Response to "Safe"

The story "Safe" had its good points and bad. It follows the story of a young woman named Alexandra, presumably recently graduated from college, as she is alone at home with her dog one evening. It gives you a lot of backstory and insight to the narrator's thoughts throughout the piece and that actually makes up the majority of the story, telling a large deal about how Alexandra has no trust for men and that her brother and mother have a large amount of dislike for the divorced father of the family. When she takes a shower, her protective dog is not around her normally and realizes that something is amiss, and eventually after some thoughts and actions from her fear she is assaulted and nearly raped. It is at the very end that the perpetrator never succeeds and he is arrested as the cops come. I felt like the story did an excellent job of building tension. You could tell throughout the story that something major was being built up to, and when a moment really makes Alexandra scared, it is told well on paper. I did feel like the story was very predictable though. The whole thing was set up to go in basically one direction, because nothing was really told other than negative thoughts on the father and details scattered around. I felt like there were a number of things that were unnecessary for the story. Also I felt like it was overloaded with commas. I felt like many things were said to give the character a voice, but I am not sure that this was accomplished and much of it just came off as being unpolished unfortunately. It seemed to drag out a long time to get to the point it ended at. Also, the characters need to seem more real.