Rebel Town Reviews [OPEN]

The Light on the Horizon - @Di_Rossi

The Light on the Horizon by Di_Rossi 

Reviewed by AmyMarieZ

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Overview: The Light on the Horizon is a short paranormal story about a group of young brothers who realize (or don't realize, depending on how you look at it) something very odd is going on at their home. When main character Robbie, the oldest of the brothers, wakes up one morning, he remembers having a headache the previous day, but it has mysteriously gone away. Other than that, he can't remember much of anything about the previous night. The oddness of the narration itself clues the reader into the fact that something has gone very, very wrong. Combined with the parents' mysterious disappearance, a strange light on the horizon each night, and other increasingly odd occurrences, The Light on the Horizon throws the reader on an adventure to figure out what exactly is going on... and what that light on the horizon means.

The Light on the Horizon is one of those stories that, if you know how it ends, it spoils a lot of the fun. Since it is such a fun and fast read, I'd recommend reading it quickly before checking out this review and having it spoiled for you!

Structure: The short story is broken up into six parts, each covering one "day" in the "life" of the brothers. Although, with the way time flows in the story, it is difficult to determine how days are actually passing, or if they are passing at all.

The use of chapter breaks to separate the days is effective. It steps the reader through the story, presenting one or two more clues with each chapter. As far as a method of presenting this type of story on Wattpad, I think chapter breaks are absolutely the way to go. The short chapters can each be read in five minutes or less, making it easily accessible.

Grammar: It is clear that the author is a very experienced writer, so there are no grammatical errors in the piece. The only odd thing I noticed was that after dialog ending in a question mark or an exclamation point where a dialog tag followed, a comma was placed after the question mark within the closing quotation mark, such as:

"Should we eat?," he asked...

I have generally seen dialog punctuated without the comma after the question mark. I am not sure if the dialog was punctuated this way as a stylistic choice, or if there is some other reason the author decided to punctuate this way. Since this piece is an experimental concept, I don't think it necessarily needs to be changed, but I did want to point out that it stuck out to me as a bit strange, and I'm curious about it.

Character Development: The main character Robbie is the oldest of his three brothers. Through hints that at first seem like jokes, Robbie divulges the fact that he feared his father might kill them for misbehaving. As the story continues, the reader realizes comes to the chilling realization that this is literally what happened.

Since Robbie was the oldest, he tried to rebel against his controlling father in any little way he could, while his younger siblings weren't quite at that point yet. Now that his parents are gone, Robbie slowly realizes this means he is completely free of their control... for the rest of his "life".

When I look back on the story, all the hints were there. But this character development point kind of flew over my head a bit more than I would have liked. It probably had to do with me being a poor reader, but part of it may have been the fact that the story had so much to figure out, I couldn't quite manage to figure out everything in one read through.

My thought is that the story might benefit from being a bit longer to give the reader more time to figure things out about Robbie's motives. Some other ideas could be having the character make more direct comparisons between his own actions and his brothers'. For example, in the first chapter, Lewis is playing basketball, something that his dad makes him practice. Robbie's rebellious nature might be a bit clearer if he mentioned something about how he no longer listens to his dad when he tries to get him to practice sports. A similar thing is shown with Robbie and waving to the neighbor the dad doesn't like, which his younger brothers don't do. However, to me, this occurrence came across more as something paranormal and eerie, so I missed the other point of it slightly.