False Memory: Chapter 9, pp. 53-58

Then, after building so much tension as Martie and Susan approach Dr. Mark Ahriman's office, he suddenly breaks it when they and why not?  Throwing a curve ball is a perfectly good literary technique and keeps readers guessing.  Dr. Ahriman is tall, handsome, athletic and very professional.  He exudes "affability, genuine interest in people, and relaxed self-confidence."  He is also a celebrity therapist with best-selling books. Susan goes into his office, undisturbed by his huge picture window.  Martie talks with him, and he seems entirely compassionate and professional, saying the sort of things you would expect a psychiatrist to say, assuring Martie that even if Susan is getting worse, it may just mean she is on the verge of a breakthrough, and telling Martie how valuable her friendship is to Susan.  If anything about the scene seems creepy, it is perhaps that Ahriman is too calming and too reassuring.  But on the whole, he calms and reassures the audience as well as Martie and Susan.

Koontz introduces two clues which do not seem sinister now, but turn out to be altogether relevant to the story later on.  There is a main reception area and waiting room when they come in, but down the hall, outside Ahriman's office is a second waiting room with a door directly to the corridor outside the office suite.  This arrangement ensured privacy for anyone accompanying patients to the office, so that they do not run into other patients or their companions.  It also, as we discover, allows Ahriman to step out of his office and bring people in the waiting room under his control without being observed.  Jennifer, the receptionist, gives Martie coffee and a biscotto.  The coffee is excellent.  It is also the perfect opportunity to drug unwary non-patients.  But we only learn any of this later.

Next comes a sequence that is a perfect clue for a generic brainwashing and mind control novel, but just doesn't fit the premises of this brainwashing and mind control novel.  It creates yet more clues that are never explained and (perhaps) gives the audience too many clues, too early as to what is going on.  Once again, I will have to quote it in full, with interspersed comment, to do it full justice.  Martie has brought a book with her to read while she waits.

After a while, she was able to concentrate on the book.  The writing was good.  The plot was entertaining.  The characters were colorful.  She enjoyed it.

The second waiting room was a fine place to read.  Hushed.  No windows.  No annoying background music.  No distractions.

Okay, none of this sounds particularly disturbing.  But consider what follows.

In the story, there was a doctor loved haiku, a concise form of Japanese poetry.  Tall, handsome, blessed with a mellifluous voice, he received a haiku in while he stood at a huge window, watching a storm:

Ok, so who is a tall, handsome doctor with a mellifluous voice?  And who as a huge window in his office, with a storm outside?  Of course, the novel could parallel what is really happening right now, but the coincidence seems like a bit much.

Pine wind blowing hard,
quick rain, torn windpaper
talking to itself.

 Although it is not yet apparent, this is the first introduction of haiku into the story.  Haiku turns out to be highly significant.  This haiku, however, never has any further significance and is never seen or heard again.  So what is it doing here?

Martie thought the poem was lovely.  And those succinct lines perfectly conveyed the mood of this January rain as it swept along the coast, beyond the window.  Lovely -- both the view of the storm and the words.

 Okay, this makes clear what what previously just hinted.  This scene is not a scene from the novel.  It is a real life scene.  Martie is looking out the window in Ahriman's office, at the storm outside in the here and now.

Yet the haiku also disturbed her.  It was haunting.  An ominous intent lurked beneath the beautiful images.  A sudden disquiet came over her, a sense that nothing was what it seemed to be.

What's happening to me?

She felt disoriented.  She was standing although she had no memory of having risen from her chair. And for God's sake, what was she doing here? 

 Clearly something is the matter.  She can't quite make out what.  She was just in Ahriman's office, and now she is in the waiting room again.  She is standing, even though she has no memory of getting up.  And something feels hostile for reasons she cannot explain. 

Then she closed her eyes, because she must relax.  She must relax.  Relax.  Have faith.

Gradually she recovered her composure.

She decided to pass the time with a book.  Books were good therapy.  You could lose yourself in a book, forget your troubles, your fear.

This particular book as especially good escape reading.  The writing was good.  The plot was entertaining.  The characters were colorful.  She enjoyed it.

