A Quiet Night At The Asylum

This is interesting. For a bit theer I thought he saw himself in the monitor, a reflection when it said the monitor was already off. I also surmized the sounds were psychological, but, wondered when I read the last line.

I think you have a good start. I think you should elaborate more on Edward, he sounds like a damned interesting character. The doctor is intriguing but you are a bit too vague. I get parts of it, but others I wonder if I am assuming or correct (such as the psychological sounds I mentioned).

I would like to see this expounded. It has potiential.

This is an interesting piece, I must say, I did get lost in the towering and somewhat interesting pompous language you used toward the end. It flew through my brain (if you asked me what happened after paragraph three or four, I couldn't tell you) Anyway, I liked the first sentence, although you could have shortened it to the asylum simply sucking in you entire life, since those thoughts, time and career are apart of you life. You hinted the horror in the sentence about the toes but, for me, the horror was lost in the forest of words after that.

"Edward tried to escape again tonight. This time one of his toes got away. Try as I might I find it hard to believe, but he managed to somehow get his foot to his mouth…so…"

This paragraph is brilliant. Really affecting. It reminded me of Stephen King's short-story style.

Unfortunately, after that, you kinda lost me. I'm not sure where you're trying to go with this, and I think in your pursuit of getting an introspective, slightly gothic tone, you strayed into pompous and overblown language. "Madness welcomes me grinning," would work as an image if the narrator was - say - observing a patient through a cell-door peephole and characterising him as Madness personified. In isolation, it sounds like it is only there to appear deep.

I think you need a framework for this. Is it a diary? A letter? How about case notes. Is the author a doctor, a psychiatrist, a warder? A trustee?

And I also had to read the end over in order to get what the little bits of flesh were. I think it's made unnecessarily ambiguous by your reference to eyes in the preceding sentence.

All in all, I would suggest that it's better to hint at terrible things using understated language (like you do in the "toes" paragraph) than to grab the reader by the shirt-front and start shouting into his face about how horrible all of this is.