The characters are the stereotypes we would expect - distrustful holiday guests; overly polite cultured black couple trying not to tread on toes; annoying whiny unpleasant teenage children. There are no surprises in how the characters behave through out the story.
Secondly the story decides to add an element of horror with the black out in the city seeming to precipitate some universal world wide cataclysmic event. Of which we have no idea at all, and so no context to be able to make any sense of what is going on. Is it an invasion? Or a nuclear war? Or some sort of chemical/bio weapon drop? Even a natural disaster? Or a combination of any of the above. Whatever has happened seems to have strange effects on people - not everyone suffers - interestingly the owners of the house seem to be untouched - may be this is something happening only to non-black people! Strange things such as thousands of deer coming out of the forest, prompting the teenage daughter to somehow develop a weird drive to follow them. Or the professor dad who goes out for a drive to see if he can find out what is going on, and inexplicably becomes totally disoriented and lost. And what are the alarming sonic booms that shake everyone to their core?
The book ends very weirdly, it just stops, totally incomplete, almost as if the page limit or word limit has been reached, so sorry folks, catastrophic end of the world story over. Did the world end or not? What happened to the characters? Most unsatisfying.
However the writing itself is pretty good, the build up of tension well done, keeping the reader's interest high. It is just a shame it never really went anywhere and the characters did not wow at all.
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