 Okay.  Obviously Martie is not reading the book, although she thinks she is.  So if she is spending an hour in the waiting room twice a week and thinks she is reading a book but really is not, what is she doing?  The scene in the book, that is really a scene in reality, appears to suggest that she is actually in Dr. Ahriman's office, and that he is reciting haiku.  I can see two problems here.  Already creepy and inexplicable happenings are specifically being associated with Dr. Ahriman's office.  It is fair to ask, is Koontz getting ahead of himself, directing suspicion to Dr. Ahriman too early?  But maybe Koontz has decided that people will start suspecting the psychiatrist anyhow, so he might as well encourage them. 

The more serious problem is that he seems to be suggesting that Martie is having real memories of the time in his office, vaguely glimpsed as part of the novel she thinks she is reading.  There is only one problem here.  Never at any other time in the novel is it so much as suggested that people might have sort of ghost memories of their time under his control, disguised as scenes from a novel or anything else.  We later learn that forbidden memories can sometimes arise in the form of dreams, although not directly, but only through symbols.  Here, by contrast, she almost certainly remembers the scene exactly as it was, but is not aware that it was a real scene.  Nothing else in the novel so much as suggests that this is possible, let alone gives any explanation how it could happen.  Once again, Koontz is dropping a huge clue that is never repeated, followed up on, or explained.  Once again, what he suggests here does not seem to fit the premise of the rest of the novel.

 The good news is that we are almost to the end of the hanging clues.  Soon the clues will, indeed, be highly relevant to the story as it develops, though with a few anomalies.  The last of the big hanging clues is coming up in the next segment.

False Memory: Chapters 5 and 7, pp. 29-47 (with intervals)

Chapter 5 widens the scope of the story as we discover what Martie's obligation on Tuesdays and Thursdays is, and learn of another major source of stress in her life.
Martie's best friend, Susan Jagger suffers from agoraphobia (fear of open places).  Before the onset about 16 months ago, Susan worked as a realtor and lived in a three-story house with her husband Eric, an investment advisor.  (No children or animals).  The agoraphobia has ruined all of these.  Her fear of open spaces made it impossible for her to do the driving necessary for a real estate agent.  After four months, her husband moved out, unable to deal with her disorder.  (That turns out to be a clue, too).  So, with her earning capacity gone and her husband leaving her, Susan has rented out the bottom two stories of the house and lives on the third floor, conveniently equipped with a kitchen, living room, bedroom and bath, and accessible by an outdoor flight of stairs.  Eric also sends her a monthly check.  At first, Susan could handle leaving the house so long as she stayed in enclosed spaces.  Now anywhere but her  house and her psychiatrist's office feels unsafe.  Four months ago, she could look longingly out the window.  Now just the view alarms her and she has to keep the windows covered.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, Martie drives her to her psychiatrist for therapy.  She has a key so Susan does not have to go to the door and confront the great outside (also significant, it turns out).  Invariably, Susan is overcome with anxiety about leaving the house, and Martie has to exhaust her store of coaxing, cajoling, jollying, bullying, threatening, taunts, insults and sarcasm to get her going.  Today is much like any other such occasion, except that Martie is suffering from anxiety as well.  In fact, it crosses her mind that dealing with Susan is another major source of stress in her life and may be responsible for her anxiety attacks.  The mirrors in the house make her uneasy, but do not trigger all-out panic.
Then, on the way out, Martie sees Susan's mezzaluna and has a sense of alarm.

mezzaluna

Here I will have to admit that I did not know what a mezzaluna was, but apparently a Mezzaluna is a two-handles knife in the shape of a half moon (mezzaluna means half moon in Italian) that is good for dicing by rocking back and forth. 

Martie asks about the knife and Susan cheerfully says it can dice an onion in a flash.  I like this sequence.  It is well done for two reasons.  First, it is the beginning of a marked progression in Martie's phobia.  Expect to see a lot of similar reactions, ever escalating.  Second, it very nicely makes the point that phobia is not indivisible.  Susan is terrified of going out.  It takes every ounce of persuasion Martie has to overcome Susan's fear and get her to leave the house.  And even as they are in the middle of the "extraction," Martie is overcome with a phobic reaction to something that has no effect on Susan at all.

