Night Chills

Night Chills by Dean Koontz

Looking for some variety in my reading author-wise, I discovered a huge stack of Dean Koontz paperbacks in my garage. I’ve only read a couple of his books prior to this one. The first thing I noticed when I opened this book is that it’s 43 years old.  Yes, 1976 was THAT long ago. After reading the book, I’ve concluded that the story is definitely dated.  What I mean is that the story hasn’t aged well.  Either that or it simply isn’t that great a book.

In the introduction, Koontz tells us that this book is about the exposure of society to the power of subliminal messaging.  Koontz states that even though such a mind controlling method isn’t being used by the evil powers-that-be often, it IS in fact (eerie music fades up) POSSIBLE!  Many of us have heard of the movie theater experiment where a single film strip with a message like “eat more popcorn” was snuck in a popular film, and the statistics showed that the muddled masses were, in fact, consuming more snacks during the show. So, yes, there can be some truth to this scare.  Well, 43 years later, it seems as though society has moved on in the ‘fear’ department, and most people seem more concerned with things like global warning, terrorism and the national debt.  

So, in this book we read about evil members of some powerful mega-corporation that want to use subliminal messaging to control the world (or something), but first they have to experiment with their concoction and choose to infect the water supply of a sleepy isolated community known as Black River. 

Apparently, things get off to quite a good start.  The mastermind behind this madness, named Ogden Salsbury, can simply walk up to anyone in this town, say four magic words, and instantly hypnotize anyone to do his bidding.  Well, it seems as though Salsbury is not only a lunatic, but a ‘sexually repressed’ lunatic, so it doesn’t take long before he’s running through the town taking advantage of all the young attractive females.  We’re talking rape, here, folks, and it’s not that pleasant to read the details during these perverted goings-on.  Again, 43 years ago, such a plot line might not have been so sickening, but in the current state of affairs, such episodes are quite revolting. 

Well, of course there’s a family arriving in this small town for a vacation, and since they weren’t infected by the water, they’re immune to the visiting psychopath.  Oh yeah, and it turns out there’s another family in the town that is somehow ‘immune’ to the drugs in the water, so this family along with the visitors can ‘team up’ to uncover, expose, and stop the madness.

Fortunately, this book was a rather quick read. I found it very predictable, and quite gruesome at times. For someone who hasn’t read much Dean Koontz, I’m hoping that most of his work is better than this. Again, maybe by 1976 standards this one was quite the thriller, but all these years later made this story somewhat unspectacular for my tastes.