Jenna Black brings us a horror/fantasy in which the streets of Philadelphia change at night into something more sinister. Everything appears to change, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, as soon as the sun goes down. The main character, Becket, is the daughter of the police commissioner. When she starts seeing things, she keeps it to herself. But then the whole city slowly appears to notice, as the city goes mad.

“-the more he looked, the more Jimmy was convinced the statue wasn’t where it was supposed to be.”

Though the “horror scenes” are very descriptive and well written, the story is overall very slow-paced. As a reader, you feel as if Nightstruck may pick up any page, but it doesn’t. The main character is obnoxious enough to frustrate any reader, with it being one of those horror stories where the main character is unbelievably naive. Becket may as well be in a comatose state where she does whatever people suggest, no matter how unreasonable or lacking logic the suggestion is. There aren’t too many redeeming qualities to the character that you are stuck with throughout the book, assuming you can make it through the first half. It takes a special hand to write horror in a way that doesn’t seem to follow a set bullet list that many attempts at horror contain today; Jenna Black does not have this hand.

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