Outside, Martie's anxiety grows, even as she is coaxing and bullying Susan along.  The storm outside seems wild and menacing and to waken something frightening in Martie.  When she gets out her car keys, she notices for the first time how sharp and jagged they are, and the harm they could inflict.  She wonders if this is a reaction to the grapefruit juice she drank that morning.  And you know what I think about that grapefruit juice.

Neither the car, nor the corridor, nor the elevators at the psychiatrist's office are enclosed enough to reassure Susan.  The only place besides her home where she feels safe is in his office.  Not even the waiting room is private enough.  The closer they get to the office, the less Susan holds back and the more she wants to hurry up and get there, muttering, "Almost safe, almost safe."  Martie feels strangely uneasy.  The mirrors in the elevator make her uncomfortable for some reason she cannot quite name.  She is overcome by a strange feeling that they are walking into great danger, and that she should grab Susan and run.

Just in case it is not clear by this point, Susan's psychiatrist turns out to be the villain.  I suppose that shouldn't be too surprising.  If the characters are victims of brainwashing and mind control, the psychiatrist is, after all, the most plausible suspect.  Who else could do it?  I think this part as they approach his office fairly broadly hints as much.  Susan's feeling safe in his office seems just a little disturbing.  Why is everywhere else outside her house so frightening except this one place?  And her craving for the his office makes one uncomfortable.  She is behaving like a moth, flying into a flame.  Or, perhaps, she craves her psychiatrist's office the way Skeet craves his drugs.  It has the feeling of being just as much an addiction, and no healthier.  In short, I think Koontz is dropping unmistakable clues here that all is not well with Susan and her psychiatrist.  Unlike many of his other clues, these ones turn out to be quite true.

Did I Despair Too Soon?

In 2008, I pounded pavements for Barack Obama for a simple reason.  I hoped he would roll back the abuses of George Bush in his War on Terror.  I did not really expect or care if he prosecuted offenders, but I did want him to expose what they had done and stop it from continuing.  To say he has disappointed would be an extreme understatement.  He has stopped torture (at least as an official policy), but that is all.  Holding suspects indefinitely without trial, massive vacuum of data and datamining, FBI use of entrappment, surveillanc on legal activities, and abuse of many of the powers in the PATRIOT Act, all continue unabated.  Not only has Obama done nothing to prosecute Bush-era abuses, he is doing his best to keep them concealed.  All this drove me to despair.
But maybe I have despaired too soon.  At the time Obama took over, there were all sorts of hysterical warnings against prosecuting Bush era officials.  We aren't a banana republic.  We don't prosecute policy differences.  (No, then how about prosecuting torture?)  Obama himself said we should look forward, not back.  What these warnings ignored was that we were behaving exactly like a dictatorship transitioning back to democracy. Unless all-out revolution sweeps the old order away (which causes a whole lot of new problems), deposed dictators' power doesn't vanish overnight with the transition to democracy.  They continue to exercise a lot of it behind the scenes.  And one of their first priorities is to protect themselves from prosecution and cover up evidence of old crimes.  Often times it is best to let it happen that way.  Dictators are unlikely to give up power without the assurance that it is safe to do so.  A real attempt to deal with the past is too raw and too ugly when it is too new. 
Such, I believe, was the case with us as well.  Painful as it is to say, I do not believe that our body politic in 2009 was strong enough to withstand a thorough-going investigation of the crimes of the Bush Administration.  Too many powerful people were penally vested in preventing that; and many less powerful people were emotionally vested in defending Bush's actions.  You think our politics are bad now?  They don't even compare with what would have happened if Obama had made a serious attempt to expose, much less prosecute, the crimes of Bush.  The result, tragically, as been to perpetuate Guantanamo, to actually make it illegal to close it or to give a fair trial to the inmates there, and to cement the worst excesses of the national security state.  Many times, I have despaired.

Maybe that was premature.  Bits and pieces of what happened are slowly coming to light. Senate Democrats have poured over millions of pages of classified documents, studying the CIA torture program and whether it yielded useful results.  A report will be coming out.  I doubt it will change many minds.  Changing minds takes time.  But it happens.

