Graphic - FunGraphix.com | Theme music - Shane Lamb

Title: The Swamp
Producer: Tanja Milojevic and LightningBolt Theater of the Mind
Type: Drama
Genre: Horror Mystery

Rating: AD-PG*
Availability: Free – LightningBolt Theater of the Mind

Greetings, Audionauts – Captain Radio here with a review of Tanja Milojevic’s The Swamp from LightningBolt Theater of the Mind.

If you ever experienced ghastly fear trying to escape a nightmare presence but unable to awaken, then you know Rachel’s terror.

[SOUND BYTE]

This hungry, menacing demon dream swamp metaphorically overflows into her conscious existence. First, Rachel (voiced by Milojevic) abruptly loses her best friend, Alice (voiced by Amanda Fur) when their college expels Alice for surreptitiously cheating off Rachel’s exam. Then, after Rachel pleads vainly with her mother (voiced by Deborah Adams) to forego a simple driving errand in an icy blizzard, Rachel receives the worst of all calls:

[SOUND BYTE]

Finally, adding to Rachel’s growing horror, the relentless swamp dream demon returns, this time with unholy help as Rachel’s mother, apparently casting blame for the accident, joins him in terrorizing her.

[SOUND BYTE]

The only seeming positive in Rachel’s waking life is the sudden appearance of dark, handsome, and very mysterious fellow student, Blake, who quickly, and quite literally, entrances her:

[SOUND BYTE]

Eventually, we gain the eerie sense of having missed a key scene along the way. By the time both we, and Rachel, learn what’s missing, it’s hideously late in the game … maybe too late.

Milojevic’s unhurried but increasingly suspenseful pace of revelation here renders The Swamp’s sudden finale all the more shocking, while the denouement “chaser” is served up suitably well chilled.

Milojevic emigrated with her family from Serbia to America at age 6. Since 2008, by day, she pursues an undergraduate degree in English Writing with a minor in Communications from Boston’s Simmons College. After-hours, she pursues her calling as an independent audio drama producer at which she steadily has improved.

For example, The Swamp, actually enlarged and scripted from a high school English Lit writing exercise, comes smartly decorated with background and bridging music so discriminately selected that I wished to hear the scoring again apart from the play.

Appearing instinctively to leverage her visual-impairment, Milojevic also aptly employs her keenly attuned hearing to evoke college environs and voices as binaural backdrop to her drama. You’ll need headphones or good stereo speaker separation to catch this particular nuance, but listen closely to this clip from The Swamp in which a professor’s voice seems at first to wander about randomly until we realize that he’s passing out student exam sheets:

[SOUND BYTE]

Having already completed over ten independent audio productions, Milojevic has also begun to create Spirit Blade Underground Alliance series episodes of Out of the Night in collaboration with Spirit Blade producer, Paeter Frandsen.

Ms. Milojevic, who aspires to graduate work at UMass and, thereafter, to teach Braille, seems also to be well underway with a moonlight career as a talented independent audio producer and voice actor.

Hear Tanja Milojevic’s The Swamp on the Audio Drama Showcase at CaptainRadio.com, and listen to all her productions at LightningBoltTheaterOfTheMind.Mypodcast.com.

Until next time, Audionauts, this is Captain Radio™, signing off!

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Captain Radio Reviews Tanja Milojevic’s The Swamp from Lightningbolt Theater of the Mind

* Rating based on the Audio Drama Directory Ratings System.