City of Nightmares

City of Nightmares imagines an urban fantasy/horror world where every night you risk being transformed into your worst nightmare while you sleep. To mitigate the risk, intoxicants, like alcohol, are illegal, although there is a robust black market, and the drinking water has drugs added to prevent people from dreaming. Still, with those precautions in place, people in the gritty and corrupt city of Newham regularly transform into Nightmares while they sleep. While some of these Nightmares end up being fairly benign, allowing a person to continue their life in their new Nightmare state, many people turn homicidal.

Ever since Ness’s sister Ruby transformed into a giant spider in her sleep and then went on to kill their father and go on a rampage through the town, Ness has been terrified of Nightmares and of becoming one. With nowhere to go, she has been living with the Friends of the Restful Soul, a maybe-cult that provides counseling for those impacted by Nightmares. When Ness is given a simple errand to deliver some mail as her last chance to prevent herself from being kicked out of the Friends, she takes it despite her fears. Ness finds herself caught up in a murderous conspiracy and discovers that the city’s corruption is much more widespread than she’d thought. Soon the only people Ness can trust are her best friend, Priya, and a Nightmare who saved her life.

City of Nightmares creates a rich and complex world and does a good job of showing the reader this world through the characters’ experiences rather than heavy exposition. The reader’s being left with the impression that there is a lot more to the world than is described in the book gives the novel a sense of depth and realism. Ness is a fully developed character who, despite her flaws, is someone to root for. At the beginning of the novel, Ness’s life is consumed by her fear of becoming a Nightmare, and, by the end, she has overcome this fear while also learning that the world is not as straightforward as she’d thought. Her growth from a person who hides from a fight to someone who confronts her greatest fear is believable.

City of Nightmares, a fun page-turner that will appeal to fans of urban fantasy that contains horror elements, will leave readers eagerly waiting for the sequel.