Hell of his Own is a short story written in the magical realism genre, and is about a boy named Charles who attends a school full of mean-spirited students and teachers who employ corporate punishment on a regular basis. It uses third-person narrative stance, and is completely in the past tense. The purpose of the short story is to entertain the audience whilst providing insight into the mind of a seemingly normal but socially outcast student with common self esteem issues, and is intended for young people interested in magical realism or thrillers.

The title ‘Hell of his Own’ is meant to refer to Charles’ seemingly grandiose persecutory suspicions that the school was built to torture him, whilst also foreshadowing the twist at the end of the story in which it turns out that the school is not in fact a school, but a psychiatric hospital, and the school was, in fact, a creation all of his own. However, the reader is intended to realise this only at the end.

Sentence structure in the story consists mainly of long complex and compound sentences to convey Charles’ thought tracks, whilst simple and shorter complex sentences are used only for simple events and observations in the real world, as in “He sat down next to her making sure not to seem invasive.” The long sentences used in thought tracks and dramatic scenes throughout the story allow complex descriptive points to be presented clearly and concisely, appealing to an intelligent audience and providing a detailed, empathic view of Charles’ mind and his school experience.

Semantic fields are used throughout the story – namely fields of hopelessness, victimisation and isolation. These are connotated respectively by phrases such as “It never ended”, “…do something upsetting or intimidating” and “There must’ve been something morbidly wrong with him”. The first paragraph presents these semantic fields in order to present the general tone of Charles’ school experience concisely.

Charles’ thoughts consist mostly of abstract nouns, whilst dialogue and events consist of other common and proper nouns. The narration of Charles’ thought tracks includes abstract nouns relating to the semantic fields being presented, such as “hope”, “coincidence”, “certainty”, and lexically cohesive abstract nouns such as “suffering”, “misery” and “hostility”.