to relate to or even comprehend upon awakening? The "last living people on earth" line was nice, but again, do you think that way in a dream? Now, if this is some sort of vision and not, technically, a dream, then there's some possibility that it would be more coherent, depending on what caused it. It's just too lucid to be a dream, really. I haven't really had experience with hallucinations, but I don't think that they'd be much like that, either. Overall, I just feel like this sequence is meant to explicate lessons that Michael (or the readers) need to learn, rather than be true to how it would actually be expected to happen--but that's something I'll talk about more at the end.
Resonance
Light poured in through the boarding cracks in my barnyard cove of convalescence.
"Boarding cracks" doesn't make any sense; "cracks in the boards" or something similar is what you want.
My pant legs were flaps dangling from the waistband...
“Ah. Well, I am. Thank you so much for saving my life…whatever that is now.” I said this with an odd lightness and a reflexive smirk.
This piece of dialogue needs a period there instead of a comma because the text after it isn't an indication of how it was conveyed, but instead a reference to the sentence as it had already been spoken.
It’s amazing how I had managed to traverse the splintered path life had led me down.
"Lead" is an element (or a verb); "led" is the past tense of "lead." As you can see, this sentence also had tense issues and one of those things where you use "this" or "these" when the word doesn't have a real antecedent.
One answer to sum it all up and explain to me why I was in burned and tattered clothing sleeping in a barn: with no one, just after dusk.
I don't understand why there's a colon there... even a comma wouldn't really fit.
You could be entitled just as much to tragedy as triumph in a world of just a million variables, and occurrences with only statistical significance.
I don't understand this sentence. Why is it significant that there is "just" a million variables, and why does it matter that there are only statistically significant occurrences? Basically everything after the word "triumph" is obfuscated.
In the quiet of my sleep, when my mind had had time to settle, I tuned in my ears.
To say that he "tuned in" his ears doesn't mean anything; if you mean he started paying attention to them, that would be "tuned in to."
Sometimes we operate so far above these things that we forget them; these emotions can’t peek out amidst the noise of our endless pursuit to be happy.
It'd be "pursuit of happiness," or a different word than "pursuit"... "attempt," for example.
It had sublimated physicality and become some kind of visible...
...sublimated? No... sublimation is the process of a solid becoming a gas. Did you maybe mean "surpassed?"
Why is Michael referring to the blissey as a "Pokemon" if he's never heard the term before?
The weird formatting makes a return this chapter; the first time I read it, I was way thrown off because I didn't realize Mrs. Rische's portion had ended and we were back with Michael for a bit. If you're going to label POV shifts to her side with her name, you should do the same for Michael.
It's odd... by now, Michael should *definitely* be in detox hell, unless the alakazam gave him some pills at some point. I would alternately suggest that the blissey had managed to heal the neurological damage caused by the drug, but he goes on to reflect that he must still be drugged because he doesn't feel sad enough. Unless that's taken to be false and that Dophinimine's influence on him has actually ended, he shouldn't be at all coherent by this point.
--
Okay! So that's the chapters, and here's the full story.
This is certainly a different concept than I've seen applied to pokémon fanfiction before. While there are plenty of dystopian approaches out there, the drugged "utopia" concept is one that I haven't run across before. While pokémon really haven't played a major role in the story thus far, I think that it will be interesting to see how they play into the world as a whole. Thus far, most of what's gone on has been more introducing the situation and characters than driving at the plot.
It's also relatively uncommon to see chaptered 'fics written in first person. I'm afraid, though, that I don't think you're really using that POV to the best of its strengths. It gives you an opportunity to get into the main character's head and really explore what he's thinking as he goes through his life, yes... and the main characters in this 'fic certainly do a great deal of thinking. You run very heavy on the introspection in this 'fic, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the way that you do introspection doesn't sit very well with me for a couple of reasons.
First, most of Michael's thoughts are a lot more like narration than actual thought. Now, because everything's in the past, it's clear that he *is* narrating from some point in the future, but you get rather carried away with long paragraphs to illustrate a particular analogy ("plucking the strings" in an earlier chapter) or consisting of philosophical musings. This is not how people think. Whenever Michael goes into a stretch of thought-narration, it seems to be because he's got something profound to mull over and a poetic conclusion to draw. At times, things seem to happen simply so that he can think about them and reach a profound understanding of them or dispense plot-necessary information (such as the kid at the bus stop near the beginning). But, really, who, on a regular basis, is going to stumble on revelations like "I'm one of the last people on earth actually able to feel!" or "this splintered staircase totally represents my life!"
Now, you're writing a story, so just like dialogue, you're going to pare thoughts down to their bare essentials and restructure them to be more clear--cut out the "umms," the stammering, and the mixing-up of words, if you would. But the way the story is now, Michael barely seems to have any "normal" thoughts, thoughts about what he's going to have for lunch, or that sports game he saw a couple of nights ago, or a joke he wants to share with Nick. He'll make observations (and then usually go off and contemplate them for a few sentences), but rarely is there the sense of his mind outside of his fixations on Mrs. Rische and the Dophinimine fixation/its associates (such as his parents' death). Dophinimine is supposed to make him a basically happy, carefree guy. Where are those carefree, happy thoughts of his? At one point he says that he thinks of his parents' death in the same way that he thinks of sports scores. Okay, but why is he mentally stating this? Why aren't we seeing it instead--Michael mulling over the big game, getting distracted and led into reflecting on his parents' murder, then going back to thinking about football as though the matter was of no consequence? Wouldn't that be more effective than stating that that should be the case?
