Dean Koontz: Velocity (2021-30)
The best horror is about an ordinary person or people in extraordinary and untenable circumstances. (Of course, that applies to a lot of other fiction as well...) Billy Wiles is not quite an ordinary person, though he seems to be one: the day bartender at a local bar in Napa county. But four years ago, BIlly was a moderately successful beginning author, with a beautiful, intelligent fiancée.
Then Barbara ate some bad food, got very sick, and wound up in a coma. Billy visits her every evening. She occasionally says mysterious and haunting things, which Billy writes down in a little notebook.
One evening, leaving the bar, Billy finds a typewritten note on his car, giving him a choice:
"If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County.
"If you do take this note tothe police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work.
"You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours."
Thus begin several days of hell for Billy WIles. He takes the note to a policeman, a close personal friend, who tells him that it's a joke, real serial killers don't play that sort of game.
The next day, Billy learns that a lovely blond schoolteacher has been brutally beaten, and then strangled to death. And another note appears on his car.
And then things get much, much worse. "The freak", as Billy thinks of the killer, has a series of tortures in mind for Billy, forcing him to make worse and harder decisions, and at the same time seeing that for Billy to go to the police would make him a suspect in multiple murders. As the freak plays his (her?) twisted game, Billy squirms more and more on the hook.
The tension is high and unrelenting, to the point that in real life I found myself shying from shadows, literally.
I have never read anything by Koontz before. I had always thought of him as likely to be a second-rate Stephen King. If this book is representative of his work, he isn't, by a long margin. His style is as utlitarian as Kings, but without the comic relief King throws in to relieve the tension here and there: the darkness grows and gets continually darker, right up to the end.
I'm either never going to read another novel by Dean Koontz again, or I'm going to read a bunch of his stuff. I'm not sure, at this point, which.
Then Barbara ate some bad food, got very sick, and wound up in a coma. Billy visits her every evening. She occasionally says mysterious and haunting things, which Billy writes down in a little notebook.
One evening, leaving the bar, Billy finds a typewritten note on his car, giving him a choice:
"If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County.
"If you do take this note tothe police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work.
"You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours."
Thus begin several days of hell for Billy WIles. He takes the note to a policeman, a close personal friend, who tells him that it's a joke, real serial killers don't play that sort of game.
The next day, Billy learns that a lovely blond schoolteacher has been brutally beaten, and then strangled to death. And another note appears on his car.
And then things get much, much worse. "The freak", as Billy thinks of the killer, has a series of tortures in mind for Billy, forcing him to make worse and harder decisions, and at the same time seeing that for Billy to go to the police would make him a suspect in multiple murders. As the freak plays his (her?) twisted game, Billy squirms more and more on the hook.
The tension is high and unrelenting, to the point that in real life I found myself shying from shadows, literally.
I have never read anything by Koontz before. I had always thought of him as likely to be a second-rate Stephen King. If this book is representative of his work, he isn't, by a long margin. His style is as utlitarian as Kings, but without the comic relief King throws in to relieve the tension here and there: the darkness grows and gets continually darker, right up to the end.
I'm either never going to read another novel by Dean Koontz again, or I'm going to read a bunch of his stuff. I'm not sure, at this point, which.