King Arthur Movie Tristan

title: Relentless

author: Dean Koontz

genre: suspense/thriller

pages: 428

published: 2009

first line: This is a thing I've learned: Even with a gun to my head, I am capable of being convulsed with laughter.

rated: 2 out of 5 stars

As a writer, I succeed by deceiving readers into accepting that the story I'm telling as true is as true as their lives, that what happens to my characters should intellectually and emotionally involve them no less than they should be concerned about their real-world neighbors. But I have never been good at self-deception.

Relentless is about an insane book critic, it caught my interest right away.



34 year old writer Cullen Greenwich is married to Penny Bloom, has a 6 year old six-year-old prodigy son named Milo and a dog named Lassie.

Literary critic Shearman Waxx gives Cullen's latest book a bad review. Cullen is really upset by this, even though his wife keeps telling him to just let it go.
When Cullen finds out what restaurant the book critic frequents, he goes there for lunch with his son, and runs into Waxx. After an odd run-in in the men's room, Waxx takes notice of Cullen and says one word to him on his way out...'Doom'.



Soon after Cullen spots an intruder in his home, and identifies him as being the book critic. What ensues afterward is an all out terrorizing of Cullen and his family by this book reviewer. The family ends up on the run, not wanting to inform the police because of the media circus that would develop. With the help of friends and various connections, they are able to stay at different homes, but somehow Waxx keeps finding them.



You do need to be willing to suspend disbelief for this read. I just didn't feel like this book critic had enough motive to become hell bent on killing Cullen and his family.


Before you know it, Waxx is after the family, there's explosions and shootings and it's all kind of 'over the top'. Authorities don't notice all this mayhem?


I felt like the methods Waxx was using were just plain absurd. He was almost like a larger than life villain finding Cullen and his family no matter where they went.

The longer Waxx waited to speak again, the more I wondered what his game might be. I had no doubt that he had come here to harm us. That he wanted first to terrorize us seemed obvious, as well. But his boldness, the risks he took, and his eerie patience in the dark gave me the impression that his purpose was more complex than the psychotic thrill of torment and murder.

I also felt like two parents who are on the run from a psychotic maniac wouldn't be so calm and collected about discussing it in front of their 6 year old.


Here's Cullen speaking to 6 year old Milo about what the book critic threatened:

"All right, all right. He says he'll cut out your heart and feed it to your mother, Are you both happy to know that? Mmmmm?


"Don't worry, Milo," Penny said. "I absolutely won't eat it."


"What else did he say?" Milo asked.


"Then he'll cut out your mother's heart and feed it to me."


"This guy," Milo judged, "is a major sicko."

It's been a while since I last read a Koontz book. Years actually. And I've been meaning to pick him up again. Koontz is a favorite of mine, I tend to feel like he won't disappoint.


I'm really, really sorry to say I didn't really enjoy this one more.
I was curious as to what would happen next, and at 428 pages, I'm surprised I finished reading it. I kept putting it away and considered making it a DNF. I was set on finishing it though, because I hoped it would get better. He did make me laugh a few times while reading.

I have a 20-gauge pistol-grip shotgun. It'll stop any book critic ever born.

I still love Koontz anyway and will continue to read his work. This is my first time reading this author where I've been disappointed.




I think Koontz puts his heart and soul into his writing and I did find a few passages I enjoyed. As I read, I would find him throwing glimmers of hope into the storyline.

Among other things, my past had taught me that the very fact of my existence is a cause for amazement and wonder, that we must seize life because we never know how much of it remains for us, that faith is the antidote to despair and that laughter is the music of faith.

This book has been read as part of R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril Challenge

title: The Taking

author: Dean Koontz

genre: horror/suspense

pages: 410

first line: A few minutes past one o'clock in the morning, a hard rain fell without warning.

rated: 5 out of 5








'One rainy night, the end of the world began.'







'The Taking' is one of my favorite Dean Koontz novels. The only books I re-read are ones I absolutely love, so I decided to pick this one up again.


Early one morning, in her cozy California home, Molly Sloan wakes up from bed, unable to sleep. Her husband, Eric, is next to her, sleepy soundly. Molly can hear the sound of rain falling outside, and she senses something is not right.

'Nonetheless, as she scanned the night woods, the nape of her neck prickled as though a ghost lover has pressed his ectoplasmic lips againts her skin. A shudder of inexplicable misgiving passed through her.

Rattled by the conviction that something in the forest returned her scrutiny from behind the wet veil of the storm, Molly backed away from the window.'

She winds up going outside and touching the rain drops, and knows for sure there is something dangerous happening. This is not normal rain, it has a strange scent to it, and touching it makes Molly feel dirty.





