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Dean Koontz
(Bantam; $7.99)
Customer review
Velocity is a good fast read. Great for the beach. Enough suspense with decent plot twists although it was all too apparent when the “Cujo” moment was about to occur. That is when, although we seem to have discovered who the perverted killer is, there is still a moment of revelation left and enough of one to scare you into turning all the lights on when you get back to your beach bungalow, and kind of making a habit of it for a few days without letting your friends know why. Like when you read Jaws and really didn’t feel much like body surfing for the rest of the summer. I thought the underlying theme of actions v. no action were more for the author’ sake than the reader’s, he seemed to be pursuing some kind of redemption from being frozen by indecision (there is a pretty obvious scene when the computer sits idle and the author seems to be referring to his own writer’s block). But on the other hand his use of color imagery throughout, much of it blood colored: i.e. mahogany ceilings orange roof tiles, crimson vines (of grapes as this novel is set in fictional Vineyard Hills someplace in Napa valley akin to St. Helena) sky red gesso of the setting sun subtly sets the mood for horror and greases the plot line. I also liked that the main character was not so strong as to suggest that he would triumph in the end. He was a vulnerable workaday fellow to whom we didn’t really know how to react. Was he a sicko who turns out to be the killer or a good guy just working through some difficulty? Good tension there and a satisfying albeit morally questionably ending.
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