False Memory: The Problem of Evil/Ahriman

As we have seen, the first 25 chapters of the book shifted perspective between Dusty and Martie as they went about their separate daily activities.  The technique is highly effective.  The increasingly creepy and alarming things happening to Martie alternate with Dusty's seemingly straightforward story about his drug addicted brother's self-destructive behavior.  Not until Chapter 20 (or so) do we begin to suspect that Skeet's off behavior may be more than just a drug addiction, let alone that they may be related to what is happening to Martie.

Once Dusty and Martie come together in Chapter 25, we can no longer alternate between them, but Koontz liked the shifting perspectives so much that he wants to keep doing it.  At first he shifts perspective between Dusty/Martie and Susan.  That is effective at first, as Susan hits on the idea of using the camcorder to catch her phantom rapist, but as soon as the villain is revealed to be Ahriman, something is lost.  Dusty is working hard to figure out what is going on, but the audience no longer has to work at all, because Koontz just showed us the back of the book so we longer have to figure it out.  No fair!

Now Susan is dead, so Koontz needs another perspective to alternate with.  The only candidate he can think of is -- Ahriman.  The book would be better off if this part were vastly reduced.

I agree that at least some Ahriman passages are essential for the sake of exposition.  Dusty is doing a fine job of figuring out how the mind control works from the viewpoint of the operator.  What he does not ever figure out or even attempt to figure out was how that control was established in the first place. We therefore need Ahriman to explain that to us, and indeed, he does.  He gains control by three times drugging his victims with his own special combination of drugs and engaging in three programming sessions with them in their drugged condition.  In Susan's case, she was a real estate broker who sold him his present house.  He invited her to toast the sale with champagne and secretly drugged hers for the  first session.  (The book does not explain how he got to her the second time).  Martie was drugged while accompanying Susan to his office.  This is useful information we need Ahriman to give us.  In addition, although Dusty gradually figures out how to operate a person under mind control, he is naturally somewhat clumsy and amateurish at it.  We need Ahriman at some time to give us a demonstration of how a pro works.  This exposition would also be useful to clear up some of those unexplained clues Koontz keeps planting.  Unfortunately, although some of the clues do get explained, a great many do not.

Other than providing exposition, Ahriman is mostly a nuisance.  Consider what we already know about him.  Ahriman is a psychiatrist who uses his training to exercise brainwashing and mind control over people.  He creates phobias and anxiety disorders and, under the guise of treating them, makes them worse and worse, tormenting his patients with terrible psychological maladies.  He also uses his mind control to rape female patients and subject them to unspeakable depravities.  He also uses his powers to make patients commit suicide or (it is beginning to be hinted) commit murder and spectacular crimes.

All of these are integral to the plot.  Any one of them should be sufficient to mark him as evil.  All of them combined mark him as really, really evil.  But apparently that is not enough for Koontz.  He has to add all sorts of pointless embellishments.  Besides all that, Ahriman relishes nothing so much as a woman's tears.  In his youth he dissected live cats and dogs and even a boy.  He killed both his parents.  He cut his father's eyes out and saves them in formaldihyde.  He drove a power drill through his step mother's heart.  And all sorts of other details that serve no purpose except to show off how thoroughly evil he is.  We get the point already!

Showing off gratuitous and pointless evil has no real appeal.  There are various reasons to dwell upon the villain.  One, mentioned above, is to provide exposition that no one else in the story can offer.  Koontz does a fair job with this, although a good deal remains unexplained.  A similar but not identical purpose is to show off the villain's fantastically intricate plot that, despite its evilness, has a certain artistic beauty in its complexity.  Koontz indicates that Ahriman does sometimes develop such plots, but in this particular case, he appears to be winging it.

Another possible reason to dwell on the villain is that he is not wholly evil, but has doubts and  misgivings.  Koontz, however, apparently has little tolerance for moral ambiguity and prefers his villains completely and utterly evil.  Of course, a villain can be completely and unambiguously evil and still be attractive.  But Koontz doesn't want his villains to be attractive.  He thinks that making evil attractive is immoral.  Or, as he puts it:

My villains are pathetic. I never glorify a villain. I couldn’t write something like Hannibal because there’s something there that makes the villain the most glamorous person in the piece. I can’t write that. I don’t find evil glamorous. You’ll never find it that way in my books.

 But evil can, after all, have a certain seductive appeal.  Much of great literature is devoted to exploring that seductive appeal and why it exists.  Of course, much of great literature is not.  If Koontz does not want to explore the seductive appeal of evil for fear of seducing his readers, that is certainly reasonable.  But to judge from the effort he expends establishing just how pointlessly and gratuitously evil Ahriman is, whether relevant to the plot or not, one can only conclude that evil has a definite fascination to Koontz.  Why?  Koontz explains:

 I need to portray the true struggle of this world, so there are bad characters in my books. We need to be honest about the violence that we face, including that which we became aware of on 9/11 — an evil that denies the legitimacy of the civilization that we know and an evil that doesn’t value human life. A lot of people want to turn away from it. We’re going to be defeated by it if we can’t recognize the depth of that evil.

Evil walks among us. We don’t always see it. Each of us, in our daily lives, encounters evil; we are tempted to evil every day of our lives. If we don’t want to read about it or think about it, I don’t think that’s a truly Christian point of view. We have to acknowledge it, face it and defeat it. That’s what each of my books is about.

But let's face it.   Evil is real, all right, and that fact has to be faced.  But characters like Ahriman -- dissects live puppies, killed both parents, pickled his father's eyes, causes innocent people to go on murderous sprees, etc. etc -- may exist, but they are extremely rare.  Koontz' readers are most unlikely to encounter anyone even remotely like Ahriman in their lives.  To suggest that people like Ahriman are lurking around every corner is a sure-fire recipe for paranoia.  To suggest that evil is Ahriman is an invitation to ignore or dismiss the countless petty misdeeds that are the form of evil most people encounter most often -- an are most likely to be tempted by.  Indeed, if the point of your novel is to encourage people to fight the ordinary evil and temptation of their everyday lives, defining evil as someone like Ahriman is the easy way out.  It makes it easy to say, "Well, I'm nothing like Ahriman, so I must be Good."

Just to be clear here, I am not saying that the villain has to be attractive, or morally ambiguous, or represent the sort of evil ordinary people are likely to encounter in their everyday lives.  All I am really saying is that if the novel is going to focus on the villain a lot, he should at least be entertaining and fun to read.  Ahriman's preening and posturing about how evil he is, is not entertaining or fun to read.

Ah, but there is one other kind of villain who can provide entertainment.  That is the comic villain, whose evil is not very effectual, and who is mostly put in for laughs.  Remarkable as it may seem, Ahriman actually does begin assuming that role around Chapter 65, page 466 (the book has short chapters).  By this time, events have spiraled out of Ahriman's control, Dusty and Martie are having more traditional action-packed adventure, and Ahriman is left to serve mostly as comic relief.  He is actually surprisingly effective and entertaining in that role, and fun to read.  (And he is already established as so thoroughly evil that showing him in a comic light in no way detracts from his evilness).

But until then, Ahriman's only real value is a source of exposition; otherwise he is an annoyance.  I will therefore gloss over the Ahriman sections except to the extent they offer exposition.