Monday, July 16, 2012

What the Night Knows

By Dean Koontz
Bantam Books, 2010. 442 pages. Horror

John Calvino is a police detective and very good at what he does. John has a story that he has told no one—except his wife—and there are pieces that he’s withheld from her. 20 years ago and hundreds of miles away a serial killer slaughtered four families in a small town. The murderer was stopped and killed by the last survivor of the fourth family: John Calvino, age 14. The particular details of each gruesome murder are now playing out again. Each set of murders was exactly 33 days apart. The number of family members in each family matches up with the families murdered 20 years earlier. John has to find some way to stop an unstoppable murderer, for he knows that his very own family has been marked for murder.

There are certainly things about this story that are completely inexplicable—but these contribute to the eeriness and the terror of the story. You know that a story like this has got to end well--but as Koontz  develops the plot the likelihood of a happy ending seems to dwindle miserably.

SML

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