Dean Koontz - Long Fiction - 1999/2000/2001



1999

False Memory

Pub: Bantam
Price: $26.95

My synopsis: Martie Rhodes is Dustin's young wife, she's a video game designer and she helps her agoraphobic friend Susan by taking her twice a week to therapy sessions. Things start to get worse when Martie herself, on a morning like many others, experiences a fleeting episode of another peculiar fear: autophobia, that is the fear of one's self. In a few hours, she is scared to death just by seeing her own reflection in a mirror, and she rapidly realizes she's going to become a danger for herself.
Desperate to find out what in the world has caused his wife to plunge in such a dreadful state of mind, Dusty starts to reconstruct Martie's recent past. It's the key to a horryfying discovery that takes the couple on a risky journey, in a frantic chase for truth and for their own safety. Meanwhile, as the shocking clues pile up to reveal the madness behind it all, it's just a matter of time before Dusty begins to show signs of another fearsome, unexplicable condition...


2000

From the Corner of His Eye

Pub: Bantam
Price: $26.95

"Bartholomew Lampion is born in Bright Beach, California, on a day of tragedy and terror, when the lives of everyone in his family are changed forever. Remarkable events accompany his birth, and everyone agrees that his unusual eyes are the most beautiful they have ever seen.
On this same day, a thousand miles away, a ruthless man learns that he has a mortal enemy named Bartholomew. He doesn't know who Bartholomew is, but he embarks on a search that will become the purpose of his life. If ever he finds the right Bartholomew, he will deal mercilessly with him.
And in San Francisco, a girl is born, the result of a violent rape. Her survival is miraculous, and her destiny is mysteriously linked to the fates of Barty and the man who stalks him.
At the age of three, Barty Lampion is blinded when surgeons reluctantly remove his eyes to save him from a fast-spreading cancer. As the growing boy copes with his blindness and proves to be a prodigy, his mother, an exceptional woman, counsels him that all things happen for a reason, that there is meaning even in his suffering, and that he will affect the lives of people yet unknown to him in ways startling and profound.
At thirteen, Bartholomew regains his sight. How he regains it, why he regains it, and what happens as his amazing life unfolds results in a breathtaking journey of courage, heart-stopping suspense, and high adventure. His mother once told him that every person's life has an effect on every other person's, in often unknowable ways, and Barty's eventful life indeed entwines with others in ways that will astonish and move everyone who reads his story."


2001

One Door Away From Heaven

Pub: Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub
Price: $26.95
Pages: 608

"In a dusty trailer park on the far edge of the California dream, Michelina Bellsong contemplates the choices she has made. At twenty-eight, she wants to change the direction of her troubled life but can't find her way - until a new family settles into the rental trailer next door and she meets the young girl who will lead her on a remarkable quest.
Despite the brace she must wear on her deformed left leg, and her withered left hand, nine-year-old Leilani Klonk radiates a buoyant and indomitable spirit that inspires Micky. Beneath Leilani's effervescence, however, Micky comes to sense a quiet desperation that the girl dares not express. Leilani's mother is lost in drugs. The girl's stepfather, Preston Maddoc, is educated but threatening. He has moved the family from place to place as he fanatically investigates UFO sightings, striving to make contact, claiming to have had a vision that by Leilani's tenth birthday aliens will either heal her or take her away to a better life on their world. Slowly, ever more troubling details emerge in Leilani's conversations with Micky. Most chilling is Micky's discovery that Leilani had an older brother, also disabled, who vanished after Maddoc took him into the woods one night and is now 'gone to the stars.'
Leilani's tenth birthday is approaching. Micky is convinced the girl will be dead by that day. While the child-protection bureaucracy gives Micky the runaround, the Maddoc family slips away into the night. Micky sets out across America to track and find them, alone and afraid but for the first time living for something bigger than herself. She finds herself pitted against an adversary, Preston Maddoc, as fearsome as he is cunning. Yet Micky pursues her quest, and her passion, her courage, draw a burned-out detective to her side. Hundreds of miles away, a motherless boy and a homeless dog begin an even more astonishing journey. Ahead for them all lie incredible peril, startling discoveries, and paths that will draw them through terrible darkness to unexpected light."

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