RIP IV: Books the Second and Third

It isn’t that I haven’t been reading.  I’m just behind on writing blog entries.

***sigh***

Herewith, Books the Second and Third for RIP IV: Fear Nothing and Seize the Night by Dean Koontz.  These are actually re-reads, but it had been such a long time since my last visit to Moonlight Bay, California, the fictional beach city where the action takes place, that I thought it okay to count them for this challenge.

The main character in both books is Christopher Snow, a 28-year-old with xeriderma pigmentosum (XP), a genetic disorder that requires him to live his entire life in virtual darkness or risk uncontrollable cancers – not only can he not expose himself to normal daylight, the UV waves from fluorescent lights or computer screens can cause cumulative harm, because his body lacks the ability to repair even that minor damage.  His companions include Bobby, his surfing buddy; Sasha, his girlfriend, who works as the late-night dj on the local radio station; and Orson, an extremely smart dog who, as we find out, is even smarter than Chris realizes.

The first book opens with the death of Chris’s father, his mother having died in a car crash a few years before… and things get seriously weird almost immediately, with Chris witnessing (from hiding) the substitution of a mutilated corpse for his father’s body in the hospital basement.  There’s:

• a murderous band of mutant rhesus monkeys roaming the city’s midnight streets,
• a putatively abandoned military base named Fort Wyvern on the outskirts of town,
• a strange golden egg-shaped room beneath one of the buildings on base,
• a secret program called “Mystery Train”,
• a runaway virus, and
• several people who are…becoming something other than human.

In the book’s timeline of only a couple of days, Fear Nothing reveals that most of what Chris thinks he knows—about his parents, his city, the military base, and the world around him—is nowhere near the truth.

Seize the Night (or carpe noctem, which as you can probably guess is a play on carpe diem, “seize the day”) takes place less than a month after Fear Nothing.  The young son of a former girlfriend of Chris’s has been kidnapped, and he and Orson follow the trail to Fort Wyvern… where Orson is also taken captive while Chris checks out an underground level (Orson’s good, but he can’t climb ladders).

The characters aren’t sure if these kidnappings—and the others that come to light once Chris makes contact with Bobby and Sasha—are independent acts of evil or somehow related to a failed experiment at Wyvern.  But in Moonlight Bay, the changes caused by the virus are accelerating, spreading, and no connection seems too farfetched.

To find the answers, the kidnapped children and, Chris hopes, Orson, he and Bobby and Sasha join forces with Roosevelt Frost (as we see him, briefly, in the first book, he’s a former NFL player who now talks to animals for a living), Sasha’s engineer Doogie (looks like a bouncer at the world’s worst biker bar, has a way with the ladies, can easily get his hands on an entire arsenal, and there are indicators of a past in something like Special Forces with Sasha, not that we find out anything for sure), and Mungojerrie, a cat who’s a cat the way Orson is “just” a dog.  Together, they return to Fort Wyvern…and deal with what they find there.

Well.  Wasn’t that a hell of a paragraph.

Fear Nothing and Seize the Night are part sci-fi (secret government experiments!  Time travel!  Strange pulsing pods!), part horror (serial killer!  People becoming!  Suicidal birds!), and part speculative fiction (what happens to the world if genetic experiments get out of hand!).  While I enjoyed both books, there are flaws, especially prominent when reading them back-to-back.

For one thing, Chris ruminates a lot on his life lived in the dark.  A whole lot.  Paragraphs, even pages at a time.  Even so, it’s almost too perfect a life – even though he’s limited to the darkness, he manages to find a lifelong best friend at an early age, and meet and build a relationship with a woman who is as intelligent and talented as she is hot.  He’s a successful author without ever leaving town, and his brilliant parents were willing to limit themselves to teaching at Moonlight Bay’s university because it meant Chris could have something approaching a normal life during the nighttime hours (the light pollution of a larger city would doom him to a completely indoor life), and this last means it’s a perfect place to set up the situations that drive both books.

Chris and Bobby (and occasionally Sasha) communicate in surfer-speak that gets old fast.  It might sound more natural in smaller doses, but as it stands, it’s just irritating.  And there’s a feel to Roosevelt Frost that makes me think Koontz was looking for a small-scale deus ex machina – “If I want Orson and Mungojerrie to be almost human-smart, or maybe smarter, I need someone who can demonstrate it to Chris… I know, a Rosie Grier type who’s an animal psychic and just happens to live on a boat in the Moonlight Bay marina!”  I suppose it could only have felt more like a set-up if he’d just been passing through town at the right time.

And the books are similar enough to feel like they could have been one book…assuming you could get Chris to stop ruminating and explicating.  I haven’t read a lot of Dean Koontz because the ones I have picked up tend to look a lot alike.  For example, the time-travel aspects of Seize the Night echo those of Lightning to a good degree, and the basic plot of one called Tick Tock (murderous demon doll!) was a close match for another whose title I simply cannot remember.  Sorry.  But as I was looking for the title of that book to make the last comparison, I happened across the plot summary of Midnight, written about a decade before Fear Nothing… and it features a California city named Moonlight Cove where people are becoming something other than people.  Sheesh.

But the basic ideas behind the books—what really defines normality, how do people react when the underpinnings of the reality they knew begin to dissolve, how our choices define us, loyalty and compassion and doing the right thing because it is, not because there will be a positive payoff—are worthwhile, and the characters are generally well-drawn.  If I used stars, I’d give them both three out of five.

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