Soon enough Eric wakes from a nightmare, and he and Molly turn on the TV to see if there are any weather forecasts. The rain is a heavy downpour and blue snow is falling in other parts of the world. They soon find out that this is not normal weather, that something sinister is out there, so they decide to head out in search of others. While in thier car, they hear a radio broadcasting a recording of a team of astronauts who have recently made contact with these other 'beings'. They hear these astronauts being slaughtered by the aliens.




They find a group of townspeople who have taken refuge in the local bar. These other people are divided in what they want to do. Some want to fight, others want to hide and some want to make peace with whatever has landed on Earth. Molly has a premonition that she is meant to save any children that have been abandoned in this 'rainstorm'. She & Eric head out in search of the children.







I enjoyed the plot, the characters are well written and this book takes off from page one. There isn't a dull moment.

'Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future, focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simple, self-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

What Molly had done thus far in her life was the history of her soul, unalterable, ineradicable. What she hoped to do in the future was of no meaning if she failed to do the wise thing, the good thing, moment by moment, here at the still point, here
in the dance of life.'

I also like Molly & Eric's relationship, it is believeable and you wind up caring what happens to these characters. 'The Taking' is a great read, especially if you're in the mood for a good science fiction/horror/end of the world story. At time Koontz writes this novel, almost like poetry. And I enjoy the references to T.S. Eliot throughout.

'They were as different as mice and moonbeams.

Considering their contrasting natures, they shared a love that seemed unlikely. Yet love was the cord that bound them together, the sinewy fiber that gave them strength to weather dissapointment, even tragedy.'

Some of you have already heard this story...but I'm telling it again. *grin*

I liked this book so much, that when I first read it a few years ago, I mailed Dean Koontz a fan letter telling him how much I loved the book and his writing. I included one of my crocheted elephants with the letter. I didn't expect a response, but a few weeks later, I received a package in the mail. It took me a few seconds for my brain to register what this was once I opened the package....lol. He sent me a personalized letter, thanking me for the elephant. And a hardcover copy of 'The Taking', personally autographed for me. Yeah, that was an O-M-G moment for me. I love my personal autographed book and letter, and I show it off to whoever will listen...lol.














this read has been part of the following reading challenges:

100 +

it's the end of the world challenge

TBR

suspense & thriller

Here's a few books I am looking forward to reading soon:




Odd Hours by Dean Koontz

Coming May 20, 2008!! *yes!* can't wait to get my hands on the next Odd Thomas book. The books in this series are wonderful, and I'm very curious to see where the next book goes. Odd Thomas is such a likeable character.

The legend began in the obscure little town of Pico Mundo. A fry cook named Odd was rumored to have the extraordinary ability to communicate with the dead. Through tragedy and triumph, exhilaration and heartbreak, word of Odd Thomas's gifts filtered far beyond Pico Mundo, attracting unforgettable new friends and enemies of implacable evil. With great gifts comes the responsibility to meet great challenges. But no mere human being was ever meant to face the darkness that now stalks the world--not even one as oddly special as Odd Thomas.



http://www.oddthomas.tv/

The Host
by Stephenie Meyer available May 6


I am a big fan of Stephenie Meyer since reading her "Twilight" series.

I'm running to the bookstore for this one next week...it sounds great! I've been wanting to read a good sci-fi novel.

Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. The earth has been invaded by a species that take over the minds of their human hosts while leaving their bodies intact, and most of humanity has succumbed.


Wanderer, the invading "soul" who has been given Melanie's body, knew about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the too vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn't expect: the former tenant of her body refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.

Breaking Dawn
by Stephenie Meyer available August 2!!

Oh my goodness...*taking a deep breath*.....must calm down....sooo excited for this one!

I'm a big fan of the Twilight series, I fell in love with Edward right away and cannot wait for the next installment. I predict losing sleep at night while staying up late reading this one.

Twilight tempted the imagination. New Moon made readers thirsty for more. Eclipse turned the saga into a worldwide phenomenon. And now, the book that everyone has been waiting for...


Breaking Dawn, the final book in the #1 bestselling Twilight Saga, will take your breath away.

http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/

any books you are looking forward to reading?

The Good Guy
by Dean Koontz



rated: 4 out of 5






Timothy Carrier is having a drink alone at his his friend’s tavern when a man who enters the bar & sits next to him mistakes Tim for a hired killer and gives him a manila envelope full of cash.

The man says “Ten thousand now. You get the rest when she’s gone.”

The stranger walks out, leavs a photo of the woman marked for death, and her address.
A few minutes later, the real hired killer comes in, sees Tim with the envelope and thinks he is the man who has hired him. Tim tells the killer that he has had a change of heart and gives the killer the cash. The killer finds this hard to believe, but takes the cash and leaves. Tim follows him out and figures out the killer is a cop.

Tim keeps the womans photo and adress and goes to the womans home to warn her. They have a mutual friend who vouches for Tim. She believes Tim's story and they both set out for a while to try to figure out why Linda is on a hit list.





