Suspense

"The sky shed itself as heavily as it had on Cathedral Hill, such blinding crystalline thickets that I couldn't see farther shore, as if snow meant for decades were released today because the world did not have decades left until its end."

"With cloaks and robes and cerements of white whirling and swooning in every quarter, the city looked as if it must be populated by more ghosts than living people, and all those spirits were agitated in their haunting."


Effortlessly flowing yet meticulously crafted paragraphs, often containing beautiful phrasing and even more beautiful meaning, pepper this tender story of a young man so hideous he is forced to live below ground, and a young women in great danger whose social phobia precludes her being touched. Dean Koontz is actually gifting to readers a tender and wintery allegory about mankind turning away from goodness and innocence, and the consequences.

I struggled a great deal with how to approach this review. It’s obvious that a lot of readers either misunderstood this book, and therefore didn’t like it, or understood it completely, and therefore hated it because it made them uncomfortable. A few thought it had its moments, yet went astray near the end. Part of that may be because on the surface Koontz is telling such an involving, heartrending story that the old-fashioned, yet incredibly relevant-for-our-time allegory felt like an intrusion. There is simply no way to talk about this beautiful and brilliant book without addressing the larger allegory, and my take as a reader on it. As with any allegory, interpretations can differ, but many things are obvious. I won’t mark this review as a SPOILER, but in essence, it probably is. So if you don’t want to know what’s inside this book, and how I felt about it, stop reading now, and read the book instead, then come back. And now you’ve been warned!

The story on the surface is a tender one, filled with heartbreaking moments which resonate for anyone sensitive enough to empathize with Addison and Gwyneth. What lies beneath that story is profoundly beautiful, and perhaps a little frightening — despite the hopeful tone of the ending. Koontz has woven piercing social commentary into this tragic, almost fairy-tale like romance. As one Goodreads reviewer from Costa Rica astutely noted, there is the feel of the old Linda Hamilton/Ron Perlman television series, Beauty and the Beast, and also a Nicholas Cage/Meg Ryan, City of Angels vibe.

The reader is immediately swept up into the heartbreak of Addison’s world, and his loneliness and isolation from the rest of humankind. Koontz draws the reader into his world so deftly that what he is really doing, the story Koontz is “really” telling, is somewhat obscured beneath the snowy, wintery landscape, and the bleak situation of Addison Goodheart. Koontz’s portrait of how far society has fallen, to a point where goodness and hope and truth are derided, and depravity embraced, is so on target that it could only have been told by someone with the willingness — and the publishing juice — to accurately paint the deplorable state of mankind:

"But insanity is everywhere these days, and celebrated. Insanity is rapidly becoming the new normal." (this exact sentiment is echoed in Koontz's The Whispering Room)

"Everyone talks about justice, but there can be no justice where there is no truth, and these are times when truth is seldom recognized and often despised."

"Great power could be a beautiful thing when men and women who had it were inclined to use it wisely and with kindness. When a leader used his power over the ruled for the purpose of settling scores and inflating self-esteem, for remaking society according to his own grand designs, class warfare and genocide ensued."

"In the end, for all of their kind, it's about the same thing—power. Having power over others, to tell you what to do, to take what you have, to use you any way they wish, to demean you and break you and make you obey, and finally to rob you of your faith in truth, make you despair that there's no hope and never was."

Now that’s out of the way, let’s first deal with the literal story, in all its tender beauty. Addison has lost his father, the only person who ever loved him. He remains beneath the city during the day, alone now, and is almost an observer of mankind by night:

"Those of us who remain hidden from everyone else, however, know that this world is wondrous and filled with mysteries. We possess no magical perception, no psychic insight. I believe our recognition of reality's complex dimensions is a consequence of our solitude."

Soon the narrative moves back and forth between present and past. We learn of Addison as a child, and his mother, who finally has to cut him lose:

"I could not but love her and wish that she could love a thing like me."

"Weeping as bitterly as I had ever wept—or ever would—I left the house and didn't look back. I grieved, although not because of either my condition or my lean prospects. I grieved for her because I knew that she didn't hate me, that she hated herself. She despised herself not for bringing me into the world in the first place, more than eight years earlier, but for turning me out into it now."

All of Addison’s interactions with man both as a child and as an adult show humanity and society in free fall. When as a boy he finds his “Father” Addison is finally no longer alone. They forge a life separate from society, who cannot bear to look at them, and who try to kill them upon sight. There is something hideous about Addison and his father, something so grotesque it at first suggests evil. Yet Addison appears to be gentle and kind, filled with goodness, and even living as he does, he harbors no ill will, and only has hope. It’s the reader’s first clue that something more is happening here than we realize, because the eyes are but a window to the soul:

"We don't know what those of the aboveground would do to our cadavers. But considering the violence most of them visit upon us on sight, we assume they might commit abominations beyond our imagining. We stand and die with courage when cornered, but we do not—must never—let them take our dignity in death."

In the present, Addison meets a girl named Gwyneth who is being pursued at the library after hours:

"From there I returned to my windowless rooms, now mine and mine alone. For the subsequent six years, I secretly moved through the city, diminished by solitude, until one night in the central library, I saw a running girl dressed in black but no less graceful than snow in motion."

A friendship is formed, she agreeing not to look upon his face, and he agreeing to give her physical space:

"Our relationship was delicate, perhaps no less so than the crystal intimacy of those first huge snowflakes that had spiraled around me in the Commons."

