Product Description

Christopher Snow suffers from a rare genetic disorder - Xeroderma pigmentosum - his skin and eyes cannot be exposed to sunlight, so his life begins at midnight. Set in the town of Moonlight Bay, a place of picturesque beauty and haunting strangeness, Dean Koontz’s new novel is a startling and compulsive masterpiece of tension.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68138 in Books
• Published on: 1998-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

The Mail on Sunday
'Fast and furious - like a hospital trolley on a tobogan run'

Review
‘This is a moral fable for the turn of the millennium, an engagingly written, hugely entertaining parable for our times’ (The Times )

'The night-time setting and peculiarly burdened hero make for instant atmosphere. Koontz is at his best' (The Express on Sunday )

'Koontz presents a unique fictional world grounded in convincing detail' (Publishers Weekly )

'Fast and furious - like a hospital trolley on a tobogan run' (The Mail on Sunday )

Publishers Weekly
'Koontz presents a unique fictional world grounded in convincing detail'

Customer Reviews

A Scary Story about a Boy and His Dog
Christopher Snow, called Snowman by his friends, is a twenty-eight-year-old writer who is doomed to a life of darkness because of a rare genetic disorder called xeroderma pigmentosum, or XP for short. He's normal in every way except that exposure to ultraviolet rays - even from fluorescent lights - could be fatal.

His father has just died. But when the hospital turns the body over to the mortuary, it's switched for one of a hitchhiker, who was a victim of a brutal beating that ended with someone plucking out his eyes. Snowman sets out to discover why and finds himself involved in a mystifying tale that involves all of Moonlight Bay, a quaint California coastal town.

Snowman goes to the mortuary but is discovered. There is a chase that wind up with Snowman following an intelligent cat into an underground drainage catacomb that's full of hundreds of animal and human skulls.

Snowman eases himself back into the darkness and goes home, where he gets his faithful dog Orson and heads out in search of answers. There are it seems, animals in town who are a whole heck of a lot smarter than they have a right to be. Some good, a troop of monkeys apparently not so good. In due course he finds out that his quiet little town has been a hotbed of DNA research and that his mother was involved in some sneaky governmental work that involved intra-species gene therapy. And he learns a little something about his dog.

This book is typical Koontz, a thriller as well as a scary read that grabs you from the first page and pulls you right into the story. I loved the characters, Christopher, Bobby, Sasha, but most of all I loved Orson the dog and I believe you will too.

A fast paced thriller
I have now read this book 4 times during the last few years, and each time I enjoy it even more. This is Koontz at his very best, describing characters like Christopher Snow and his surfing friend with consummate skill. The relationship they have is very well described. It is genuinely frightening in parts, and the reader has no trouble empathising with Christopher in his quest for the truth in Moonlight Bay, however strange and depressing it might be. It poses many questions about the ethics of scientific research, and of the official explanation of events, and of the subsequent "cover up" inherent in many walks of life these days. Who CAN you trust?

Read Nothing
You know your back catalogue is in trouble when you read reviews about them and they could be describing any of the last ten books you wrote. 'Fear Nothing' is yet another novel from the Koontz's sausage factory. Each book reads almost identically even if the characters and situations are meant to be different. Koontz continues to overwrite his work and tries to stretch a 200 page concept over a laborious and dull 500 pages.

In 'Fear Nothing' we follow Christopher Snow, a man who has a rare disease called XP that means he has to stay out of light. To be honest this has little impact on the story and is just used to set it at night. Snow's father dies early in the book, but the body is taken away to the local military settlement rather than being cremated. Can Snow uncover the reasons why people in the town are acting so strangely and a troop of monkeys are out to kill him?

I would not recommend this book to anyone, even Koontz fans. He has written some great books like 'Odd Thomas' but the vast majority of his stuff is very very boring. During 'Fear Nothing' there are a couple of scenes that show the promise the book could have had, but a hackneyed science fiction plot and pages of unneeded diatribe makes their impact become lost in a sea of dull prose.