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The Sky Was Empty, But Still the Thunder Rolled
90 pages, Paperback
Published May 20, 2025
4 people want to read
About the author
Dominic Lyne
22 books11 followersBorn in Essex in 1983.
Dominic Lyne is a British author and artist. His work delves into the underbelly of human experience, tackling themes of drug use, dissociation, sexuality, and mental health struggles.
He holds a first-class honours degree in Contemporary Music Production from the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford, where he honed his skills in performance (drums), music business, and music production. His passion for literature was explored academically through an Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature and Creative Writing from the Open University, where he focused on Children’s Literature. This blend of artistic and literary pursuits fuels his unique voice.
Dominic’s writing is often described as raw and unflinching, drawing inspiration from authors like Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis, and William S. Burroughs. His aim to challenge societal norms, and provoke conversations about the darker aspects of life and the complexities of the human condition.
A multifaceted artist, Dominic has produced work across many different mediums. His musical project The Red Devil Incident has released four albums, as well as provided music for usage on computer games (Nadeo‘s TrackMania Sunrise [PC, 2005] / THQ‘s MotoGP06 [xBox, 2006]) and independent films.
Dominic Lyne is an artistic voice that refuses to be ignored. Through his bold and uncompromising work, he compels his audience to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves and the world around them.
Dominic Lyne is a British author and artist. His work delves into the underbelly of human experience, tackling themes of drug use, dissociation, sexuality, and mental health struggles.
He holds a first-class honours degree in Contemporary Music Production from the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford, where he honed his skills in performance (drums), music business, and music production. His passion for literature was explored academically through an Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature and Creative Writing from the Open University, where he focused on Children’s Literature. This blend of artistic and literary pursuits fuels his unique voice.
Dominic’s writing is often described as raw and unflinching, drawing inspiration from authors like Dennis Cooper, Bret Easton Ellis, and William S. Burroughs. His aim to challenge societal norms, and provoke conversations about the darker aspects of life and the complexities of the human condition.
A multifaceted artist, Dominic has produced work across many different mediums. His musical project The Red Devil Incident has released four albums, as well as provided music for usage on computer games (Nadeo‘s TrackMania Sunrise [PC, 2005] / THQ‘s MotoGP06 [xBox, 2006]) and independent films.
Dominic Lyne is an artistic voice that refuses to be ignored. Through his bold and uncompromising work, he compels his audience to confront uncomfortable truths about themselves and the world around them.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 7, 2025
Dominic Lyne’s The Sky Was Empty, but Still the Thunder Rolled is not an easy book to describe, though its urgency makes it feel like one that demands description. It is built out of fragments—poetic, diaristic, sometimes furious, sometimes tender—that circle around grief, addiction, friendship, and survival. The book reads like someone holding a flashlight inside a collapsing house, illuminating broken beams and sudden glimpses of beauty, all the while refusing to look away.
What makes it striking is how much it functions as both personal elegy and testimony. Scientists who study memory often note that trauma can fix moments in the brain with a clarity that outlasts ordinary recollection; Lyne uses language to enact this same process. Scenes repeat, refract, return, not because he is careless, but because that is how memory itself insists. Just as astronomers map the afterglow of long-dead stars, these pages map the aftershocks of loss.
Reading it, you might be reminded of the way a song can hit one exact nerve and replay itself in your mind all day, or the way certain smells or sounds pull the past into the present without permission. Lyne turns those raw recurrences into a form, building an emotional architecture that is as fractured as it is honest. One moment he is raging at the unfairness of what has happened, the next he is recounting a small act of love so vividly that it feels like watching a photograph develop in a darkroom.
This book is not for readers seeking conventional narrative comfort. It resists tidy arcs, preferring the jagged path of lived experience. Yet for readers who understand that literature can be a form of witness—a way of preserving both beauty and pain in the same breath—it offers something rare. It may resonate with those who have lost someone, those who have struggled with substances, or simply those who know how fragile and fierce human connection can be. For others who prefer their stories smoothed over, insulated from rawness, this may feel too much like staring directly into the storm.
Content Warning: The book contains depictions of substance use, grief, and death, rendered with graphic honesty.
In the end, what lingers is not despair, but the stubborn act of writing itself: the insistence that even when the sky is empty, thunder still rolls—that memory, love, and language refuse to vanish.
What makes it striking is how much it functions as both personal elegy and testimony. Scientists who study memory often note that trauma can fix moments in the brain with a clarity that outlasts ordinary recollection; Lyne uses language to enact this same process. Scenes repeat, refract, return, not because he is careless, but because that is how memory itself insists. Just as astronomers map the afterglow of long-dead stars, these pages map the aftershocks of loss.
Reading it, you might be reminded of the way a song can hit one exact nerve and replay itself in your mind all day, or the way certain smells or sounds pull the past into the present without permission. Lyne turns those raw recurrences into a form, building an emotional architecture that is as fractured as it is honest. One moment he is raging at the unfairness of what has happened, the next he is recounting a small act of love so vividly that it feels like watching a photograph develop in a darkroom.
This book is not for readers seeking conventional narrative comfort. It resists tidy arcs, preferring the jagged path of lived experience. Yet for readers who understand that literature can be a form of witness—a way of preserving both beauty and pain in the same breath—it offers something rare. It may resonate with those who have lost someone, those who have struggled with substances, or simply those who know how fragile and fierce human connection can be. For others who prefer their stories smoothed over, insulated from rawness, this may feel too much like staring directly into the storm.
Content Warning: The book contains depictions of substance use, grief, and death, rendered with graphic honesty.
In the end, what lingers is not despair, but the stubborn act of writing itself: the insistence that even when the sky is empty, thunder still rolls—that memory, love, and language refuse to vanish.
Displaying 1 of 1 review