May Be Too Real to Think About?

Dean Koontz has done it again - really SCARED me!

Koontz is my favorite writer and I believe I would be caught up in any tale he told. But the scariest part of this story is one of those things that is too close to the truth for comfort! Hate to give away info he saved for the back of the book, but the evil doers in this book ACTUALLY EXIST! (Did anyone else read NIGHT CHILLS years ago and then read that the techniques and most of the equipment he wrote about ACTUALLY EXISTED? Brrr...chills up my spine! Well, same here!)

Our heroines in this wonderful adventure are Micky, a 28-year-old wagon-perching drunk who at the moment is trying to recover at her auntie's place and needs nothing else to complicate her life; and Leilani, almost 10 years old, The Complication, who lives - or rather - has been surviving thus far - next door.

Leilani is the smartest, most precocious kid Micky has ever met (or any of us, for that matter). She has physical deformities which she accepts matter-of-factly and which you know will not stand in the way of her becoming SOMETHING when she grows up...IF she grows up. It soon becomes apparent that she is likely not going to live beyond her 10th birthday. Her mother is totally unavailable to her, lost somewhere between a fantasy life and a drug-induced stupor, and her stepfather...well, her stepfather is somewhat preoccupied with how the aliens will either come in their UFOs to HEAL Leilani by her 10th birthday, or take her away by then. It seems very important to stepdad that Leilani be either HEALED or ... something...

Of course, RIGHT BEFORE Leilani's tenth birthday, the whole family disappears. Micky has to track them down herself, because she has been unable to enlist the help of the authorities. Preston, the stepdad, has moved the family around quite a bit in the past, following the UFO circuit. Micky needs all her (sober) wits about her to race the clock to find Leilani in time...

In my opinion, Koontz's books can almost always be boiled down to Good versus Evil dramas, and the Evil in this one comes in the form of a mad doctor/evil philosopher type stepdad, Preston, whose mission in life is to rid the world of its deformed, sick, imperfect humans that provide only a drain on resources instead of being able to contribute to society. That's pretty scary, huh? Well, yeah, and unfortunately there are people who actually believe that. Not rare, isolated, near-certifiable loonies who believe it. Respected, successful, INFLUENTIAL people who have formed GROUPS, who propose this philosophy and wish to implement it! (Utilitarian bioethics is the dry, politically correct term for this monstrous philosophy.) If that doesn't give you nightmares, I don't know what will!

If you've read any Dean Koontz before, I'm sure that my giving away this much of the plot will not deter you. This is one of his very best books, with certainly some of his most memorable characters. I really didn't think I would be all that interested in a book with a 10-year-old protagonist, but I was. (I guess there was enough emphasis on the 28-year-old loser that I could identify!) As usual, the plot moves right along and you are pretty much always left hanging at each chapter end, so that it's not much use looking to see how many pages 'til the end of the chapter to judge how much longer you'll be reading. Koontz doesn't seem to view chapter endings as stop points for things like getting a meal or taking a nap!

If you have NOT read any Dean Koontz before, I highly recommend this and any of his other books. But one word of warning; no, make that TWO words of warning - (1) Don't stop anywhere in the first 50 or so pages just because you come across anything totally "unbelievable" - like a flying saucer, someone floating in air, or anything at all you may think is impossible. It is NOT impossible, and this author will have you believing it soon enough if you will just read another few paragraphs; and (2) if you are a person who is irritated by coming across a word you don't already "own", i.e., one you cannot use in a sentence all by yourself, then you'd better keep a dictionary handy whenever you read Dean Koontz. He has a lovely mastery of the English language, and for the most part his stories just flow beautifully. But whether he does it on purpose or he just can't control his genius (I suspect the former, really), there is always at least ONE word that I have to look up to really own it. I can always figure out the general meaning by the context as he's written it, but I would be afraid to use it in a new sentence without checking its ramifications. So I keep a dictionary at hand when reading Koontz, and I truly believe he intended this. Do it anyway; it will enrich you. But other than that occasional teaching tool, his highly evolved command of the language will not get in the way, it will just further the story. This is a great story to start with and it is self-contained, not related to any other Koontz novel.