The hired killer figures out what is going on and tracks Tim and Linda down and you soon see how crazy he is. His name is Krait and he is pretty much nuts. He has alot of resources and help in tracking down his targets and kills other innocents in the process as well.

It becomes like a cat and mouse chase with Tim and Linda narrowly escaping the killer. They are trying to figure out why he is after Linda and trying to stay alive now that that killer is after both of them.


'He had not fallen in love at first sight. He had not spent his life looking for someone like Linda. Her face had just been another face, attractive but not enchanting. The feelings he had for her now were nothing he could have imagined then.

Maybe it was this: The name of the person marked for murder is just a name, but the face makes real the cost of violence, for if we have the nerve to look, we can see in any face our own vulnerability.'












I enjoyed this book. I liked it from the start, it was interesting and suspenseful.
It had Koontz' good humor in it as well. Throughout most of the book, you are reading from either Tim or the hired killers perspectives. I liked this, because this way you get to see what both are thinking during the story.
I also liked Linda and Tim's romance, it's not forced and gradually shows up.


"This was not the moment of no return, for Tim had passed that moment earlier in the night. When he had walked out of the street and into her house, when he had seen that she possessed a poster of a TV instead of a TV, he had committed himself to a course as irreversible as the one that Columbus had taken when he weighed anchor in August of 1492."





I always love reading a good Dean Koontz novel. It's kinda like good chocolate.
visit the author's website @ http://deankoontz.com/







this read is part of the following challenges:

suspense & thriller

TBR

Velocity by Dean Koontz




'Our myths are rich with enchanters and enchantresses: sea nymps that sing sailors into rocks, Circe turning men into swine, pipers playing children to their doom. They are metaphors for the secret sinister urge to self-destruction that has been with us since the first bite of the first apple.'





rated: 3 out of 5




Bill Wile is a bartender who lives a pretty quiet life. He has no close friends, his gilfriend is in the hospital and has been in a coma for several years. One day after his shift is over, Bill finds a note stuck to his windshield:

'If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have four hours to decide. The choice is yours.'



At first, Bill thinks it is a sick joke, so he talks to his cop friend Lanny, who agrees. But then, soon after a blond schoolteacher is found dead. From then on, Billy knows this is for real, he gets another note with another morbid ultimatum.




At times I cringed during reading. It was just plain gross. And I didn't really like this story that much, I didn't really feel any connection with any characters and I didn't really understand why the murderer chose Billy to send these notes to.





D.K. is one of my all time favorites but I really didn't enjoy this one too much.
And the main character does all these grisly things, then you think there is no way he can get out of it without going to prison, but yet, after it's all over, he finds the killer, then he goes back to his normal life. It's like 'Why just not go to the cops in the first place?' instead of pretty much becoming a psycho yourself?



http://deankoontz.com/

I got my Christmas is Good book
in the mail yesterday....and it's autographed by Dean and Trixie. It's very cute.

Brother Odd by Dean Koontz


This is my second book for the R.I.P. challenge.









rated: 3 out of 5








This is the 3rd book in the Odd Thomas series and I am sad to say I liked this one the least. I'm a big fan of Odd, and the first 2 books were so good. Odd Thomas was excellent, and Forever Odd was just as great. This one didn't hold my attention much though. It started off slow and didn't really take off at all.


It does leave room for another book though, so that's promising.
D.K. did include a few comedic lines as he does with these books, and I did laugh out loud at times. I love Odd's sense of humor.







In this one, Odd goes to live in a monastery in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where one of the monks goes missing. He starts seeing 'bodachs' and tries to figure out what is going on. Bodachs are kind of like ghosts that come 'round when death and pain are coming, only Odd can see them.

One thing I didn't like was that the sick little girl in the room says 'loop me in' to Odd, and he feels it is Stormy, his girlfriend who was killed in book 1, using this little girl to talk to him from the other side. But then nothing else really happens with that story line....

And what happened to Danny? Odd's best friend in book 2? He's not even mentioned once. You even wonder what is Odd doing in a monastery? I also didn't really care much for the other characters. The story really didn't have much excitement and when I first started reading, I was sure I'd be done in a day or two. Instead, it took me 2 weeks, because I didn't really feel like picking the book up again. Sad to say, I found it boring at parts.
It was almost like this book had nothing to do with the previous 2 books.




"Because I live with the dead, my tolerance for the macabre is so high that I am seldom spooked. The part-shriek-part-squeal-part-buzz, however, was so otherworldly that my imagination failed to conjure a creature that might have made it, and the marrow in my bones seemed to shrink in the way that mercury, in winter, contracts to the bottom of a thermometer.

