Footprints In The Shadows

Dean Koontz is known for his thrillers in pop fiction.  Koontz's use of referentiality, however, also brings his work into the conversation of literary fiction.

II.

Take as an example a more recent Koontz novel, 77 Shadow Street. It features the Pendleton, a sprawling mansion in the American heartland, originally built in 1889 to the taste of the billionaire Andrew North Pendleton.  The sinister soon followed.

Pendleton's wife and two children vanished from the mansion, never to be found, leaving Andrew North to turn insane with grief. The owners after Pendleton, the Ostock family, were murdered in 1935 by their butler, Nolan Tolliver.  Tolliver then killed himself, leaving a cryptic note to explain his actions, as an attempt to "'save the world from eternal darkness'". <1>

The Pendleton now, in the 21st century, is a swanky condo building. How and what Koontz writes of some of the current building's residents makes for the referential discourse I alluded to earlier. It is a discourse that exposes a corruption of appetites.

III.

Among the Pendletonians, there is the hitman Mickey Dime.  His pleasure in termination is connected to the pleasure he receives from art - through its "sensation".  "True art was about the meaninglessness of life, about the freedom of transgression, about power."

There is the enigmatic figure known only as "Witness".  He has great feeling for the law, "just as a man who lived in godless despair might esteem the idea of God that he was unable to embrace".

There is the "One", the Pendleton's artificial intelligence/ consciousness.  Throughout the story, the One makes its declarations:  "The only love that matters is self-love, and the only self worth loving is the One"; or, "A world of weaklings is a world without a future".  Just in case we still haven't caught the reference, the One states:  "In your wisdom, you once observed: 'What need have we of gods if we become gods ourselves?'"

And then, there's Fielding Udell.

IV.

Being a heir to great wealth, Fielding Udell has perhaps too much time on his hands.  All that leisure and...Udell becomes obsessed with conspiracy theories.  When his various researches on the internet scuttle one apocalyptic scenario after another, he makes a breakthrough; and it's not realizing that he might be a mite paranoid.  No, he comes to believe that the conspiracies he had investigated were actually the fabrications of a Ruling Elite, to "control the masses with fear".

But wait!  Udell makes a bigger breakthrough when he infers that instead of inventing crises, the Elite were concealing them, to "prevent panic...and the loss of their power".  And just who or what was this Ruling Elite?  Udell has his guesses - survivors from the continent Atlantis, space aliens, or even, the "Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks" - and is hard at work on them, when all kinds of paranormal activity breaks out in the Pendleton building.

As another of Koontz's characters, the novelist Sparkle Sykes looks on, two house cats transform into a new "biological chaos" of a creature.  By the hallucinatory nature of this event, Sykes is reminded of "Thomas Pynchon, six genres in the same book, horror blooming out of horror with a feverish delight".

V.

There will be readers to whom referentiality matters little, who come to Dean Koontz mostly for page-turning chills and thrills. Their book is also here, at 77 Shadow Street.
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<1>Koontz, Dean. 77 Shadow Street. Bantam Books, 2011.