After a busy day at work there is really nothing like being able to escape into the world of fiction. A good book will make you focus on the story and forget everything around you. It never ceases to amaze me how this happens. I have music playing when I read but do not ask me what songs went past in the process of reading of my book because I have no idea. I tend to drown out the music and it becomes background noise rather than sounds disturbing my concentration on what is happening on the page. A good book absorbs you and takes you away from where you are, mentally. It engages our mind and imagination as you imagine how the characters look, what the environment they are in looks like, what they wear looks like. I always get a little "mind movie" playing in my head as I read. Part of my brain reads the words on the page, part of my brain follows the plot, and part of my brain sort of "projects" what I read into a little movie that plays in my head. It's a great buzz when all of that comes together!
This time I went for another one by Dean Koontz. He is an author that I like to read as much for his inventive and weird subject matter as for his pace of writing.
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Dark Rivers of the Heart - Dean Koontz
The story in this book is again not too far off what you are used to from DK. A man with a dark past, or almost no past has a chance meeting with a woman. He becomes obsesses with finding her and (naturally) she is in some kind of trouble. The second story line is about a government agent (Roy) who thinks that he has the right to take people's lives away from them because he thinks they have had a hard life and can never reach perfection. He may call it compassion killing but really the guy is as nutty as they come. The third strand of the story is how a government can destroy innocent lives just because it can.
Spencer Grant is a man who has a past, only he has tried to hide it from others as much as from himself perhaps. Throughout the book you get snippets of information about what has happened to him as a young boy, why he now tries to make himself almost invisible, and how he got his scar. He has a past in the army and police force and is quite handy with a computer. Spencer comes across as a very nice guy. Calm, caring and dedicated to the friends that he has/s. He goes to bars to talk to strangers about the past he cannot unlock and one of these is a woman named Valerie. Turns out that Valerie is not who she says she is either and very soon Spencer finds himself hunted by an unknown enemy who will stop at nothing to find him and Valerie. Suffice it to say that both Valerie and Spencer have know violent deaths of loved ones and that has shaped who they are now. Valerie got into trouble for what she knew and she has been on the run for 4 months, trying to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. So far she has been doing okay. She's a dab hand with a gun and can find her way into any computer network you can imagine. You kid of know that things will be okay between Spencer and Valerie from the start. They seem to be made for each other. The journey that they take is filled with car chases, violent government agents and the occasional burger. The cars used in the story are (as ever with DK) mostly Ford Explorers and Rovers, Chevy's. If I am not mistaken, proper American cars! Maybe they sponsor him, maybe he just wants to make the point that they are American cars not imported Japanese or European cars... which he does not seem to like that much.
In the end we find out what is lurking in Spencer's past and who he really is. Valerie's past is revealed much more quickly and easily but then what lurks in Spencer's past is, in a way, far more devastating that that in Valerie's.
One of the cutest characters in the book is Spencer's dog. He comes from the pound and is damaged with and unclear past just like Spencer and Valerie. He seems to cower behind Spencer most of the time and will not even do his business whilst watched but he has a need for speed and finds his inner canine when it matters most.
There is a nice side story of what happens to Spencer's old boss. He is the one who is most devastated by the system. Spencer and Valerie have elected to almost live outside the system but Harris Descoteaux is the one who loses his life and identity because one powerful but petty man took a dislike to him.
The guys that are after Valerie and Spencer are powerful and hard to recognise. They can be whoever they need to be (FBI, DEA) and infiltrate any computer system they want. They can go after whoever they want and devastate people's lives. They do this without any compassion and any respect for laws. To me this seems to be the main point that DK wants to get across He is not exactly on a crusade but he has created a book in which he riles against the power of the fictional organisation he has created, of the government that has turned against the citizens it is supposed to protect and aid in their survival. It seems to be he has an axe to grind with some of the laws that exist in the USA about seizing property. It is the indiscriminate power of shady government organisations that seem to grind away at basic human rights that annoys him as well. Furthermore, I distinctly get the feeling that he is not exactly happy about the power that computers have in the modern world either or perhaps he is more upset about how that power is harnessed for evil and unlawful purposes than it actually being there. Mind you, i have never investigated what DK thinks about anything what his political beliefs and how sees the world, but I do really get the idea that he is trying to make a serious point with this book. He does not always do this in his books. He usually has a point but it has more often a moral or human angle. His stories are about human behaviour and how people get in involved in weird things and how they deal with what the world throws at them.
The book has a very good pace from the start but in the last couple hundreds of pages it picks up another gear. I had to just finish it today as I had to know what it was that burdened Spencer and to see if him and Valerie would both survive. I kind of knew they would but yet, even knowing that they probably would, I had to get to the end and fast. There are some nasty, sick minds running around in this book and not all of them end up dead. The book does leave you with hope for the future for all the main characters. Their lives will be in danger many times and they will probably be running for a long time to come, maybe even for the rest of their lives but they have friends, people they trust and love around them and they will be alright. It also leaves with the hope that surely someone , somewhere will be able to stop the sicko ones from doing what they do best.
Title: Dark Rivers of the Heart
Author: Dean Koontz
728 pages
Headline
ISBN nr 978-0-7472-449-3
Books to be read: 76
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