A faltering, flat instalment for the series.
Genre: Fantasy, Mystery
No. of pages: 201
The night is dark…and full of paranormal killers.
If Jason, Michael, and Freddy were merged into one being and given supernatural powers, the result would be something like Mister Scary. He’s been carrying out his murders from the Shadow Land for way too long now. It’s time to put him down.
It was fun to delve into the Harbinger franchise once again – this is a guilty pleasure read for me. Adam Wright has a great imagination and can weave the familiar and unfamiliar with ease. Thought to be honest, I felt like I was reading one of my high schoolers papers. At the end of Chapter 2 the last three pages were repeated again at the start of Chapter three. There were obvious grammatical errors and missing words that hampered an immersive experience. Additionally, Wrights writing style seemed to have devolved. This manuscript felt rushed into publication. There was a lot of telling and little showing, an awful amount of repetition, and a serendipity of events that seemed to fall together without an obstacle. ‘Night Hunt’ read like a first draft, still needing a bit of development and editing. It was really disappointing as this series has wormed its way under my skin.
The structure of the story is another episodic instalment to the franchise, ending in a cliff-hanger for more novels to come. Again, there is too much introduced in ‘Night Hunt’ that was not resolved to give me complete satisfaction, and the writing felt immature. Don’t introduce too many elements in your story that you intend to resolve in a sequel – it puts readers off. And it makes the author appear amateurish.
I really enjoyed the magical elements and setting of the story. But just about every character had no or little development; and again Alec assembled the ‘Scooby Squad’ magically and without argument – it was all too convenient. I really need to start seeing some character driven stories and not plot driven ones. If he continues to follow his current writing style I fear the sequels are going to be interesting but altogether flat.
The action scenes were crafted well, but too short, and again suffered from serendipity – it means you can sense the hand of the author guiding the story instead of it unfolding organically. You want to keep you reader engaged as much as possible.
There is still a great effort in creating suitable spooky ambiance for certain scenes, but I feel Wright could go a little further so we can attach an emotional connection to really hammer home the following scenes.
I see real potential in Wright as a writer, but hope that ‘Night Hunt’ is just a small falter in the development of his writing career. While entertaining, it did not feel up to his regular standard… and I want to see him, and this series, improve with each instalment.
In all honesty, after reading ‘Night Hunt’ I wouldn’t recommend this to a friend. It pains me to say there was so much going on with grammar, character development, and lack of editing that I didn’t get to really enjoy the story.
Not such a glowing review, but a hopeful one.
Overall feeling: Disappointed, but with a glimmer of hope.
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Casey Carlisle 