This article gives me hope. The author points out that we've seen this script play out before in Latin America where, indeed, the transition from dictatorship to democracy was possible only by guaranteeing the former dictators against prosecution, or even exposure.  But exposure couldn't be stopped, and over 20 years it led to prosecution:

Each of these regimes left office armored with amnesties and immunities, with official decisions to decline prosecution, and, significantly, with strong public support for the use of torture as a necessary evil in the battle against terrorists. But in the past few years, former heads of state and leading figures in the intelligence communities of each of these countries have been charged, tried, and convicted of crimes that include torture and conspiring to torture.

What happened? Across more than two decades, public opinion steadily turned against those who had used torture. This process was driven by disclosures of photographs and tapes of heinous acts, by the meticulous work of forensic pathologists who gave the victims a voice, by survivors who forcefully recounted their experiences, by journalists who published exposés, and by lawyers who pressed for information to be revealed and who painstakingly assembled facts for lawsuits.

 We've been through this before.  Our government, in the Cold War, committed heinous acts, worse, in many ways, than what Bush has done.  Those acts have never been punished.  But they were exposed in the 1970's, the participants discredited, and the practices outlawed.  The War on Terror proved the perfect excuse to go back to the practices of the Cold War.  But the War on Terror will end, just as the Cold War ended.  It didn't even take the end of the Cold War to expose what had been done -- just a thaw, and a President who went too far. 

In 2006 I thought electing a Democratic Congress would expose George Bush's misdeeds.  In 2008 I thought electing a Democratic President would do it.  Both times I have been proven wrong.  But time, confidence, waning passions, and the death of a thousand cuts may ultimately expose what was done and persuade us to mend our ways.  It won't happen this year, or next.  Maybe, as in Latin American, it will take 20 years.  In the U.S. it arguably took 40 years from FDR's beginning abuses to exposure after Watergate.  But maybe playing a long game, exposing every chance we get, we can actually win this thing.  The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine.    

Circling Back to Haidt

Sigh.  I just can't seem to get over my obsession with Jonathan Haidt.  One of the most obvious shortcomings in his theory is dividing his moral foundations into neat categories.  Some things go in the harm/care box; some go in the purity/sanctity box and so forth.  Haidt listens closely and decides with box things go into.  The problem, of course, it that people don't actually think like that.  The don't neatly file their moral concerns in one category or another, but often see them in terms of more than one.  And they are apt to resent being told that their stated reasons are not why they are "really" upset about an issue.
Haidt strongly criticizes liberals for excluding the concept of the sacred from public discourse.  Such exclusion has two undesirable effects -- it makes conservatives feel disenfranchised because their deepest-seated concerns are dismissed and mere bigotry, and it forces them into expressing them in terms that don't fit very well.  Abortion is a classic example.  Haidt sees abortion as a purity/sanctity issue that conservatives are forced to express in terms of harm/care because purity and sanctity are not treated as legitimate matters of public discourse.  Liberals are eager to pounce on any inconsistency as proof that conservative opposition to abortion is really a matter of sanctity, not harm, and therefore illegitimate.  (See, you allow an exception for rape!  Obviously your opposition to abortion is based on punishing sluts, not protecting innocent babies!)  Haidt would rather acknowledge that it is a matter of purity and sanctity, which is a legitimate concern.
The trouble is that these two concepts are not mutually exclusive.  It is perfectly possible to see abortion as the murder of an innocent baby and as facilitating illicit sex.  Furthermore, seeing abortion in harm/care terms, as preventing the murder of babies can lead to extreme results, such as opposition to stem cell research or in vitro fertilization that are not related to illicit sex.
Furthermore, the blurring of categories can also occur in areas agreed on all hands to be legitimate subjects of public discourse.  Haidt's analysis of the Tea Party is a fine example.  The Tea Party expresses itself mostly in the language if liberty which, of course, is generally accepted as a proper public policy concern.  But (Haidt says), social conservatives are no more attached to liberty than liberals or libertarians, and less so in the classical liberal sense of being free to do whatever you want so long as it does not infringe on the freedom of other.  Rather, in his view, Tea Partiers' real concern is justice, particularly a karmic sense of justice, that people should suffer the consequences of bad decisions.  But justice, is after all, a perfectly acceptable subject in public discourse.  If your real concern is not that paying taxes to support a safety net infringes on your liberty, but that it is unfair, why not say so?  Many people, of course, do, but they also continue to express their concern in terms of freedom as well.  If people say they see the safety net, not just as unfair, but as a threat to freedom because it raises taxes, we might as well take their word for it and believe that they really do see it in terms of freedom.
All of which is partly just a convoluted way of raising this post, which attempts an analysis. The author suggests that our mistake is to assume a classical liberal definition of freedom -- not being bound by legal constraints.  But, he suggests, many people see freedom in other terms -- as not being bound by material constraints.  In other words, being rich enough to do what you want.  In classical liberal terms, taxes are undesirable, but a relatively small constraint on freedom, because they do not forbid actions, even if they make them somewhat more expensive.  But if you see freedom as financial security, then taxes are a very serious attack on freedom; perhaps the ultimate one.

