THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 25, 1996 TAG: 9602270476
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GREGORY N. KROLCZYK
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
INTENSITY
DEAN R. KOONTZ
Alfred A. Knopf. 308 pp. $25.
Twenty-six-year-old Chyna Shepherd never could sleep comfortably in strange houses, and even though she was staying with her best friend, Laura Templeton, at Laura's parents' beautiful vineyard home in the Napa Valley, tonight was no exception.
This unease was due mostly to a childhood that had her less-then-noble mother dragging her around the country, staying nowhere longer than a month or two, always subjecting her to terrible new places and dangerous people. And though she knew on a conscious level that those days were long gone, still she sat fully dressed staring out over the moonlit vineyards.
And that's when she heard the scream.
Or did she? It came and went so fast she wasn't sure. Until she heard another, followed by a soft thud, and now she knows and does what all her childhood-honed instincts have taught her to do: She hides.
He enters the room, perhaps sensing a presence, perhaps just to investigate. His name is Edgler Foreman Vess. He's a self-proclaimed ``homicidal adventurer.'' Tonight's adventure was to kill the Templetons. Mission accomplished - more or less. Now one final sweep of the house and he'll be on his way. Chyna waits until she is sure he has left the house and goes to investigate. What she finds is death. What she hears is worse. What she does about it could cost her her life.
Long ago, before the multimillion dollar contracts, Dean R. Koontz used to put out several books a year. And because he didn't want readers thinking he was just hacking them out, he wrote under his own name and several different pseudonyms, purposefully giving each its own style.
A book under the Koontz name was usually a full-blown affair, complete with character development, plot twists, background, etc. A Leigh Nichols book (a name under which Koontz became a best seller) was always styled to appeal to the gothic romance/horror audience, and featured a strong female character, a fair amount of romance and a child in trouble. A Brian Coffey novel was a straight-ahead wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am adventure with little if any frills.
Then, of course, there were K.R. Dwyer, David Axton, Owen West . . . and the more than a dozen science fiction novels that, according to Koontz, will never again see print.
The point is, with all this experience, writing to a particular style should be one of Koontz's strengths. But in his latest effort, Intensity, quite the opposite seems true.
While overall an entertaining effort, Intensity suffers from a conflict of styles. Or, perhaps more precisely, a crisis of identity.
Plot-wise Intensity is little more than a chase novel, reminiscent of Koontz's K.R. Dwyer novel, Shattered. But unlike the lean and mean Shattered, Intensity is pockmarked with passages seemingly intended either to provide introspective insights into a character's motivation or to justify his actions.
Unfortunately, in a novel with a plot of such limited scope as Intensity's, these passages serve not to enhance the pace, but to impede it.
Another problem arises from Koontz's penchant for stretching seconds into paragraphs, minutes into pages. When used deftly, these expansion-of-time passages add tremendous suspense to a scene. But in Intensity Koontz stretches so many scenes that instead of suspense, all he seems to be adding is pages.
Finally, a device that some may like, but I found jarring, was the way Koontz chose to present his characters' points of view. While the entire novel is written in the third person, when we see through Chyna's eye, we do so in the past tense, but when we change to Vess' point of view, we change to present tense. Whatever the intent here, the result is disconcerting.
These ``speed bumps'' come at quite a cost. For a ``chase'' novel without that sense of immediacy isn't much of a chase at all, but instead just another bumpy ride. MEMO: Gregory N. Krolczyk is a writer who lives in Kill Devil Hills, N.C. by CNB