Review of THE WITCH'S PARTY

I obtained a copy of Nicky Pacione's story, THE WITCH'S PARTY, from the Google cache for The Dark Fiction Spotlight.

THE WITCH'S PARTY is (supposedly) a true story of the time Nicky went to a Halloween party. It's rather short by Nicky's current standards - only 2100 words - but oh, what a train wreck! Let's look at the opening sentences:

It was Halloween of 1997 when I was invited to a Halloween party in Naperville, Illinois, and I had no idea what was in store for me because this was an actual party helmed by Goths. I thought it was regular Halloween Party, but what I wasn’t expecting that the party was actually ran by actual witches.

I am confused. Was the party organized by Goths? or witches? or perhaps Goth witches (if there is such a thing)? Almost immediately after this, we have the first change from past to present tense, a problem that occurs multiple times throughout the story. It appears that the editors at TDFS are as lost when it comes to the basics of writing as Nicky is.

When Nicky gets to the party, he feels:

"...like the complete outsider at this party, everyone was in long capes and dresses...The men were wearing a little more dressy takes in black...I felt like the odd man out because I was the one who had the blue collar take,..."

Translation: Nicky was too cheap or too creatively-challenged to come up with a costume. He feels out of place, and reliving that memory while writing this story apparently caused him to fall back into his habit of shilling himself whenever possible. There's now a paragraph and a half of stuff about Nicky that is both amusing (to readers who know Nicky) and completely irrelevant to the story. The witches hold a seance - and this event, which could be the most interesting in the entire story, is given just one little declaratory statement - and Nicky:

"...sat on the couch without my binder full of the works I wrote,..."

WTF? As if any normal person would go to a Halloween party with a binder full of stories. But despite getting the creeps, Nicky:

"...had this feeling I should have ran, but I didn’t because I knew if I stayed I would have a hell of a horror story to tell when I got older."

I hope the story I'm reading now isn't it, because this story is Boring, with a capital B, which rhymes with T, which...oh nevermind. The party-goers have a Ouija board, and that further creeps Nicky out because, OMG, they are trying to contact the dead. And that's necromancy. Horrors! Nicky didn't try to stop them because:

"I was their invited guest. I didn’t want to piss them off by pulling the hellfire and brimstone preacher act, living up to my Online persona GothicPreacher. ...I watched and did nothing – after all, it was Devil’s Night."

Being intimidated by women and doing nothing both sound like entirely plausible behavior from Nicky. There's bit more hand-wringing from Nicky about how creepy the Ouija board is, how people have become possessed by demons while using one, and how he feels like he's in a horror film. He mentions Lovecraft, Blackwood, Poe, etc. He states that sometimes:

"...people would see the fucking heart shaped eye fly across the room."

But:

"I was expecting something like that to happen at this party, but didn’t..."

And that's it. That's all that happened at the party. Some folks dressed in black played with a Ouija board, nothing happened, and Nicky got scared.

In summary, this is a typical Nicky "No Plot" Pacione story. There is nothing interesting or remotely scary about it.