Luke Ingram and his buds Billy and Matt are sitting in the pizza parlor's parking lot when Luke gets bored and decides to goe for a walk by the powerlines near his house. As he is walking there he blacks out when he is attacked by something from the sky. He then wakes up four hours latter in bed. At the same time, Mandy Durgin, a classmate that Luke has a crush on, wakes up confused. This is because she finds that she had woke up on her front porch when she had originally gone to bed. And neither Luke nor Mandy can remember how they had become dislocated. Later while they are both separately at the local swimming they aretormented by Quentin, the town cretin, creep, and sadist. Recently he has been changing, becoming better looking, gaining charisma and confidence, and starting a local skinhead gang, one of whose members is Luke's younger brother. Every time that Luke and Mandy see him they have flashbacks of nightmares involving Quentin and bug-eyed aliens, and of experiencing a paralyzing fear that leaves them helpless in Quentin's presence. There are perpetual power failures every day between ten and eleven p.m., so Mandy borrows her father's video camera with the idea to go to the place where Luke believes he had been abducted to attempt to videotape the blackout. Unfortunately, while she does manage to videotape the power failure, she and Luke, who she meets there, are still abducted. They manage to videotape both the blackout, which shows something in the sky, and their abduction, although the tape is blanked out when they attempt to show it to others later on. Luke is convinced that they've been abducted by aliens while Mandy is convinced that the powersurges have been causing blackouts, hallucinations, and psychic powers in certain individuals. Then about the halfway mark a mysterious black-haired femmé fatale type called Cassandra enters the picture, and she has some strange connection with Quentin. What is it? And it is then the pace of the novel starts to pick up. The basic problems with the novel though are many. First of all is that the aliens, called the dyzych, are just your standard issue grays. Thin, bug-eyed, thin lipped, etc., and they have an agenda, one of which is to change as many earthpeople as they can into alien/human hybrids, and they can put implants into you to control your behavior. Oh yeah, and ewww, they eat cockroaches, alive. Another problem is that, except for Luke, everybody is two-dimensional. Everybody is either good, or they are bad. Mandy is the cute chick, who's just not too bright, and always seems to be the damsel in distress, or Quentin is always the wannabe rapist, quisling, and sadistic punk who seems drunk on power. And, as common in young people's thrillers, the parents are either idiots, or totally absent, or both. There is the alien hybrids, they can change their shape at will, leading the authors to include a lot of cheap morphing. Oh yeah, and there is ANOTHER evil librarian, great if you have a phobia against books, and learning, and stuff. What saved it for me for the first three-quarters of the book is that the book can be read as a metaphor about being bullied. Quentin is a punk who enjoys psychically torturing Luke and Mandy, physically and mentally, plus promising to take Mandy as his mate and constantly rape her. And both are helpless against both him and his gang. Unfortunately, this metaphor completely collapses in the last quarter as the whole thing turns into just another UFO chase thriller. Something that can be found in dozens of tv shows, DVDs, and second-rate fictions. Worse yet, there is no real ending. I can't tell you how this book closes without spoiling the book for any first time readers, but the book literally blows chunks as it ties up absolutely nothing, leaving itself open to be the first in a series, a series that never materialized. Even the aliens Achilles' heel is more than a bit ridiculous, in fact it's ludicrous, and insults the intelligence of anybody with an IQ over that of room temperature, I know that it mine. It's stuff like this that gives young people's novels a bad name.For this site I have also done these novels dealing with the UFO theme:The Contactees Die Young by Antoinette Azolakov(a suspense novel)Tactical Response (Stony Man) by Don Pendleton (action novel)The Mind Masters #2: Shamballah by John M. Rossmann (suspense novel)A Ufo Has Landed by Milton Dank (juvenile suspense novel)