By the Light of the Moon
 Dean Koontz
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 2002 Bantam Books
 ISBN: 0553801430

An artist & his autistic brother stop at a Santa Fe motel where they are attacked by a mysterious doctor.

Resting at that same motel, with her best friend Fred, a pampered Jade plant, stand-up comedienne Jilly Jackson is heading toward a week's booking & hopefully, a whole new life, except when she returns from getting some food, someone attacks her, smothers her with chloroform, injects her with something, & vanishes.

Coming back from getting some fast food, Dylan O'Connor is bashed over the head, dragged into his room where his brother, Shep, is obsessively working a 2500 piece jigsaw puzzle. In his isolation, Shep neither hears nor sees what's going on behind his back, which is this smiley-faced stranger gagging & tying his older brother to a chair & then injecting him from an enormous hypodermic needle, all the while muttering irrational phrases about nanorobots, secret research & pursuers. Then the stranger disappears, leaving a knife where Dylan can reach it to free himself.

When Dylan, dragging Shep behind him, & Jilly collide outside their rooms in the light of the moon, at first they're hostile, until Jilly realizes her 1956 classic Cadillac is gone. As they stand there arguing, a convoy of black SUVs circle the parking lot & move on. It is the concussion from an explosion out on the road, that tumble the trio into Dylan's Explorer. As they slow down to pass the burning vehicle beside which those black SUVs are huddled, Jilly realizes the wreckage was once her beautiful Coupe DeVille.

Dylan O'Connor has a past which he's stuffed & controlled because, for the past decade, he's taken care of his autistic brother, ever since their father committed suicide & their mother was killed by an intruder.

Now he's driving to anywhere to get away from the people the weird doctor spoke about before vanishing. The affects of those injections, however, are beginning to make themselves known. Jilly is having glorious, premonitional visions, Dylan's feeling the spoors of evil as he touches everyday things, & Shep's muttering odd phrases that make a strange sort of sense.

You keep expecting the horror to creep around the next page, & there's plenty of on-the-edge chases, with dashes of the supernatural, the extra-ordinary -- where time & place fold into each other -- where reality needs checking every so often.

I could not put down By the Light of the Moon as I followed the adventures, the encounters, the transformations & the redemptions.

Reading a Dean Koontz is like working a huge jigsaw puzzle without the box cover. I enjoy the way he plays with the language, he had me frequently chuckling. His stories are always exciting, intensely visual...& unpredictable.

Very well done, thought-provoking & satisfying!

More from Dean Koontz:
The Face
Strangers
Watchers
Intensity
The Door to December
Sole Survivor
From the Corner of His Eye
Phantoms & many more!
(08/17/03)

Rebecca