I think the criticisms are interesting as they were some of the things I struggled with writing the story, namely the time shifts and the motives of the narrator. I've always hated stories that start at the end and then work backwards, whereas this goes back and forth quite a bit. However overtime I found it was a better structure to tell the story than a linear one, especially in regards to pacing. It would've been way too slow otherwise.
As a revenge story, I think it's pretty clear that drug addiction has muddled this narrator's thought process and the value of his actions. Does he want to take down the whole drug trade? No. I think more than anything he just wants to somehow let go of the trauma of losing his first love interest and somehow thinks if he can find and kill the men that did this, things will somehow get better and he won't feel so troubled. Of course, they don't get better, not until he gets high again. There's a lot of flaws and weakness in this person and his good intentions are devalued by the fact that despite everything, despite where he gets the drugs from, he doesn't care because of how they make him feel. Specifically it's a reliving of his first sexual experience with Derrick, who he lost due to these very drug dealers. It's escapism at it's worst and I think it is, as one put it, a very clear metaphor for how drugs can "eat a person". Corny, maybe, but I enjoyed playing around with the horror elements in that sense.
So, in a way, being frustrated I think is a very understandable reaction. Of course it's terrible that he does the drugs that killed his friend at the end of the story, and when you think of the imagery of the worm eating the boy in the warehouse, it's even more disturbing that he's able to push these thoughts aside all so he can feel something he doesn't really deserve to have anymore.
As far as the crime noir elements with the father figure, it was more of a practical choice, otherwise I didn't think his chances of ever finding these men were very good. There are, of course, all sorts of holes one could find, ones I conveniently "wrote around" to maintain a suspension of disbelief (as much as that's possible in a story where worms shit drugs). Lazy writing? Maybe, but sometimes you just have to choose your battles in a story and focus on the things that are working. The horror of it worked well I think. The crime noir elements could've have been tighter and I think if it had been less of a genre story I would've focused more on those elements. Specifically it still bothers me that the license plates were known by the police but never found, as if it would be so easy to travel around Philadelphia like that. But maybe it was just in the narrator's father's notes and not on record with the police department, or maybe the dealers paid people off. There are plenty of ways to explain it, but I never thought it was very important to focus on the more procedural elements of the story as it's more of a weird fiction story, not so much a crime noir story.
Most of this came from walking the train tracks near my house back home and some of the people I knew in a small town. I used to wonder all the time if they went all the way to Philadelphia or not. I still don't to be honest, but I'd like to think they do, that somehow if you walked the tracks you could pass through every city in America. There's something haunting about that to me.
As far as the worms, it was one of those ideas that changed quite a bit until I settled on something that disturbed me the most. They're frightening in that they aren't fast and predatory, but something you'd have to assist in order for it to feast on another person, which is quite depraved. They're big slow dumb worms. The mindlessness of it is especially uncomfortable for me. It was very much a nod to Perdido Street Station and their "slake moths", which ate consciousness and shit dreams over the city at night, however unlike the slake moths, these worms are not dangerous on their own and they literally feast on the brains of their prey.
It's strange to read the story now, and to listen to it. I wrote it about a year ago and it was like hearing it for the first time. The table with the boy left me very cold and all I could think was, "ugh, who would write this!". Horror writing is tricky in that way. For every beast I put on the page, I'm also sort of exorcising them from myself, so they're all the more shocking when I read them again.