“Not an extra totally weird hour! Not an extra hour where everything tries to kill me! No, I don’t think I ever wished for that.” “Come on, haven’t you ever wished for an extra hour in the day?” Rex asked. With the help of her new friends, Jess must come to grips with the reality of the secret hour, and figure out the key to her own unknown power if she is to survive night in Bixby.

Jess might seem all normal, well-adjusted daylight, but she soon discovers that she, too, is a midnighter–and that for some reason, she’s a locus for the slithers’ and darklings’ attention. That is, they do until Jessica Day comes to town. Slithers, darklings, and other powerful shadows that the world has forgotten about live in this single hour–and for the most part, the midnighters and the slithers stay out of each other’s way. It is also, however, the hour that the dark things roam.

There are actually 25 hours in the day, not just 24, and only those people born in the instant of midnight–the midnighters–are attuned to this “secret hour.” It can be a liberating time of beauty and enhanced special abilities–during this time, a psychic and empathetic teenager can hear herself think a mathematical genius can put her algorithms to magical use a boy can see with crystal clarity what would have been completely blurry another can fly with single leaps and bounds. Well, with one exception.Įvery night, in the instant that passes as the clock strikes midnight, a secret hour unfolds in Bixby. “I should have told you: this isn’t a dream.” įlat, rural, without much to offer in the way of downtown metropolitan fine living, Bixby is a small town that looks like any other small midwestern American town. Standalone or series: Book 1 in the Midnighters trilogy All changes when Jessica Day comes to Bixby High with a hidden power. Their different powers strongest at midnight are: Seer, Mindcaster, Acrobat, Polymath. Nobody moves except dark creatures that haunt the shadows and the few people who are free to move at midnight, Midnighters.

Strange things happen at midnight in the town of Bixby, Oklahoma. Publication date: First published in 2004 Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Horror, Speculative Fiction, Contemporary What better way to snap out of a reading fugue than to take a mini-vacation into the past?

We came up with the idea towards the end of 2012, when both Ana and Thea were feeling exhausted from the never-ending inundation of New and Shiny (and often over-hyped) books. Old School Wednesdays is a weekly Book Smugglers feature. Fun midnight-hour shenanigans from Scott Westerfeld–yes, please.

The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld