Laura and those surrounding her are basically paper-thin entities who move through the story performing their functions exactly as we expect them to - or perhaps even more predictably than we expect them to.

As an old-fashioned cliffhanger, 'Lightning' mostly succeeds given that, perhaps we do not have to be concerned with subtleties of character.Įven so, the characters themselves are mostly a mixture of 19th- and 20th-century popular-fiction stereotypes - the brave heroine, the cute kid, the adoring husband, the sinister villain, the aforementioned mysterious stranger, the faithful friend. After spending the first 30 pages or so on faltering, clunky prose ('The stranger had unusually blue eyes that conjured in Markwell the image of a clear winter sky reflected in the millimeter-thin ice of a just-freezing pond'), the author plunges into all the romance, action and suspense that mark this type of novel, and holds the reader through the sheer momentum of story. This is a high-tech, latter-day penny dreadful - too plot-heavy, in fact, to probe the nuances of character.

and so on.Īdd to that her best friend's rise from child-shelter poverty to success as a comedian, the theme of time travel, the intrusion of Nazi Germany - including a brief depiction of Hitler himself (not to mention Winston Churchill), the identity and purpose of the mysterious stranger, and a cat-and-mouse chase involving Laura and other characters, and we begin to see how chock full of plot 'Lightning' is.

The central character, Laura Shane, suffers all manner of triumph and tragedy in the 30-plus years the novel encompasses.Īfter a mysterious stranger saves her at birth from the near-fatal attentions of a drunken doctor, she endures the death of her father, the dubious comforts of a child shelter, a near rape by a first-class sleazebag (Willy Sheener - a name straight out of Dickens), the death of a much-loved foster mother, the death of a much-loved roommate, a perfect marriage, unbelievable success as a novelist, the death of a husband. In 'Lightning,' Dean Koontz has attempted a mind-boggling hybrid, with elements of the romance, the science fiction novel, the Dickensian potboiler and the suspense thriller blended in the same melting pot.

Lightning by dean koontz