"Already I loved her. I would be content to love her all of my life without touching her, but I saw no indication that she loved me in the same way, or at all."

Gwyneth’s situation is as precarious as Addison’s. For those who’ve ever read The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane, you will see the similarity in the way her father provided for her upon his death, with secreted apartments all over the city so she would be safe, and free to live her own life. But there is a man the personification of degradation out to kill her, and marionettes her father made that may also be watching, and harbor ill will. Because Addison has come across one of the marionettes in a store window years before, and an evil music box, we realize instantly that somehow Addison and Gwyneth were connected long before they met. There is some stuff with the marionettes which is particularly creepy — I hate clowns, ventriloquist dolls, and marionettes!

The more Addison and Gwyneth are pursued, and the more danger they are in, the more Addison comes to adore her:

"Considering her social phobia, if she were to suspect the depth of my feelings for her, she might recoil, retreat, and banish me. She might not be capable of loving me as I already loved her, let alone in the more profound way that I would surely come to love her over time."

"I drew hope from the fact that she had clearly loved her father, and I needed that hope because, after living my life with one loss after another, losing this might at last break me."

Addison does not tell Gwyneth about the Fogs, or the Clears, which apparently only he can see, because he does not want her to think him mad as well as hideous. Addison knows the Fogs are bad, disturbingly so, but as his father taught him, even the Clears are to be feared, and should not be looked upon directly. But there are clues which relate to the allegory. While helping Gwyneth, Addison, in a disturbing scene, views a pedophile about to watch one of his videos in the privacy of his home, when a Fog invades the man rather than kill him. The man then continues on with what he was doing, as though nothing grotesque had happened to him. It was obvious these were demons, and of particular note that free will had play, because the man made a choice, and it was not until after he chose that the Fog came to reside inside the man. In essence, evil found a willing host...

From that point forward, which was fairly early on in the narrative, I believe, there was not a single doubt that this was an allegory, and there were two stories here — the one on the surface, and a much larger one beneath. You realize then that it is cold and wintery throughout the story not only because it is winter, and Christmas is approaching, but because man’s heart has grown cold, and far from his Creator. But what of the Clears? Why are they in hospital garb? There is a clue in T.S. Elliot, but a much bigger one when Addison sees the Clears looking this way and that in the street. He senses in a way he can’t explain that they are trying to hold something back — what, he does not know. Any discerning reader will guess that it’s the Four Winds, and that final plague…

Yes, this is an allegory about Armageddon, and a point reached where man, of his own free will, has fallen too far to be redeemed. But there is hope, as there always is in a Koontz novel, and of course dogs, who are blameless. Koontz uses Addison and Gwyneth, a young girl in a coma, and a handful of children who, like Addison, are “immune” to the final plague being brought upon debauched humankind, to uplift the reader, provide an olive branch of hope. The story is exciting, moving, heartbreaking, and on a few occasions, quite eerie. A scene where the Clears hover above the city and ache for it to be different is particularly disturbing. Because to interfere, is to interfere with man’s free will, and it is this path mankind has chosen, until starting over is the only option…

This is a tender, beautiful story with moving moments, staggeringly lovely passages, and great thrills. It is also, despite the cataclysmic allegory beneath, hopeful. I don’t usually care for allegories as a rule, but this one was brilliant, and could not have been more relevant for the times in which we live…

“There is no end of wonders and mysteries: fireflies and music boxes, the stars that outnumber all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world, pin-head eggs that become caterpillars that dissolve into genetic soup from which arise butterflies, that some hearts are dark and others full of light.” ( )

FROM AMAZON: He lives in solitude beneath the city, an exile from society, which will destroy him if he is ever seen.

She dwells in seclusion, a fugitive from enemies who will do her harm if she is ever found.

But the bond between them runs deeper than the tragedies that have scarred their lives. Something more than chance - and nothing less than destiny - has brought them together in a world whose hour of reckoning is fast approaching.

From Amazon: Wilderness (Short story, prelude to Innocence)Addison Goodheart was born in an isolated home surrounded by a deep forest, never known to his father, kept secret from everyone but his mother, who barely accepts him. Only in the woods, among the wildlife, is Addison truly welcome. Only there can he be at peace. Until the day he first knows terror, the day when his life changes radically and forever.... ( )

Review: Innocence by Dean Koontz.

Koontz creates a story with heart, soul, characters with special abilities, and the power of love and courage and self-sacrifice with a spiritual touch. This is sort of an apocalyptic story where the world is headed for disaster. Koontz character development was part of the plot but he captured some philosophical and religious aspects of the story which surpasses several graphic and horrifying scenes that stay intact.

The story deals with an isolated man with a disfigurement curse named Addison Goodheart and an isolated girl with a social phobia known as Gwyneth. Addison is a loner hiding in the underworld of New York’s subway tunnels to hide his appearance from everyone. His mother abandoned him at a very young age because she was repulsed by his features and he lived a miserable lonely life. He was able to move around the city during the night and that is how Addison and Gwyneth met in a hideaway in the city’s library.

Gwyneth couldn’t stand to be touched and carried as much baggage as Addison. Gwyneth is not as open with her life as Addison was. She harbored answers but refused to share what she knew. It seems as if they were meant to meet at this time because of a worldwide breakout of the Plague. From this point on they bonded a good friendship and helped each other understand what was happening to the world…. ( )

I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook. The prose is beautifully written and the story is interesting. My only complaint is that it was too long. There was repetition of description. I felt like the story could have been told with the same effect in three fourths of the time. ( )