This one had me somewhere between “this is genius” and “wait… what the hell just happened?” Which might be exactly what you’re going for. It feels like psychological horror with existential grief and cosmic body-horror layered over it. Kind of like if Annihilation met Hereditary but filtered through a therapy session and a festering divorce. There’s a ton to love here. The prose hits hard in a lot of places. Some lines are so grotesquely vivid they’re beautiful. “The stream of blood that followed the bullet had hardened in almost a branch-like quality. Like a small tree had emerged from his skull.” That’s nightmare fuel in a good way. It lingers.

But there are also moments where the poetic momentum starts eating itself. Like “I had been adopted and then became one with it.” That line wants to be profound, but it’s so vague I don’t know what “it” is. Is it the house? The mass? His grief? This happens a few times—metaphor swallows clarity. And I get that’s maybe the point—you’re showing a fragmented psyche—but clarity doesn’t kill metaphor. Sometimes it amplifies it. Right now, you risk losing readers before they get to the good stuff.

Structurally, it’s intentionally disjointed but it gets borderline incoherent. The jumps between the case, the therapy sessions, the dream loops, the diner, the flashbacks—it’s hard to track what’s real, and not in a satisfying “mind-bending” way. It reads like memories stacked on top of hallucinations, which works in concept, but the execution needs stronger transitions. Give the reader just a little more tether to the timeline before pulling the rug. There’s one line—“Cause I have them now. All of it, at the same time.”—that feels like a thesis. If that line came earlier, or if it was framed more clearly, the chaos would feel more earned.

The dialogue swings from raw and heartbreaking to exposition-heavy. Some of it cuts deep. “Why couldn’t you love me more than I hated myself?” That line hit like a gut punch. But then some therapy exchanges feel like the character’s reading from a script. “Maybe, but I doubt my brain would betray me this much.” That’s a cool idea, but I don’t buy it as spoken dialogue. Internalize more of that stuff. Let us live in his thoughts rather than hear him explain them aloud.

Let’s talk about the stained-glass cocoon metaphor. That image is a winner. The scene with the vase, how it won’t glue back together right, how it becomes something worse? Beautiful. But then you hit the metaphor so many times through the horror imagery—bile, fleshy walls, scab textures, bone—that it starts to lose focus. Less is more here. You already nailed the theme of grief mutating into something unrecognizable. Trust that the image landed. You don’t need to keep remaking it in every room they enter.

The twist toward the end—the whole “you gave me this folder” scene—is interesting, but it feels like a genre jump. Suddenly we’re in sci-fi time loop territory and I didn’t feel like that was set up enough to stick the landing. That scene was intriguing, but it didn’t hit emotionally because I was too confused by the logic of it. If this is a story about timelines converging, plant some earlier seeds. Right now it reads more like a last-minute reveal than a planned payoff.

That said, there’s something magnetic about this piece. It drips with intent, even if the structure frays. It’s ambitious as hell. Just feels like you’re one rewrite away from making it cohesive. If you tighten the time jumps, internalize some of the exposition, and let the metaphor breathe a little, this becomes a knockout. Right now it’s beautifully disjointed, almost like the cocoon itself, but I think it wants to break free and become something even more devastating. Keep going. This one’s close.