Dean R. Koontz - The Voice of the Night

Dean Koontz's The Voice of the Night is a horror novel that finds its horror not in ghosts, demons, or anything else supernatural. The darkness in this book is found in its plausibility. The scary thing about The Voice of the Night is that it could happen, easily.

Okay, not that easily. Not many 14-year-olds are given the almost total freedom Roy and Colin have. But with Colin's constantly working mother and Roy's indifferent parents, this story is allowed to happen.

Colin is the new kid in town. Roy is the first real friend he's ever had. Roy is the strong, popular type. Colin is his exact opposite. So why, you ask, would Roy ever be friends with Colin? Because Colin, in his eagerness to have a friend and his basic naivete‚ is easily manipulated. And Roy's a hell of a charmer. He's like Eddie Haskel (from Leave it to Beaver) with a killing streak. One day a few weeks after they become friends, Roy asks Colin, "You ever killed anything?"

Roy admits to having tortured and killed a cat, but Colin thinks he's being strung along, tested for some bigger secret Roy wants to tell him.

When Roy finally spills his secret, it's too late for Colin to safely back out. And when he tries to tell someone what Roy's been planning, the only person he can tell is his mostly-absent mother who assumes (because Roy's told her so--remember, he's the charmer) that Colin's "fallen in with the bad kids" and is on dope.

So now Colin's got, not only his mother thinking he's on drugs, but Roy wants to kill him, and no one will believe him.

That's enough set-up. For the rest, go read the book. Let's talk about the writing.

This was my first Koontz book and I was split in my opinion. On the one hand, the book moves right along. Elmore Leonard said to leave out all the parts readers skip and Dean Koontz (at least from this one example I have) is pretty good at that. On the other hand, I don't know if he was purposely trying to exaggerate the differences in personality between Colin and Roy or if he just doesn't remember what it's like to be 14, but Colin's character seemed incredibly gullible and frightened.

One night when Colin comes home late to find his mother still out, this is what we read (I'm also including this excerpt because the way it's written is nice, moving through the sequence without wasting much time with "the parts readers skip").

"Suddenly he dashed across the living room, dodging furniture, burst into the downstairs hallway, slapped the light switch there, saw nothing out of the ordinary, thundered up the stairs, turned on the second-floor hall lights, ran into his bedroom, hit the lights there, too, felt a tiny bit better when he saw he was still alone, jerked open the closet door, found no werewolves or vampires lurking among the clothes, shut the bedroom door, locked it, braced it with a straightbacked chair, drew the drapes over both windows so that nothing could look in at him, and collapsed onto the mattress, gasping. He didn't have to look under the bed: It was a platform job, built right on the floor.

He would be safe until morning--unless, of course, something broke down the door in spite of the chair that was wedged under the knob."

These all seem more like the actions and worries of a 10-year-old instead of a 14-year-old.

Another thing I noticed while reading this book: most books with young kids as the main characters take place during the summer. Nothing happens during the school year, but once summer starts, so does the excitement.

As I said, the thing that makes this book frightening is that it could actually happen. And that's beautiful. Most horror novels are based on scaring people with things not from 'round here. Vampires. Ghosts. Things from space. What-have-you. But who hasn't met that guy in school you just weren't too sure of?

I could go on all day discussing the weak and strong points of this book (for instance, weakness: Koontz keeps the characters very separated. You know in any given scene where Roy or Colin are going because Roy is the bad kid, period, and Colin is the good kid, complete with juvenile vocabulary--Colin sticks to "Jeez" through most of the book, never mumbling "Bullsh*t" to himself until the book's nearly over), but I won't.

I set out to do with the reading of this book what I set out to do with the reading of any book: to learn something about writing. What I learned is that a scene doesn't need a ton of crap to move gracefully from one place to another. If you want to get from where you are to where you've got to be, then get there. But don't bore the reader doing it. The style here is simple without falling into "hack" territory.

I also got a good reminder that the scariest things in fiction are the ones right outside the door. Because they could one day actually come knocking.