Dark Rivers of the Heart

Dark Rivers of the Heart – Dean Koontz   

This is only the fifth or sixth Dean Koontz novel that I have read.  Unlike Stephen King, Koontz’ brand of ‘horror’ seems to be much more from skeletons ‘within’ as opposed to outward threats of monsters, ghosts, and the supernatural.  At least this is what I’ve observed within these five or six books.  This book, unlike a Stephen King story, is very “real”.  I’m not sure about “realistic”, but definitely “real”.  I guess the story told within these pages is something that COULD really happen, although a lot of it seems rather farfetched. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the book, I thought it was overall a strong story, yet I did find myself shaking my head and suppressing laughter at times because of various events and predicaments.

There are three main characters in this book – Spencer Grant, Valerie Keene, and Roy Miro. Spencer is supposed to be the good guy, but his actions in the first half of the book kind of creeped me out.  He has a very scarred past (I mean that literally) which can explain much of his behaviors, but if I was a single female, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with someone like him in my neighborhood.  Spencer is never far away from his loyal dog; basically his only companion.  The dog gets a lot of attention in this book. I guess if you’re a dog lover this will make you like Spencer, and the story, a bit more.

Spencer has a strange attraction for a woman he meets one night named Valerie Keene, and without giving away much of the plot, Valerie is a wanted woman by a sinister rogue government agency.  This leads us to Roy Miro, the one who in charge of said agency.  Roy probably deserves his own story in his own book.  I don’t mean that in a good way.  I guess Koontz figured out his plot wasn’t creepy enough, so Roy is a grade A psycho killer on the side. His character is very well fleshed out, and his actions are quite believable, yet at times I felt like I was reading two different very strange books about two different very strange people. Spencer might be creepy, but Roy is a certified lunatic.

Then there’s the ‘government conspiracy’ angle of the book that I found a tad silly.  Again, I won’t go into details, but much of the motivation in this story arrives from a very deep personal fear of the author in terms of where he sees the country headed (the book was written about 20 years prior to this review).  Is the country really in such warped shape?  The hopeless would say so.  The hopeful, probably not.  Anyway, it kind of adds a preachy unwelcome message and sub-story in the book.  In fact, the ending of the book is rather unsatisfying as Koontz purposely leaves certain aspects hanging. It’s almost as if he’s refusing to have a nice neat happy ending, otherwise his readers might not take up their pitchforks and rise against the masses because of the new unwelcome government laws that Koontz apparently loathes.

There are other parts of the book the were a little ridiculous.  Roy’s nightly fetishes with the Las Vegas security officer wear thin very early and are borderline nauseous.  The chase in the middle of the book in the desert during the rainstorm went on longer than it should have as well.  

I realize I’m complaining an awful lot, but as I said, I really did enjoy the book.  Koontz spends a lot of meticulous detail when describing his characters, their predicaments, and the overall plot, yet it never seems forced, and the reader with patience is rewarded with the many rich descriptions.  Overall I might conclude that I enjoyed the book while I was reading it, but after I finished it, I thought the whole thing was kinda stupid.  The book was enjoyable, but by no means earth shattering.

Dereliction of Duty

Dereliction of Duty by H.R. McMaster

 

Dereliction of Duty is one of those books that I would give a grade of A+ to the first half of the book; but a D- to the second half.  So about a ‘B’ overall. There have already been so many books about the Vietnam war; both the war itself and the politics behind it. The first question one should ask is “Is there really anything new that we haven’t read before?”  In a sense, you could argue that this book does fill somewhat of a void in the unpleasant history. The bulk of this book takes place in the years 1964 and 1965; when things were just starting to heat up and the country hadn’t yet been exposed to ubiquitous peace rallies, sabotaged presidential conventions, and Woodstock.   For me, this was the overall problem of the book though. It didn’t seem necessary to spend so much time and effort focusing on these two years alone. Yes, these years are important and, yes, this is where the tiger started to become too hard to tame, but there’s simply too much minutiae here.  There comes a point where it’s not necessarily enjoyable to read about every single thing that was said by every single member of LBJ’s cabinet and/or the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This book, as I mentioned, starts off wonderfully. It does a brilliant job setting the stage of how and why the U.S. got involved in Viet Nam in the first place. Contrary to what Oliver Stone might tell you, Viet Nam was very much John F. Kennedy’s idea. Kennedy wasn’t a peace monger who was slayed by the establishment so Lyndon Johnson could appease his rich government contract friends.  No, Kennedy is the one who first got us in the mess.  To be fair, I think had Kennedy had lived, he would have done much better job than his successor and the outcome probably would have been much more favorable. But one can truthfully only speculate on such matters.  If we’re going to place blame or credit, let’s blame and credit people for their real actions, not their imagined ones.

We also read about how Kennedy learned the hard way not to trust the military heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff  (see: Bay of Pigs).  He quickly changed protocol and instead learned to rely on his cabinet and closest advisors in military matters who did, in fact, do a much better job for their Commander in Chief (see: Cuban Missile Crisis). So when Lyndon Baines Johnson unexpectedly becomes the nation’s 34^th president, it shouldn’t shock many that LBJ kept the same system in place.  In fact, the majority of Kennedy’s advisors and cabinet stayed on board once Johnson took over the reins. 

Unfortunately for Johnson, he really didn’t know how to lead a country. He was used to wheeling and dealing in the halls of congress and generally worked through intimidation and palm-greasing.  He could very easily state something as “fact” before the case, and then quickly manipulate those surrounding him to make such facts come true.  This works if you’re an influential senator, but not as president of a democratic country involved in an unfamiliar Asiatic war.  Truth be told, the war was more of a nuisance to LBJ than anything.  He wanted to place his primary focus on his “Great Society”.  So Viet Nam almost became a means to an end for his other priorities of his administration.  We then must remember that when Johnson became president, he had roughly less than one year before the election of 1964.  So the main priority of his first year in office was ensuring he would get to remain in office come November.  Therefore, Viet Nam had to be kept out of the headlines as much as possible.

So the bulk of this book is Johnson and his cabinet strategizing one way, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff vehemently opposed to these plans.  Since the chiefs are basically ignored or given limited opportunity to express their doubts, this allows Johnson to do what he had always done as a career politician: shout his opinion and made sure everyone around him agreed with him,  or face dire consequences of being kicked out of his inner circle (see: Humbert Humphrey).  All of this really does make good, interesting reading, yet once we get about halfway through the book, we feel we’re reading the same stories and the same arguments over and over (and over) again.

So why does this book end in 1965 and not ‘continue’?  To be fair, I’m glad it did as I was really worn out by the end of the book.  It seems that the author could have kept his thesis intact, shortened the detailed years of 1964-65, and then continued with key events of 1966 through 1968 instead. For me, this would have produced a more satisfying read.  It was simply too tedious for me to read so many details of who said what to whom in the mentioned limited timeframe of two years.

Another point of irony: this book contains an epilogue.  I always thought ‘epilogue’ meant something like “this is what happened next”, yet for this book the epilogue was mostly a summary of everything we had already read!  The author simply takes his long dissertation and quickly encapsulates it at the end.  This leads me to wonder why he couldn’t practice such measures of ‘summarizing’ throughout his entire book instead of including it in a so-called ‘epilogue’.

Still, as I said earlier, the first half of the book really is stellar, and I probably used my e-reader highlighting tool to draw attention to well over 100 key statements made by those embroiled in the thick of things. I guess if you really like detail, you’ll love this book.  Personally, I prefer my history to be a bit more concise and summarized.