Hope Kelley dreams every night. Every night, she dreams in Sombre.
Sombre is beyond lucid, beyond any nightmare. It can be felt, it exists.
Each dream is a mission. Every nightmare is horrific and plays out to a
violent end. In her waking world, Hope is a nearsighted
fifteen-year-old-nobody, who spends her days as an estranged member of
her own family and a ghost at her new school, Centurion High. In Sombre
she is Gatherer, Halliday Knight - her complete gunslinging,
head-stomping, liquor swilling, magnificent opposite. Aboard her
machanihorse, Wilder, she serves Sombre, gathering Nightmarers, the
world's troubled sleepers, with her very own breed of unashamed
violence, folly and charm. An existence in Sombre can be fleeting, as
everyone; Gatherer, monster, animal and miscreant alike, live with
twelve strokes on their Beating Clock, a timepiece embedded in the
chest. Sombre's Mender's monitor and regulate each citizen's existence.
Every new stroke a Mender sets on a citizen's Beating Clock, means a
stroke closer to the end of their time in the nightmare world. Hope's
sleeping world clashes with her waking world when she meets the cool and
uninhibited Parker Wright, a cheerleader, a year above her at Centurion
High School, a rebel in every sense of the word. Parker has been touched
by Sombre as well. An unexplained and horrific attack of a male student
at Centurion involves Hope, just as a seemingly unstoppable threat comes
to Sombre. The same threat invades Hope's waking existence in Pento;
signifying the beginning to a wild journey on a road of intertwining
realities. For fans of macabre fantasy, real horror and adventured
filled steampunk from YA author S.B.Norton.
