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October 08, 2005

things you can count on

from a Dean Koontz novel:
Everything starts happening right away, often right in the first paragraph--no foreplay, no stage setting, no explanation. (It's like Koontz says to his readers You want to learn how to swim? Jump off the dock.) A girl wakes up and there's a spider-eating serial killer dispatching the family she is visiting. A woman goes out for a jog along the beach and is killed by half-human beasts. An insomniac goes downstairs to make herself some warm milk and realizes that aliens are taking over the planet.
And
At least once in each book, a car window shatters into "gummy" fragments of glass. Rain is described as "sussurant."
And
Dogs are psychic, mystical beings with one paw on the pulse of humanity and the other paw on God's throne. Government is evil; intelligence organizations are run by sociopaths; organized religion is questionable; alien life forms have it in for us, whether they are fauna or flora; Hell exists; scientists, often in league with the government or intelligence agencies, are Wrong About Everything; parents are either clueless, well-meaning-but-weak individuals or they are psychotic alcoholics, drug abusers, child haters, but children are always infinitely wise and persevering.
And
Once the action begins, unfortunately, the characters never shut up. Any situation, from driving a car to facing down an alien life form to being menaced by a killer, involves pages and pages of internal musings about what's happening. This is Koontz's preferred method of fleshing out two seconds of action into a half-hour of discussion. He must have been a philosophy major.
And
He never met an adjective, "as if" sentence or metaphor he didn't fall in love with and use over and over.
And
All climactic action happens in the rain, no matter where the story is set. When I listen to a Dean Koontz novel I like to imagine parallel worlds roiling with menacing clouds, water falling from the sky, thunder, lightning, with children and women and supernatural dogs battling death and evil, all at the same time.
And
Reading Dean Koontz is my guilty secret pleasure (or was a secret). I love his books even when they drive me crazy--once I skipped fully half the tapes in the set because I couldn't stand to hear any more internal dialogues. But mostly I like his peculiar author's tics and twitches; they soothe me because I always know what to expect. Horrible, disgusting, evil things happen to his characters, mostly perpetrated by horrible, disgusting, evil beings, human or otherwise ... but somehow he finds a way to lead the characters he loves--the young women, the dogs, the kids--out of the rain and into the sunshine. They are bruised by the most hideous circumstances but not sundered. And the stories are great.

I recommend for the uninitiated these Dean Koontz novels:
Midnight (mad scientist turns men into ravening super-human beasts)
Intensity (evil-beyond-evil serial murderer with a really cool name [Edgler Forman Vess] versus spunky 20-something girl)
Dark Rivers of the Heart (with a subplot Koontz himself described as "psychos in love")

Posted by JudyLa at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)