I’m reading Ashley Bell – excellent story, if you haven’t read it and like twisty, eerie, weird mysteries that are so intricately interwound you can’t tell one end from another, then this is one to pick up… It has fabulous characters, full of spit and vinegar and evil and mercy and confusing overlapping backstories. It also has Koontz’s trademark way with description, and odd, seemingly throw-away, moments that brilliantly encapsulate some otherwise obtuse element of the human condition. I’ve loved him since his early works (Lightning is still one of my all-time favorites), and am pleased as punch to note that he hasn’t lost any of his magic over the years… These are two such gems.
“She would have been a better woman and teacher if someone had been there to shoot her every morning of her life” (which is itself a better-worded paraphrase of Flannery O’Connor’s “‘She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'”)
Once you bought into valor, it was your residence forever; you could neither sell it like a house nor remodel it into something less grand, and if the day came when you refused to live there anymore, you would also be unable to live any longer with yourself.
VERY different feel, obviously, but equally profound and unusual and utterly Koontz!
[…] – have for years. I recently rediscovered him after a somewhat lengthy (for me) break with Ashley Bell, and was reminded why he has long been one of my favorite escape authors. When I saw his latest was […]