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Surrender from the start --- that's the best way to enjoy this book. Just let yourself go into the baroque, moody atmosphere created by a master of his craft. You'll have no regrets, because halfway into the 600+ pages of THE FACE, you will be completely caught up and so absorbed that you will have forgotten you ever wondered (as I did for a bit early on) where the heck the plot was.
Dean Koontz has been writing for a long time. He has, if I counted correctly, 40 books to his credit, this one being the 41st. In a market long dominated by Stephen King, with occasional invasions from Peter Straub, Koontz has nevertheless steadily built the kind of faithful following that consistently puts him on the bestseller lists. Nobody works harder, or is more deserving of success, than this man who, from the start of his career, has never been too busy to give help and advice to new writers. I've read about half his books, but this is my first in five years, and I'm glad to be back with Koontz. THE FACE has an enviable maturity of style. Not all authors who write long and prolifically also write better as the years go by; in fact, judging by many popular authors today, most don't. If there is anyone who enjoys the horror genre but hasn't read Koontz, THE FACE would be an excellent place to start.
The time is the present, the place is Hollywood --- in boldface with a capital H. "The Face" is what an adoring public calls Channing Manheim, Hollywood superstar yet all-around nice guy. Channing is in the book's background, though. Like many of Koontz's novels, this one revolves around a boy, Channing's son Aelfric, whose age hovers just on the edge of the teens --- with all that implies. Fric, as he prefers to be called (and so would you if you had a name like that), is intelligent, brave and unspoiled. He has pretty much raised himself, due to the continual absence of a father who makes three movies a year, most of them on location, and a mother who is a jet-setting superstar model. He's a great kid, and a believable character too.
Ethan Truman is The Face's head of security. He lives on the star's estate, in the big house called Palazzo Rospo --- which Fric, who likes to know stuff and makes it his business to find out, tells us is Italian for Toad Hall. Truman's suite is on the first floor, while Fric's is on the third. There are a bazillion rooms in this place, and hearing about it in great detail from Fric's point of view is fun. There is a lot of Hollywood lore, in fact, scattered throughout THE FACE and all of it is fun. The author, who has lived most of his life in Southern California and has had several of his books made into movies, obviously knows this territory well and has a sense of humor about it.
But back to Ethan Truman: he's a former L.A. Robbery-Homicide cop who decided to go private after his wife, Hannah, died a few years before our story starts. He has a friend named Hazard who is still on the police force, and another friend from childhood named Dunnie, which is short for Duncan, who became a criminal but repented. Dunnie was also in love with Hannah, and it was after her death that he finally understood loving her could have saved him from his meaningless life of crime; if he had only let it, he might have married her instead of Ethan.
Both Hazard and Dunnie (yes, in spite of him being dead) are trying to help Ethan Truman who, by virtue of his job, must protect The Face from a creep who is sending some very odd packages Truman intercepts. But nothing is necessarily as it seems, so is Dunnie really dead and does he really want to protect Ethan? The Face is off location somewhere, but the sender of strange gifts doesn't know that. It's a few days before Christmas, and Fric expects Dad to come home for the holidays. The big house is being decorated, and Fric's wisecracks about that are as amusing as his observations of his parents' lifestyle. Less amusing are the phone calls Fric starts getting ... and less amusing still are the calls that come in to the big house's one line of 12 that is dedicated to receiving phone communications from the dead. Only Ethan knows about these calls, due to his security job, but even he can't listen in --- he can only see by an indicator light when that dedicated line is engaged. Nobody except Channing Manheim and his spiritual advisor has access to that phone.
We meet early on a man named Corky LaPuta, who is a professor of English by profession and an anarchist by vocation. Corky has many truly inventive ways to sow anarchy; he's a creative genius. He is also, well, just plain evil. Koontz takes his time in showing us how far Corky will go and how he ties in to those odd gifts for Channing Manheim. He also takes his time in showing us the that role Corky plays in the alteration of reality that slowly, subtly, and very scarily builds as the book's pages mount.
Dean Koontz's real skill comes in the way he takes you in, so that you believe these things could really happen, no matter how strange they are. First you believe the people in the book can be real people, then you begin thinking that they can believe these things are really happening to them, and eventually you're believing it yourself --- all of it. And you don't want to leave your cozy chair underneath the reading light to walk all the way down that long dark hall to the bathroom, and you especially do not want to look in the mirror once you get there.
As I said at the beginning, surrender! You'll be glad you did.
--- Reviewed by Ava Dianne Day
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