Jercurpac 2009-10-06 10:08:03

I believe you mean "I had this fixation with steam" and not "asphyxiation. Unless, of course, he's constantly being strangled to death by steam. Otherwise it's a decent story. I like the idea of a madman twisting a massive steam driven factory into a place of torture, but it's not very believably done. It just sort of happens. I never got the sense that the guy was the kind of bat-shit insane one would have to be too pull something like that off. I think the tone is also pretty flat, it's in first person, but it feels distant, detached, and overall pretty flat. The near death tension is never heightened. You might want to toy with putting into third-person. Looking at the story from a different perspective might help you see it with the proper intensity.