Of course, the author focuses on freedom-as-economic-security only from the perspective of a wealthy person aspiring to be super-rich.  To such a person, freedom means never having to worry about money, and taxes are a grave threat.  But probably a lot of people who aren't so rich also see freedom as economic security, just less security.  To a retiree of limited means to whom a Social Security check is the difference between living modestly and the fear of being out on the street, a Social Security check is freedom, just less freedom.  In any event, maybe I should make a new category of how people see freedom.
Incidentally, on the subject of freedom and wealth, I highly recommend this brief but excellent piece by David Frum.  He points out that in some societies the rich make their wealth honestly, and in others (Russia, say, and its oligarchs) they do not.  One reason, he points out, is that in Russia the path to riches simply is not an honest one, and this has more to do with the nature of society and its institutions than anything else.  One should focus, therefore, on the institutions that encourage making a fortune honestly and discourage making one dishonestly.

False Memory: Chapter 3, pp. 10-15

Chapter 2 begins the Dusty and Skeet story I have already recounted.  Chapter 3 begins with Martie heading home, thinking about her mother and her attempts to break up their marriage.  She wonders whether the strange anxiety attack was brought on by fear that her mother might actually succeed.  This is a perfectly good red herring.  From what we know about Martie so far, she is strong, resilient, optimistic and happily married.  The main sources of stress in her life appear to be (1) her father dying recently, and (2) her mother trying to break up her marriage.  (We soon discover another source of stress, a big one).  It does seem reasonable that if Martie is starting to have anxiety attacks, the most likely source is that she is being asked to choose between the two (living) people she loves the most.  As the story progresses it becomes increasingly clear that this is not the source of Martie’s anxiety attack, but Martie’s mother nonetheless goes on, dropping phone messages, mostly as a form on comic relief.  Finally, around page 435, we find out that Mom really has nothing against Dusty at all, she is just afraid he will fall off a roof and be killed or injured, and she wants to spare Martie the heartbreak.  This is the proper way to deal with red herrings – when they no longer serve their purpose, explain why they are really just red herrings.  This one is now disposed of, so I will take the liberty of ignoring it any time it makes a further appearance.

All is well until Martie goes to look into the bathroom mirror.  Suddenly she is again overcome with terror, this time of the mirror.  And, in another, pretty good, clue, even the sight of a strand of her hair in the sink seems so ominous that she washes it down the drain.  Koontz goes on for two pages, describing her terror in vivid detail.  Of the mirror, Martie thinks, “It was not a window at which some madman might be standing, peering in with a lunatic grin, eyes burning with homicidal intent, as in some cheesy screamfest movie.”  I will give Koontz this.  He needs none of Stephen King’s props to create terror; he can make it out of nothing at all.  It does an impressive work of making your own heart pound and stomach clench, without anything gross to account for it.  Martie then touches Valet, the dog, and her terror seems to pass through him into the ground, like a lightening rod.  She looks into the mirror and sees only her own reflection.  And unlike her fear of her shadow, Marties’ fear of her reflection makes a number of further appearances and becomes more and more understandable in the context of her real phobia.

