Oblivion’s Child by Tommy B. Smith

Oblivion’s Child by Tommy B. Smith
Publisher: Raven Tale Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Paranormal, Historical
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

The storm came down, incredible in its fury. When the clouds parted, even the sun’s brilliance could not dispel the darkest spaces to persist.

Nine-year-old Zander sees the outlines of the monsters in the darkness. Against his mounting fears, he cannot elude them, nor escape the madness of the day when his mother tried to drown him in the bath.

She never gave him a true name, only a Z with X’s behind it, and promised him to the void.

For Zander, his grandmother, and his catatonic Aunt Helen in their beachfront house on the Florida shoreline, the tide has shifted—the tide of a turbulent cosmic sea, its dark currents murmuring chaos.

Rural doesn’t always mean safe.

What a deliciously scary read this was! I loved the ominous descriptions of the places Zander visited during the course of the plot. Some of them seemed fairly ordinary at first glance, but that only made it more exciting to discover their eerie secrets as the characters took a closer look at the home or the forest they were currently in and realized that things might not be what they seem. I wish I could be more specific than that, but the less other readers know in advance about what awaits the characters the better.

I would have liked to see a bit more time spent on the character development as the amount of it that was included tickled my imagination. Yes, this seems to be a world that is more plot driven, but with a little more attention paid to fleshing out the characters I would have happily bumped this up to a full five-star rating. It was otherwise exactly the sort of horror I love to read.

Secrets can have a funny way of wiggling their way out into the open. Zander’s limited knowledge about his birth parents intrigued me, and I wondered where the author might go with the few tidbits of information about them Zander did have as the plot progressed. I’m still a fairly new fan of Mr. Smith’s work, but I have to say that I’ve become even more impressed with his ability to weave plot lines together in memorable ways as I dig deeper into his body of work. He handled Zander’s origins nicely.

This is the second instalment in the Black Carmenia series, and it should be read in publication order for plot development reasons.

Oblivion’s Child made me yearn for more.