Now take my hand and hold it tight.
I will not fail you here tonight,
For failing you, I fail myself
And place my soul upon a shelf
In Hell's library without light.
I will not fail you here tonight.
— The Book of Counted Sorrows
* * *
Shadowfires by Dean Koontz (1987) is a multi-character, multi point-of-view weird science thriller. In five hundred pages its three competing sets of characters and one mutating, villainous genetic scientist rush from Southern California's wealthy suburbs to a shuttered and dilapidated Las Vegas motel. The last half of the novel takes place in an apocalyptic desert thunderstorm, multiplying trouble for all: Koontz's way of showing the reader that, yes, he can accomplish anything he wants with the novel form.
* * *
Like T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies (1984), Dean Koontz's 1987 novel Shadowfires is a work of fiction that has attracted and defeated me on several attempts in the last three decades.
I first became preoccupied with reading the novel when I read the paperback's plot description:
Rachael's request for a quick and clean divorce enraged her husband. She had never seen Eric so angry, so consumed by pure and terrifying hatred. Then, in the heat of the moment, Eric was struck down in a traffic accident. His death was instantaneous. Shocked and relieved, Rachael had nothing left to fear. Until Eric's body disappeared from the morgue—and Rachael was stalked by someone who looked like her dead husband . . .
Shadowfires shares a jumping-off point with Brian Moore's 1983 novel Cold Heaven (another of my must-reads), though there the similarities end.
In the last forty years I have read several Koontz novels. (I have also read his outstanding non-fiction book Writing Popular Fiction (1972), which excels similar works by authors like Lawrence Block in focus and perspicacity.) Stand-outs include Midnight (1989), The Taking (2004), a wonderful comment on the "Left Behind" novels, and The Good Guy (2007). I don't remember the plots or characters, but the reading experiences left a positive residue. Odd Thomas (2003), on the other hand, remains indelibly perfect and completely memorable.
As I read these Koontz novels, Shadowfires cast its shadow: unfinished business.
* * *
Thanks to Covid, I have been unemployed since 3 March 2020, and reading daily.
The prospect of a start date at a new job began sharpening my priorities two weeks ago. Hence my desire to finish unfinished business: Klein's The Ceremonies and Koontz's Shadowfires.
* * *
Shadowfires is very much a novel of its time.
Whatever historical shortcomings and dishonesties Koontz may present about his characters and their backgrounds, it is a novel emerging from political tumult of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and the Vietnam Syndrome curbing Washington's war moves in the Carter-Reagan interregnum.
Characters
Eric Leben: entrepreneur and geneticist. A man who went "too far."
Rachael Leben: his ex-wife. Hunted by the genetically evolving Eric, whose last human thought is to destroy her.
Ben Shadway: Realtor, Rachael's boyfriend. Also: three-time volunteer for Vietnam, a man with "a certain set of skills."
Detectives Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom: Good cop and Good cop: coping with collateral carnage created by Eric Leben, sticking to the case even when ordered not to.
Anson Sharp: all-around creep and human villain: an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency leveraging his position to carry out a personal vendetta against old nemesis Ben Shadway.
Jerry Peake: Sharp's lieutenant, a lover of Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie, who thwarts Sharp and finds a way to be the hero.
* * *
Dean Koontz has been hard at it every day for over fifty years. He is a tireless worker accused of being a hack, accused of retreading ideas and effects better craftsmen inaugurated.
He puts his heart and his beliefs on his sleeve, a rare trait any today. His horizon is that of bourgeois right. He quotes with approval Reinhold Niebuhr: "Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility."
S.T. Joshi sums up his prosecutor's case against Koontz by noting his "popularity among the herd." (A conclusion which says more about Joshi and his view of we genre readers than about Koontz).
I have been trying to arrange out of my Koontz reading notes a succinct descriptive definition the Koontz oeuvre. In an afterword to a reissue of his 1993 thriller Mr. Murder, tongue firmly in cheek, Koontz writes:
....The biggest idea I was ever offered came at a cocktail party where a gentleman stipulated that he wanted only "a reasonable commission," and then announced, "I've got a whole new genre of fiction that'll make you the richest guy in publishing." I always explain that I can put in the long hours and the hard work to write a novel only when I'm passionate about a story and that I'm only passionate about stories that arise in my own—admittedly strange— head. This gentleman, like every other bearer of big ideas, ignored me and then gave me the shortest pitch I'd ever received, describing his new genre in seven words: "Tom Clancy without all the military stuff." That was it. He had no more....
I reflected on this donnée. I have read Clancy's thrillers since 1986, and I have to state that Clancy is simply Koontz with a lot of military hardware and ideological bullshit added.
Koontz preceded Clancy; both are passionately curious about tech and its repercussions. The only difference is that Clancy is delighted to serve as a defense industry glove-puppet; Koontz revels in creating tech-based domestic nightmare melodramas.
Unlike Clancy, Koontz always hits his target.
* * *
Jay
19 July 2020
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