I took one step toward where the school out to be, but then halted, retracted that step. I turned uphill but dared not retreat to the abbey. Something unseen in the camouflaging storm, something with an alien voice full off need and fury, seemed to await me no matter in which direction I proceeded."






see my other reviews for this challenge:



Frankenstein Prodigal Son by Dean Koontz

I just finished reading Frankenstein the Prodigal Son Book I by Dean Koontz. This is my first book for the R.I.P. challenge.









rated: 4 out of 5





I really enjoyed this read, it was creepy and full of suspense.




In the story, Victor Frankenstein survives to live in the 21st century. He lives as a rich scientist named Victor Helios in New Orleans.

The House of Frankenstein is pretty creepy to say the least. His staff is made up of his own monsters. And he has changed himself to remain young and to replace society with his 'New Race' of monsters.
He programs them whatever way he wants and performs all kinds of nasty experiments in his lab.





Frankensteins nasty creations already live among humans...they are everywhere. One of which is a cop serial killer, who is trying to slice people up in an effort to find out what makes them happy. Frankensteins creatures can never feel happiness.



A pair of homicide detectives, who are kind of in love with each other BTW, are discovering the truth and that Frankenstein is real.

Frankensteins first creation, calls himself Deucalion, and has been hiding in a Tibetan monastery for 200 years. Now he comes to New Orleans to help the homicide detectives and fight against Franeknstein and his monsters.


I can't wait to read the next part of the story 'City of Night'.




A character I liked alot is Victors wife Erika. She is made to be a slave to Victor, yet when he 'designs' her, he allows her humility, so she can feel shame. Erika ends up being more than what Victor expected, she enjoys reading Emily Dickinson and even admires the 'Old Race' of humans instead of hating them as she is supposed to.






'Life in the house of Victor Frankenstein was certain to involve more macabre moments than life in the house of Huckelberry Finn. Nevertheless, the sight of a severed hand crawling across the drawing-room carpet amazed even Erika, a man-made
woman equipped with two hearts.'-Frankenstein the Prodigal Son Book I by Dean Koontz

I found this R.I.P. II challenge and decided to join.

This is so up my alley.

'R.I.P. II is a September 1st through October 31st celebration of all tales gothic, eerie, creepy, and dark. Tales that one reads in the dark of night, experiencing delicious shivers of terror and suspense at each creak of the floorboards or each gust of wind.'




I am taking on 'the first peril' which is:

'Read Four books of any length, from any subgenre of scary stories that you choose.'

Here are my horrific choices:

1. Frankenstien, Book I by Dean Koontz

2. City of Night, Frankenstien, Book II by Dean Koontz

3. The Stand by Stephen King

4.
Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice






I'm also taking on an additional peril and will be reading:


1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

2. A collection of tales by Edgar Allan Poe

3. Brother Odd by Dean Koontz (I've read the first 2 books in this series and have been wanting to read this latest one)





And I may try to get some H. P. Lovecraft in there as well.


Even if I don't finish by October 31st, I will keep reading until my list is complete.







---------------------------------



And since we're on the topic of all things spooky, I wanted to post my Dean Koontz autographed book here.

I posted this a while ago at my crochet blog before I had a book blog, but I think it's more fitting here:


Last year I sent my fav author Dean Koontz a fan letter
telling him my fav book of his is 'The Taking'.
I also asked him for an autograph and sent him one of my crocheted elephants.
Well, a few weeks later, to my utter amazement, I received mail from him.
He sent me a personally signed hard cover copy of 'The Taking', his newsletter
and a note saying thanks for the letter and the cute elephant!
*faint* need I say more?
I was thrilled! I still have everything he sent, carefully stored and I do take it out now and then to show it off to friends and family who visit.

I finished reading Dean Koontz's 'The Husband'


Gardener Mitch Rafferty receives a cell phone call one afternoon from a stranger saying that his wife Holly has been kidnapped and that he has less than three days to come up with $2 million in cash. The kidnapper tells Mitch he must not involve the police or else Holly will be tortured slowly then murdered. Yikes!



Sounding good? It gets better. Mitch tries explaining that he is just a gardener and has no way of getting 2 mil, but then the kidnapper shoots a guy on the street just to make sure Mitch knows they are serious.



Once the police arrive, Mitch tries to seem calm and doesn't mention that his wife has been kidnapped. But the one detective doesn't seem too convinced.


As the story unravels, Mitch goes home to find he will be framed for his wifes murder if he tries to go to the police, since the kidnappers set up his home to make it seem Mitch murdered her.....


**********************************



It's a great read and I recommend it. I'm partial to Dean Koontz novels though.
I like the love story between Mitch and his wife. I also like the impossible scenario Mitch is in and how you wonder how the heck will he get 2mil for the ransom. I also like Mitch's background and how he is just a plain ol' good guy, even though he had such twisted parents.





rating : 4 out of 5