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Sep 18Liked by Elizabeth Tai

I don’t like graphic violence and horror in literature when it’s done gratuitously, but when telling a story such as yours it’s necessary.

Again, what a well-written story, thank you for sharing it here.

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Thanks for reading it, Claudia. I wrote this a long time ago and was surprised someone is reading it ;)

You are right. I rarely write violent stories, but this one just had to be written.

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You're such a talented writer, I was surprised to find such a good story here raising the bar for fiction on Substack.

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Excellent ending!

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Thank you :D Now, waiting patiently for your Substack lol

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Excellent ghost story! I read the essay at the end as well.

The Rape of Nanking is so horrific. There was a writer named William Manchester, who’s sort of fallen out of favor these days, but he wrote several really good histories back in the 1970s and 1980s, including a series on Winston Churchill called “The Last Lion”. He was a Marine in the Pacific theater during WWII and in one of his books, which I can’t remember the title of now because I read it over 20 years ago, he devoted several pages to a rather thorough and graphic exposition of the event--maybe in his biography of General MacArthur, which was called “American Caesar”.

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Nov 14, 2022·edited Nov 14, 2022Author

I'm so happy you enjoyed it! As you know, as fiction writers, feedback is like gold. It helps us keep going ;)

Looked up William Manchester and wonder if I should look it up, but I couldn't even read Rape of Nanking. Gah. It was just too horrific.

Yeah, I cannot imagine what would happen to my mind if I had actually witnessed it. I read some of the descriptions about what happened and I had to stop because it was too much. Even watching the movie left me shaken, even if they most implied unlike how they like to show every brutality in shows these days.

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