Then she has trouble facing her reflection in the mirror.īy the end of the day, after she has gotten Susan safely back home, Martie is in full-blown autophobia - the fear of herself. Walking her dog before taking off for the appointment, she saw her shadow on the sidewalk and felt afraid, for no reason she could fathom. This particular day, however, she herself has been feeling… odd. Martie Rhodes has been, for over a year, helping her friend Susan Jaggers, get to a twice-a-week appointment with her psychiatrist to treat acute agoraphobia. For small miracles, give praise.īut the story, we must encapsulate the story. He actually lets the reference, blunt and obvious thought it is, go as a simple, unexplained reference. It’s actually one of Koontz’s more subtle touches, though, since he does not in fact stop the narrative to have one (or more) of the characters ponder and pontificate on the name, the mythological Ahriman, the history of Zoroastrianism, or anything else related to it. If you guessed “the guy who is named after a mythological entity of destruction”, congratulations, you get a no-prize. Now, just on the names, tell me who’s the bad guy. Here’s a slate of main (and some secondary) characters from the book. He thinks piling on detail after detail after detail after detail is good writing.Īnd before the story, a little test. Koontz, clearly, has never performed comedy before.īut in reading this book, I realize that he doesn’t just do that with comedy. However, when he’s showing off, he gets an idea, comes up with every variation on it possible, and then dumps them all in the reader’s lap at once, one after the other, with the seeming expectation that each variation will enhance the funniness of the ones that came before. If he confines it to his characters dealing with things in their own characteristic ways, then it is as effective as his characters are well-drawn.

I had noticed long ago that Koontz thinks he is much wittier and funnier than he is in fact. When he doesn’t, he makes the reader contemplate actions his villains would find pleasing.īut it was in reading this book that something clicked for me, and I realized why I find Koontz so aggravating a writer, even in the books that I enjoy. When he tells a tale well, he can be damned entertaining. I’ve read a dozen or so of Koontz’s books, spread across his career from the 1980s to just a few years ago.

False memory koontz