Next comes a sequence that has to be quoted in full to do it justice: 

The phone rang.  She went into the kitchen to answer it.

Valet followed.  He stared at her, puzzled, tail wagging at first, then not wagging. 

“Sorry, wrong number,” she said eventually, and she hung up.  She noticed the dog’s peculiar attitude.  “What’s wrong with you?”

Valet stared at her, hackles slightly raised.

“I swear, it wasn’t the girl poodle next door, calling for you.” 

When she returned to the half bath, to the mirror, she still did not like what she saw, but now she knew what to do about it. 

Okay, let’s unpack that.  Martie answers the phone, and the dog sees or hears something that upsets him.  She “eventually” says, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hangs up.  We are not told what was said in the conversation.  Normally a wrong number call is very short.  This one, however, was long enough that Martie “eventually” said wrong number.  It also went on long enough for the dog to stop wagging his tail and become alarmed. This hints at an interval we are not told about, but one that disturbs Valet.  But the hint is vague enough that it could easily be overlooked. 

This sequence introduces two important themes that recur throughout the novel – memory lapses, and control by telephone.  Koontz is quite artful here in introducing both themes so subtly that one could easily miss them altogether.  Only later does one begin to appreciate the sinister aspects of the call and wonder what took place during that apparent interval.  But here is the problem.  We never find out what happened in that interval.  We never find out why it was made.  In fact, the whole conversation is never mentioned again. 

It would make much more sense if the phone preceded Martie’s anxiety symptoms, and only later did we begin to realize that they began after someone on the other end of the phone suggested them.  Of course, it would be too obvious if Martie’s symptoms began immediately after the phone call.  Some other event would have to intervene.  The possibilities are endless.  Maybe she would get the mysterious call, and then her mother’s call.  She would answer her mother impatiently, thinking it was the wrong number again, have a dispute over her mother trying to break up her marriage, and then start getting anxiety symptoms.  That would direct our attention toward the red herring of Martie’s mother.  Or, she could get then call, walk the dog without the shadow incident (which also never reappears) and then get her first anxiety attack over the mirror.  Or she could finish sweeping up the dead ants, then walk the dog and have her first anxiety attack.  But having the phone call trigger Martie’s symptoms makes vastly more sense than having Martie’s symptoms begin with no triggering event (unless you suspect, as I do, that she was originally supposed to have been programmed the night before), and then a seemingly pointless and unmotivated phone call. 

Although, to be fair, we actually do learn the outcome of the call.  Martie, as you will recall, now knows what to do about the mirror.  We don’t find out here, but in Chapter 14, Dusty comes home (changing into dry clothes, remember?) to find out that it was broken.  And when Martie gets home in Chapter 19, she has no memory of breaking it.  This definitely presents the theme of memory lapses.  But once again, we have the same problem.  The broken mirror is never followed up on.  We never find out why Martie’s programmer wants her to break the mirror and then forget she did it.  The subject never gets mentioned as the characters increasingly begin to suspect they have memory lapses.  Once again, Koontz introduces a clue, beats us over the head with it, and then drops it and never bothers to explain.

False Memory: Chapter 1, pp. 1-4

Although the novel begins with Martie, I took the liberty of beginning with Dusty’s story because, at least at first, it is not replete with clues, so many of which go nowhere.  We now begin at the actual beginning and proceed slowly (though not as slowly, I trust, as Fred Clark) with an eye to all the clues Dean Koontz plants, especially the ones he fails to follow up on, but just leaves hanging.

The hanging clues begin with the first 28 words of the first sentence, “On that Tuesday in January, when her life changed forever, Martine Rhodes woke with a headache, developed a sour stomach after washing down two aspirin with grapefruit juice . . .”  As we later learn, the brainwashing in the story is initially achieved by the use of drugs, although once the programming in place, drugs are no longer needed.  So I wonder if in an earlier plan, the brainwashing had just been completed the night before.  That would be the first clue – Martie’s headache and sour stomach were hangover symptoms from the drug. 

