Friday 18 May 2018

Book Review 3 : Seize the Night, by Dean Koontz.

A Review.


‘There are no rules in the dark, no place to feel safe, no escape from the shadows. But to save the day, you must...Seize the Night.’

This is my second Koontz book. The first one was 'Fear nothing', the review of which I have already posted here. It ensured that I would never miss another Koontz book if I could help it.

The blurb further convinced me that I could not miss this one.  An enticing brilliance in the blend of fear for missing children, unknown secrets to unearth in the darkness of the night and unimaginable horror at the crux of the suspense…what more could a thriller lover like me ask for?

We return to Moonlight Bay, the hometown of Christopher Snow, where he urges himself to embrace the darkness, that his life is by ‘Seizing the night’.

Chris Snow is a different protagonist, as clichéd as that may seem. One feels sorry for his deadly predicament of having to live a lifetime without sunlight or light. The challenges faced by a person with a rare genetic disorder like XP or Xeroderman Pigmentosum, are articulated to perfection throughout the novel. It is hard to imagine or even empathize with such a person and makes one thankful for the little joys of life than we often take for granted, such as sunlight.

And yet, Snow aces it better than most people with normal faculties. Snow knows that the disappearance of his friend’s son and the other children is connected to the seemingly abandoned military base of Wyvern, where clandestine experiments were conducted by the military in the past. The police cannot be trusted as they are hand-in-glove with the people responsible. Worse, Orsen, his darling trusted canine friend disappears too in the premises of the dead town’s sordid centre. The added challenge of Chris’s fear and heartbreak touches more than one raw nerve.

Snow’s race against time, even as he fights chasing goons, escapes from violent groups of monkeys, and tries to outrun the breaking dawn, to avoid the monstrous carnage that may result otherwise, makes this book ‘unputdownable’.The tension that is built up over each turned page can be sliced with a knife.

443 pages of delicious suspense that keeps your grey cells ticking overtime, horror that makes the goose-bumps simmer on your skin, deep life lessons that stay with you, mind blowing descriptions that bring the scene alive in your head, wry humor that offers smiles, despite the hair-rising tension, artfully woven into even the most perilous scenes & of course, my most important criteria: top notch vocabulary make ‘Seize the Night’ impossible to put down.

By far the undisputed king of similes and metaphors, Koontz is the master at getting right under your skin and making ice cubes crawl right under each pore.

Pick this one if you are up for a terrific thrill ride.

***
 Excerpts :

We are the most alive & the closest to the meaning of our existence when we are most vulnerable, when experience has humbled us & cured the arrogance, which, like a form of deafness, prevents us from hearing the #lessons that the world teaches.
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The worst thing I saw wasn't in the night, but inside my head.
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I am my own worst enemy. This, more than any other trait, proves my fundamental humanity.
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Nothing gives us #courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.
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#Friendship, #love & surf. Get them while they're still still hot, before they're gone, while you're still human enough to know how precious they are.
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Cold comfort is better than none.
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I cannot care too much about what I cannot change. Like all of us in this storm between life & death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love, which means that, to live, I must care, not about what I am, but about what I can become, not about the past but about the future.
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#Patience. That is one of the great virtues God tries to teach us by refusing to show Himself in this world.

*** 


Picture Credit : Chethana Ramesh©

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