โ Scribed by Dean Koontz
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Dean Koontz's Odd Apocalypse.
"Koontz is brilliant in the creation of his characters and in building tension."
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
In Los Angeles, a hot Hollywood director, high on PCP, turns a city street into a fiery apocalypse. Heroic LAPD officer Jac McGarvey is badly wounded and will not walk for months. His wife and his child are left to fend for themselves against both criminals that control an increasingly violent city and the dead director's cult of fanatic fans.
In a lonely corner of Montana, Eduardo Fernandez, the father of McGarvey's murdered partner, witnesses a strange nocturnal sight. The stand of pines outside his house suddenly glows with eerie amber light, and Fernandez senses a watcher in the winter woods. As the seasons change, the very creatures of the forest seem in league with a mysterious presence. Fernandez is caught up in a series of chilling incidents that escalate toward a confronation that could rob him of his sanity or his life--or both.
As events careen out of control, the McGarvey family is drawn to Fernandez's Montana ranch. In that isolated place they discover their destiny in a terrifying and fiercely suspenseful encounter with a hostile, utterly ruthless, and enigmatic enemy, from which neither the living nor the dead are safe.
A brush with death prompts L.A. policeman Jack McGarvey to move wife Heather and son Toby up to Quartermass Ranch, a Montana estate bequeathed to them by Eduardo Fernandez, the father of Jack's former partner. The McGarveys settle in, dismissing strange noises and smells, as well as weird trances that seem to grip Toby from time to time, as the embodiment of common fears of urbanites confronted by open spaces. It seems Eduardo had had uninvited visitors: the Givers, creatures from another dimension who came for an incomprehensible, apparently evil purpose. Scared out of his wits, Ed succumbed to a heart attack, but not before scrawling his discovery on a legal pad and stashing it in the freezer. These Givers are actually takers, assuming control of bodies and corpses to use them as vehicles in which to create mayhem. And now they want control of Toby. Bestselling author Koontz ( Hideaway ) exploits and occasionally skewers many horror novel and film conventions--including telepathic mind control games and the obligatory "surprise" blizzard during the climatic battle--to great effect while building tension in this gripping parable about the real cost of "getting away from it all."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
It seems these nasty octopi have invaded Montana. At first, you don't see them. Then they go inside raccoons and squirrels and crows and make their brains explode. Then they ride around on corpses {}a la Night of the Living Dead. Shotguns won't stop them. Uzis won't stop them. Fire won't stop them. Only mind control works. The mind of the innocent: young Toby McGarvey, son of that brave policeman Jack McGarvey, who was nearly killed ridding the earth of scum down in L.A. The family comes to Montana because they inherit a ranch from Eduardo Fernandez, whose only son was Jack's slain partner. There's also some stuff about a crazed movie director out on a killing spree, but it's never quite connected to the octopi. Are the octopi symbolic of the evil that slinks and oozes among Angelenos? Probably not. Does Koontz mean to trade upon the contemporary myth of cattle mutilations? Maybe so. Anyhow, this paperback original is the first of 10 that Ballantine intends to publish, and the print run is two million. John Mort
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