77 Shadow Street, Week 3

This brings us up to chapter 30.

As a Koontz afficianado, I should have seen this coming.  What appears, at first, to be a story about the "supernatural" turns out to be a cautionary tale about runaway technology!  Much of his best work runs along those lines, including Watchers, in which a horrible monster is discovered to be a military lab experiment gone wrong.  A similar premise is found in my favorite DK book, Fear Nothing and its follow-up, Seize the Night. 

There is still much to be explained, though the entity that refers to itself as "One" has already disclosed itself to be an AI (Artificial Intelligence), most likely meaning that it is man-made.  The whole "haunted-house-on-steroids" premise (gotta love the ever-present glowing fungus twist that lends a funhouse aura to the setting!) is still a mystery, but will presumeably be explained by the end of the book.  I always appreciate that DK doesn't wait until the last 10 pages to explain away the mysteries, but unfolds them gradually throughout the plot.

In this book I am struck, as usual, by the author's ability to make us care about the characters with apparently very little effort.  Is it simply through the dialog that we become sympathetic to them?  It does seem that quite a few of them throughout his stories seem to have had difficult, even horrible past childhood events from which to recover.  However he does it, you have to like Bailey Hawks as a hero; evoking the heroes played by the likes of Nicolas Cage.  (Yes, I've given away one of my "castings" which I mentioned in an earlier post!)

What is really different here, for Koontz, is the plot device of time travel, projecting the characters into a hopelessly dystopian future.  We've already had hints of a possible rectification, the idea that a character or characters might figure out a way of, not only getting out of the fine mess they've gotten themselves into, but also how to change the "past" (their temporal point of origin) so that the dystopian future never happens.  Sort of a reverse version of the premise of The Terminator. 

But the characters seem to have accepted the idea of time travel perhaps a little too readily.  The residence does seem to be a very run-down version of its former self.  Maybe that's enough evidence; but I'm not totally convinced that real people would be quite so comfortable with the conclusion.

Start looking for a copy of Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses - should be pretty easy to find in the libraries or used book stores.  (The hardback copy I have cost one dollar at Half Price Books...) We'll start that one in May!