Tommy Blue

Shadows Walk the Red Skies

Tommy was good at watching, not good at remembering.

He doesn't know your name. He may never look at your face. But Tommy Blue knows when something is wrong — and he will make it right.

In the sweltering Missouri Ozarks, a drifter unlike any other moves quietly through the margins of a small town. Tommy is enormous, gentle, and broken in ways others can't see — no eyebrows, no lashes, one leg shorter than the other, a mind that lives only in the present. He speaks little and communicates with Angels only he can hear: Soft Angel, who paints the world in colors only Tommy sees; Hard Angel, who warns him of danger; Fat Angel, who rejoices in small comforts. He repairs broken lumber stacks. He corrects wrong things. He protects those who cannot protect themselves. He has always done this. He will always do this.

But something is gathering in Harrison, Arkansas.

A series of brutal, inexplicable murders has left the town reeling. Sheriff Ray Cobb, near retirement and carrying quiet grief, is working the case. His deputy — sharp-edged, haunted by her own darkness — is investigating a string of disappearances that may be connected. In the woods, in the nursing home corridors, in the red-lit nights Tommy alone can see, something ancient and malevolent is hunting the vulnerable.

Tommy Blue is supernatural horror told from the inside of an extraordinary mind — a narrative that strips away conventional thriller architecture and replaces it with something stranger and more luminous. Neuffer's novel defies easy genre placement: part folk legend, part cosmic parable, part crime procedural, soaked in the sensory richness of the Ozarks. Tommy is not your typical hero. He has no arc in the conventional sense. He simply is — a force for correction in a world that cannot stop breaking.

For readers who want their horror to linger, to unsettle, and to leave them thinking about what angels actually are.

3.5 stars

postive:
This is a skilled author who keeps you captivated by his writing and the story itself. This is overall a great story but I would recommend reading the physical book.
negative:
The automated narration for this story has poor pacing and reads everything in one single monotonous voice with no character differentiation.
In this book there are a very high number of focal characters making the story more difficult to follow. The story also has alot of jumps within time and space. It's often difficult to tell if something is real or a hallucination of a character and that allows for many interpretations of the plot.