More Dean Koontz!

I'm cruising through this book, and while I won't call it astronomically bad, I'm finding it kind of a fascinating ride, in a car wreck kind of way.

First, I am being forced to recall Koontz's fascination with architecture. Most of his books take place in southern California, and he's always talking about Spanish styles, Tudors, neoclassical architecture, with everything surrounded by bougainvillea. I don't quite know what bougainvillea is, but I'm surprised it's possible to see the state of California under the blankets of it that populate Koontz books.

He is also definitely very excited about the research he does. When the guy has blood drawn, the author uses the technical name for the little tube that they take the sample in, as well as for the part of the syringe that it attaches to. I was able to glean what he was talking about pretty easily, but it's such a cute affectation, like an eighth grader using a fifty cent word that he just looked up. At another point, the guy has a little twitch in his eyelid (the girl thinks he's winking at her, which results in a meet-cute), and he uses the technical name for that, too. This one, though, he had to explain, resulting in the sentence, "...on the afternoon that she had met him, thirteen months previously, he had been afflicted with a stubborn case of myokymia, uncontrollable twitching of the eyelid." Learning the word myokymia, I'm sorry to say has not improved my life at all so far.

The other thing he's doing is going HEAVY with the Poe references. We've got a guy with a heart condition who's been hearing a weird tapping noise and having paranoid moments. It's finally come to the point where Koontz writes that he suspects someone of following him around "for the purpose of tormenting him with the rapping, the soft rapping, the soft rap-rap-rapping, only this and nothing more." Followed by a paragraph describing the lub-dub of his unhealthy heart in telltale detail.

Oh, oh, and also! All the trappings of wealth I was talking about earlier? It's one thing to have a private plane and call a limo service all the time. But every time the car service comes to take him to or from the airport, it sends a superstretch limousine. I mean, why? It's one guy, driving to the airport. He spends all the time staring out the window--it's not like he's into the champagne or taking a nap on the huge seats. I really don't think I'm supposed to find this showy wealth as creepy as I do.

On the plus side--the whole thing where I thought he was being paranoid? He was being paranoid. So maybe, at the end, the character will realize he's also throwing his money around conspicuously and having Edgar Allen Poe channeling moments. Maybe this is an intricately crafted, mind blowing roller coaster ride of a novel. Hehe. I'm pretty sure not, though.