"Show, don't tell," isn't exactly one of my favorite phrases, but you do seem to have issues with it in this 'fic. Like I said, for a happy guy, Michael sure doesn't
seem happy at any point in this 'fic. Whether it's questioning his addiction to Dophinimine or mulling over his relationship with Mrs. Rische, he feels at best detached, emotionless--not happy or even really "not sad." Unless, of course, the point is that Dophinimine doesn't actually make you happy, it just blocks really extreme emotions and people keep telling themselves that they're happy because they think that's how they "should" be, but the rest of the 'fic doesn't suggest that line of reasoning.
Also, Michael's thoughts are always very definite. This is a massive shift in his life, a time of turmoil. It makes sense that he would be reflecting on his life, questioning the way he sees the world, searching for answers--but even though he takes on major issues again and again, there's little of that sense of confusion and loss in his thinking patterns. He's always very definite in his thoughts--there's little, "could Dophinimine be wrong?" and almost entirely, "Dophinimine is so wrong, I see that now!" There's no, "could I salvage this relationship" and lots of "omg she hates me
forever!" Michael is always convinced, whether correctly ("Dophinimine is bad") or incorrectly ("Mrs. Rische doesn't love me"); there's not a lot of confusion or lack of conviction or flip-flopping from one opinion to another. This is a time when Michael's life essentially gets turned upside-down--don't you think he'd feel very lost?
Finally, the way that Michael thinks about things doesn't feel right for him. For example, take that one stats passage I called out earlier. We're talking about a guy who answers phones for a living, here. That doesn't mean that he can't be a very intelligent person--but he's just not going to think about things in terms of math all the time. If he were a mathematician, sure, he would be expected to structure his thoughts that way. But sometimes Michael's narration makes rather technical analogies that seem wrong for his character.
At times, this carries over into dialogue. In general, you do much better dialogue than you do thought/narration; you capture some of the frivolity of conversation and don't lay the revelation on as heavy. There are times where you slip, though. Take Mrs. Rische's comment about playing peek-a-boo with a child who hasn't learned the concept of Object Permanence. Object Permanence is a very technical term; most people probably don't even know what it means, and unless the speaker is a psychologist speaking to another psychologist, it's very unlikely to get brought up in conversation. It just doesn't make sense for an analogy because so few people understand it. Now, Mrs. Rische might be a psychologist for all I know, but it comes down to the fact that the analogy doesn't make sense for casual conversation. The same is true but far, far more so for the characters' reflections, but because there's so much more introspection than dialogue, it feels a lot worse.
In general, I think you're laying things on too heavy with this 'fic. I've mentioned before that you're setting up situations that are so extreme that they feel contrived rather than intense? To an extent, I feel like this is an extension of wanting to spell the point out to readers rather than letting them infer it from the way the story actually plays out. Reading this, I felt like I was getting beat over the head with the idea that sorrow is a natural and integral part of life, that Mrs. Rische and Michael are totally in love, and so on. It's possible to explore these subjects without having Michael spell it out, sometimes repeatedly, in his thought-narration. If you were to set up a prologue with no thoughts at all, just Michael being all happy, going to work, taking his pills, and then watching his friend getting shot and just kind of being all smiles and getting on with his day, people are definitely going to understand that Dophinimine is awful. They'd be just as creeped out without Michael explaining that he's come to the realization that they should be creeped out. I think that, while spending time in a character's head can add a lot to the story, you kind of spend time in Michael's head to the expense of the atmosphere and impact of the story itself, simply because it belabors the point and kind of puts a gigantic flashing neon sign out telling readers how they should feel about the story's events, rather than letting them feel how they want to about those events and come to their own conclusions.
In general, your prose style is decent. You have the most trouble with commas in sentence construction and dialogue punctuation--you do it right
most of the time, but then there are times when you just stop for some reason. Tense changes, too, happen a lot. It feels like you really want to be writing this in present tense (but Michael's expository stuff would work even less in that format). The prose style doesn't particularly detract from the story, doesn't really add much to it; it's serviceable, I guess. Not much to say about it. You do a fine turn of phrase now and then, as I've said a couple of times before--the replacing tissues with pill bottles bit for example, or the introduction of Mrs. Rische. Your analogies can be nice, it's just that I feel they don't really belong.
There are moments where things do really work in this. You really get a sense of who the characters are at times; when Michael's talking to his apartment like it's a person, for example, or Mrs. Rische's doing her littler percentage thing or Nick's making a stupid joke. You should be looking to have more of this sort of interaction in the 'fic;
that's what makes character. When Michael was saying, "pleased to see you too" to his apartment, that gave me the picture of someone cheerful and carefree, sort of a joker and at peace with the world. Not much else in that chapter did much in terms of letting me in on what sort of person he really was. Profundity doesn't really do that for you; when Michael's in narrator-mode, he doesn't really come off as a
person, but rather as some detached entity dispensing life's truths. Getting into a character's head can tell you a lot about them, sure, but seeing how they interact with the world and other people is just as important.
I think that you've got a good idea here, provided that it doesn't somehow turn itself into a generic 'fic ("now that you have discovered the pokémon, you must go on a trainer journey to find yourself and experience true emotion!"). At the moment, though, I think that your approach robs the idea of some of its impact. Right now, I don't feel any particular empathy for any of the characters. If you can bring them to life, turn them into real people, then I think your story will be much more effective.
