Obliteration Circle by Tommy B. Smith
Black Carmenia #3
Publisher: Raven Tale Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Paranormal, Historical
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

When the black-bound journal of Claude de la Cour fell into Chloe’s possession, the secret passages and hidden signposts of the world became revealed to her. With these discoveries, entities from beyond have marked her for destruction.

While investigating a series of ghastly deaths on the south Louisiana bayou, she is targeted by a terror she cannot fight. The burning circles in the dark intend to obliterate her and everyone around her. Fleeing for her life, Chloe’s days have become a desperate battle for survival.

Against such forces, is any escape or means of defense even possible?

Beware the bayou.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed the most about this world so far has to do with the characters’ realistic reactions to supernatural experiences that they don’t understand. They generally had a mixture of disbelief, curiosity, and deep fear that made it difficult for them to decide what to do in the heat of the moment. Some ran away as fast as they could while others made the courageous – if also sometimes foolish – decision to investigate further. In my experience, this is exactly how people tend to react in real life to unexpected and frightening events, so it was refreshing to see it play out in fiction the same way. Each character was still an individual, but human nature tended to guide all of them along similar paths as they attempted to figure out what was really going on.

I struggled a little with keeping track of the large cast of characters in this book. Some of them were people mentioned in the first two instalments of this series, but many more were new to the universe and therefore needed to be introduced during a fast-paced plot. It would have been helpful to have some more guidance about who all of the new folks were and what their personalities were like as that’s something that plays a big role in how someone reacts to things that they cannot yet explain.

The horror elements of the plot had a nice mixture of psychological, supernatural, and physical causes. Yes, there were a few gory scenes, but many more were about building tension for characters who were fumbling around with a few clues and didn’t always know if they were on the right track. That’s exactly what I like to see in this genre.

This is the third book in a series that I’d recommend reading in order for plot and character development reasons.

Obliteration Circle was wonderfully scary.

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.