On the other hand, sometimes a headache is just a headache.  The headache and sour stomach are just the first two of a whole string of minor misfortunes.  Martie also ruined her hair by using her husband’s shampoo, broke her nail, burned her toast, and found ants under the sink that she killed with insecticide.  All in one sentence!  (It’s a long sentence).  None of this has any further relevance to the story; the point is simply to show that none of these misfortunes phase Martie because she is strong and resilient.  Or, as the novel puts it, her recently deceased father, a heroic fireman, bequeathed her “an optimistic nature, formidable coping skills, and a deep love of life.”  This makes the point that even the most mentally healthy person is vulnerable to the sinister mind control in the novel.  Martie’s mother also calls (still in the first sentence), trying to break up her marriage.  This is somewhat relevant to the story, in that it serves, for a time, as a decent red herring.  (More on that later).

By the end of the page, Martie is out walking the dog, Valet, and her headache clears, never to be heard from again.  So it may not have been intended as a clue, just one of the misfortunes that can’t get her down.  The grapefruit juice is another matter.  Koontz returns to it twice.  Martie had switched from orange to grapefruit juice because of the lower calorie count.  There is nothing suspicious about this, but then again, nothing else in the novel suggests that Martie worries about her weight, or that she has any reason to.  A change in behavior, even an innocuous one, with a seemingly rational explanation, can turn out to be a sign of mind control.  And as she gets odder and odder symptoms, she keeps wondering if they are caused by tainted grapefruit juice and wanting to get it analyzed.  Koontz does everything short of jump up and down and shout, “Hey, dummies, this is a clue!”  Then he drops it and never goes anywhere with it.  If this is supposed to be a red herring, fine, there’s nothing wrong with some red herrings. But in that case you are obliged to stop and explain why really, this thing that appeared serious had a perfectly innocent explanation.  That doesn’t happen here.  The mystery of the sour grapefruit juice is raised, dropped, and forgotten.  But I digress.

We last saw Martie  walking her golden retriever.  (Dean Koontz is a great dog lover who includes a dog, usually a golden or labrador retriever, in most of his stories).  In a nicely (and soon) explained clue, the book says that the walk lasts for an hour except Tuesdays and Thursdays, when Martie has another obligation.  Valet always seems to know when those days are and complete his business quickly.  As he does, Martie is overcome by a heart-pounding, chest-tightening terror – apparently of nothing.  The only thing she can think of is that she is still spooked by the nightmare she had last night and had been having “on a few other recent nights” about being attacked by a man made of dead, rotting leaves.  This is the first clue that maybe her mental state is not as stable as advertised, although even the most mentally healthy people have bad dreams sometimes.  But again, the statement that she has had the same nightmare “on a few other recent nights” also suggests that at the time Koontz was thinking of her brainwashing as something recent.  We later find out that it happened months ago.

Then Martie’s eyes fall on her shadow, and she realizes that this is what had frightened her.  “In the severe angle of the morning sun, the houses and trees case distorted images, too, but she saw nothing fearsome in their stretched and buckled shadows – only in her own.”  This both is and is not a good clue.  It is the first suggestion of something that is not immediately apparent.  She is not afraid of the shadow because it is a shadow, but because it is her shadow.  This is the first, well-concealed, suggestion of the direction her anxiety will go.  Then again, it is the last time she ever expresses any fear of her shadow.  Although her behavior soon starts becoming stranger and stranger, the fear of her shadow never returns.    Wouldn’t it be better to start with a mild and vague version that slowly develops into her real phobia?  In fact, Koontz does a good job of this later.

Martie closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and when she opens her eyes finds the anxiety gone.  End of Chapter 1.

My review may turn out to be as slow-going as Fred Clark’s after all.

False Memory: Dusty for the First 64 Pages

I will begin my discussion if False Memory with a few general comments.  As I understand it, Dean Koontz is considered Stephen King's primary rival for the title of master of horror.  There are definite differences between them.  King's horror stories are full of grossout material about blood, guts, rotting corpses and the like.  Koontz is more sparing on the physical side of horror, focusing instead of mental horrors that take place entirely on the inside.  King equates horror with the supernatural on the theory (I assume) that it can't truly horrify if it is bound by the same laws of physics that we are.  Koontz generally avoids the supernatural and prefers purportedly scientific explanations.  I will add, though, that the basic premise in False Memory is no more plausible than Stephen King's stories of the supernatural.  Koontz also has a gift for description and bringing scenes to life, not just in physical detail, but in the mood and atmosphere and emotional impression they create. And his ability to create stomach clenching, heart-pounding terror with absolutely nothing outwardly to justify it is extraordinary.

