Quoting Dylan Thomas Death Shall Have No Dominion - Featuring Dean Koontz - The Other Emily...

 

“Loneliness, enduring fear, a sense that society has gone mad and I’m falling, falling through the madness of it. That's horror enough for me...

Listen, the world is going to hell. Maybe it’s always been going to hell, but it’s sliding down faster on a steeper slope than before. There’s so much insanity these days, so much hatred and violence. The internet, social media, seems like a poison that makes some people crazy, it’s all about power, everyone wanting to tell everyone else what to think, how to live. It won’t end well.

“Who runs this thrift shop? Satan? There’s a South American gang, as violent as MS-13, their motto is ‘rape, rob, and kill for justice.’ Each of them wears blood from his first victim. But this isn’t that. The chain’s too girly. Only guys allowed in this gang, and they put the blood in an empty rifle cartridge and seal it, not in a glass ampule.”

...in the wake of the countless other electrifying abominations born of the culture of self and sensation, few if any of the morbidly curious would prowl around the property.

You either love the words of Dean Koontz...or you don't. There seems not to be a middle ground where you can pick or choose which of his books you will read... I have no idea when or why I picked this book, although in distant past years, when Koontz and Stephen King were just beginning to write, especially horror, I found that my major word for Koontz was intriguing, while never really getting into King's type of horror--The Pet Cemetery did it for me with him...

...The maze of Ronny Jessup’s dark erotic dreams of absolute power was also the labyrinth of David Thorne’s nightmares. In this cochlea of eerie silence, the narrow serpentine passageways, with their low ceilings and walls patterned by creeping mold, testified to the seed of evil in the human heart— dormant in some, flourishing in others. Where it flourished, there was the narcissistic certainty of being superior and the associated insatiable lust for power from which all other wickedness grew. The need to control others and use them, to intimidate and abuse them, forcing them to submit until eventually they submitted with self-negating eagerness. In the twisting warrens of Jessup’s mind, which were here made manifest, all the varied gods of human history were dead and catacombed and powerless, leaving the new god, Ronny, whose one commandment was Do as I tell you, whose love was insatiable lust, whose grace was terror, whose promise was death everlasting. 

Koontz, however, I found to be more than just a horror writer, his diversity of topic has been great. But you can always count on his books being...unique, different...and, sometimes, so compelling that you are forced to read even though you are not enjoying it...

So it was with the novel, The Other Emily... Indeed, I even tried to share the concept of the book with a girlfriend as we were talking yesterday...and failed to grab her attention... In fact, I had decided that I would just use some interesting quotes from the book and not try to review it... And that's how I started this morning. But then I found a couple of relevant videos that could help and added the poetry that had been quoted at the beginning of the book. The book itself, is broken down into parts, interestingly, in my opinion, mostly for allowing a beautifully arranged flower bouquet to grace the beginning of each part... 

She is lost, and he must find her, but she leaves no trail, no footprints or spoor of any kind, and the way is dark, for she has gone into the forest of the night, where the trees are black and leafless, where the moon and stars do not exist, where the sun will never rise, where the path is ever downward, yet he descends in a desperate search, for she does not belong here among the dead, not when she is so alive in his mind and heart, does not belong here, does not belong here, and although finding her is his only hope of joy, his only reason to exist, there are moments when he senses her within arm’s reach in the blinding darkness— and terror wakes him

David Thorne is a writer and has reached that time of the year, when he moves westward to warmer climates and a lovely cottage in which he is able to rejuvenate his mind, his ideas, and conceptually think through what his next book should offer to his millions of readers...

But this time, something is different. He's nervous, dreaming a lot, and remembering that they have still not discovered the body of his lost love from so many years ago... They found her car and everybody thinks she is dead. Except David cannot accept that, nor can her mother who, while blind, lives alone and enjoys any time that David can spend with her...

But Emily's mother does not know David's secret. In fact, he can barely even think about his past actions without becoming so deeply depressed to, then, begin again searching for answers...