Now, on to the story.  False Memory is about Dusty and Martie Rhodes, a Los Angels couple in their late 20's with a dog (golden retriever named Valet) but no children.  Since it is not clear from the names, Dusty (short for Dustin) is the husband, a painting contractor with a three employees.  Martie (short for Martine) is a freelance video games designer who works out of the house.  Her video games design work has no relevance to the plot and (so far as I can tell) is included to give her enough flexibility not to have to worry about missing work, without making her anything so unfashionable as a full-time housewife.

For the first 150 pages of the novel, Koontz gives separate stories of Dusty and Martie and what they are doing on one stormy Tuesday in January.  At first, the stories seem unrelated except that the primary characters are married to each other, but over time eerie parallels begin to appear.  While Martie's story is obviously sinister and disturbing from the very start, Dusty's begins straightforwardly enough, with no hint of anything creepy for the first 64 pages.  Although the perspective during those pages switches back and forth, I will stick to Dusty and breeze through, because nothing appears to be happening that needs any further explanation.

Dusty's story begins with Dusty and his crew painting a 3-story house in a gated community, while the owners are on vacation.  House painting tends to attract social misfits who are unable or unwilling to submit to industrial discipline, and Dusty's crew is no exception.  Skeet, a drug addict, loser and failure on Dusty's crew, climbs to the top of the house and sits there, high on a cocktail of drugs "hallucinating and suicidal" while the crows circle.  He says that the angel of death has shown him the Other Side and instructed him to jump.  Dusty climbs up onto the roof and tries to talk some sense into Skeet, but Skeet sees no point in going on living.  As a crow dive-bombs his shoe, he points to what it left and says, "This is my life."  "Don't be ridiculous," Dusty says.  "You're not well enough educated to think in metaphors."  While Dusty tries to reason with Skeet, the crew commandeers a pile of high quality mattresses from the house (they were given the keys) and stacks them for him to land on.  Just as it starts to rain, Skeet runs for the edge.  Dusty manages to deflect him, and they both land on the mattresses, dazed and disoriented, but not hurt.  Dusty takes Skeet to the New Life Clinic to sober up (Skeet's third stay in rehab, second at this clinic).  He then heads home to change into dry clothes and then to swing by Skeet's apartment to pick up some things for him.

In short, a stoned-out addict and loser behaves like a stoned-out addict and loser.  Skeet's behavior is not normal, obviously, but it is the sort of normal abnormality one would expect of an addict high on a cocktail of drugs.  Nothing suggests a sinister or mysterious explanation. 

The only mystery is why Dusty continues to employ this good-for-nothing.  We get the answer in Chapter 8, page 49 (the book has short chapters).  It turns out the Dusty and Skeet are brothers, or rather, half-brothers.  Their mother, Claudette, was in the habit of marrying professors who are tyrannical, arrogant, overbearing jerks, having a child, divorcing, and moving on to the next.  Her first husband was a psychologist, and she had a daughter with Down's syndrome, who died.  Next came Dusty's father, a professor of literature.  Then Skeet's father, another professor of literature.  And last was her current husband, Derek Lampton, worst of the lot, a psychologist/psychiatrist and father of their now-teenage son, Derek Lampton, Jr.  Claudette herself is no slouch in the arrogant, overbearing jerk department, either.  I suspect that this is at least in part a hat tip to The Manchurian Candidate, in which the brainwashed soldier has serious issues with his mother and step-father, who is no mere professor, but a U.S. Senator.  It also turns out to be vitally important to the plot.  But we don't find out about that until page 527 of a 627 page book, so I will ignore it for now.

Next I will get to Martie, whose story is obviously sinister and creepy from the start, and which keeps dropping clues that are not properly followed up on.