Only one man has possible answers... But the psychopath who is in prison for life, knows how to play David, even to the point of his being willing to provide $500/monthly just so the potential book, as David has offered the prisoner...or that he might one day be willing to tell David more than what has already been shared publicly. During David's search, he has already spent time in the dungeons that had been carved under the prisoner's home, where he kept all of the beautiful women he kidnapped and, when the time suited him, murdered them.

“Well, I guess I got more time for it than you do. I like Westerns and all, 'cause the good guys always win, which is how it ought to be but mostly isn’t.”

He was a homicidal psychopathic sentimentalist whose emotional life was as vivid as it was confused, who was the star of his own soap opera and something of a psychic vampire. His emotions—and the emotions of others on which he fed—were like a mild but continuous orgasm. If he were allowed to feed on David’s memories of Emily and on his feelings for her, Jessup would soon be sated on the subject, and he would have no motivation to answer any questions about her.

Pretty standard plot for serial killer novels, right? Well, not with Dean Kootntz...

For once, David has arrived in his home away from New York, he began his usual routine by visiting a favorite restaurant... and seeing... Emily, the love of his life...

But Maddison, who appears to be about 25, the same age of Emily when she disappeared, denies that she knows Emily... although there are many things that she seems to know from the time David and Emily were together...

The bar was too crowded for David. He tipped the hostess for the window table at which he’d dined the previous night. She seated him and saw to it that his waiter brought a glass of Caymus cabernet by the time that he unfolded the napkin and placed it on his lap. The anticipation that had drawn his nerves taut the previous evening rose in him once more. He expected nothing would come of it. Nothing ever did. Nearby on the harbor, two twentyish women in bikinis, standing on paddleboards, oared their way past the docks, making progress so effortlessly that they were conducting an animated conversation at the same time and laughing with delight. They were beautiful and lithe, with tanned and silken limbs, but though they gave rise to a certain need in David, they didn’t fill him with true desire. The swollen sun was still five minutes from immersion in the sea when he glanced toward the noisy bar and saw her. He froze with the wineglass halfway to his mouth and for a moment forgot that it remained in his hand. She was in that highest rank of beauties that inspired stupid men to commit foolish acts and made wiser men despair for their inadequacies. He thought he must be wrong about her. Then she looked his way and for a moment met his eyes at a distance, and he put down his glass for fear of spilling the cabernet. Her gaze didn’t linger on David or on anyone. She turned her elegant head to the bartender as he placed a martini before her. Balanced on the horizon, the fat sun poured apocalyptic light through the huge tinted windows. The restaurant and bar occupied one enormous space designed to allow patrons to see and be seen by the largest possible audience. Yet as the room filled with the fantastic light of the dying day, David felt as if everyone but he and this woman had been vaporized. The sun sank, the night rose like a tide, and the restaurant dimmed to a romantic glow. Although he considered approaching the woman at the bar, he didn’t dare. She surely couldn’t be true. He ordered a second glass of cabernet and the filet mignon, and he watched her surreptitiously for the next hour. She did not glance at him again...

What was so compelling was that I just couldn't get a handle on what was really happening... for certainly, that's how Koontz wrote the story so that readers, along with David Thorne would be conducting the search for the love of his life, who, really, was probably dead, murdered by a psychopath... But not just any psychopath! Not from Koontz. This psychopath had extraordinary psychological problems, a brilliant mind, and the talents to not only capture women and disappear with them, but totally build an underground playland for his victims!

Reality and surreality were becoming indistinguishable, fiction and fact folding together in a hallucinatory kaleidoscopic moment.

A few selected quotes are provided for your enlightment... Provided in blood...

The ending is our salvation from those who place their need for power over all else...

Evil Must Be Identified - And Eliminated

Just My Personal Opinion, Of Course...

Freedom, Truth, Love

And the Greatest of These is Love