Product Description

When Dylan O’Connor pulls into a motel off the Arizona interstate highway, all he wants to do is relax with his autistic brother Shep, and get a good night’s sleep. Yet within the hour he finds himself bound, gagged and being injected with some mysterious fluid by a 'doctor’ who claims that Dylan will be the carrier for ‘his life’s work’. Meanwhile, Jillian Jackson, a comedian, is midway through her tour of seedy cocktail lounges and and second-rate comedy clubs. Her plans for stardom are dramatically altered, however, when she too falls victim to the eccentric scientist, who makes off with her beloved cadillac. The doctor warns his victims that he is being pursued and that they too are now targets. If they're caught, they'll be killed. Both are sceptical, but when 3 black Chevrolet Suburbans come screaming into the motel carpark and Jillian’s car is found in flames, they begin to wonder if the lunatic doctor wasn’t so mad after all...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #132110 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-18
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In By the Light of the Moon artist Dylan O'Connor is driving through Arizona with his autistic brother Shepherd, and decides to catch up on his sleep in a motel. But (as Hitchcock demonstrated) motels can be dangerous places, and Dylan is soon tied up, gagged and being pumped full of strange fluid by sinister doctor. At the same time, comedian Jillian Jackson is watching her career feebly played out against a succession of down-market comedy joints. All her dreams of changing her life are torpedoed when she, too, becomes a victim of the deranged scientist, who steals her car. Then begins a lunatic chase, involving the doctor and his victims, and the surfaces of reality quickly become very insubstantial.

As the plot suggests, Koontz's new book is quite unlike anything he has written before (or, for that matter, unlike anything by his contemporaries); the highly ingenious plotting is matched by some beguilingly off-kilter characterisation and a breathtaking pace that allows for little pause. One can only admire this writer's refusal to repeat himself: a phenomenon all too rare with so many other thriller writers simply recycling the same old material. --Barry Forshaw

Synopsis
When Dylan O'Connor pulls into a motel off the Arizona interstate highway, all he wants to do is relax with his autistic brother Shep, and get a good night's sleep. Yet within the hour he finds himself bound, gagged and being injected with some mysterious fluid by a 'doctor' who claims that Dylan will be the carrier for 'his life's work'. Meanwhile, Jillian Jackson, a comedian, is midway through her tour of seedy cocktail lounges and and second-rate comedy clubs. Her plans for stardom are dramatically altered, however, when she too falls victim to the eccentric scientist, who makes off with her beloved cadillac. The doctor warns his victims that he is being pursued and that they too are now targets. If they're caught, they'll be killed. Both are sceptical, but when 3 black Chevrolet Suburbans come screaming into the motel carpark and Jillian's car is found in flames, they begin to wonder if the lunatic doctor wasn't so mad after all...

About the Author
Dean Koontz was born into a very poor family and learned early on to escape into fiction. He lives in southern California with his wife, Gerda and a vivid imagination.

Customer Reviews

Fast Pace
Well, Koontz finally has written a book without a dog in it. Though they do show up in a puzzle. :) This book shows that the author has a command with the English language. His descriptions are beautifully crafted. Even so this book is a very fast read. But the end of the book leaves you wanting more. It is as if he did not finish it, or there is a sequel in mind.

By the Light of the Moon follows the tried and true formula, normal people who are unwillingly brought into a government conspiracy. This time the bad guy is a mad-scientist. While the good guys are a sensitive he-man, his impaired brother and a man hating heroine. Our trio ends up on the run from ex-special forces teams.

A doctor who claims that the substance will either kill them, or drastically change them for the better injects our trio with a serum. But now that they are injected, the men who are looking to kill him will want to kill them as well. And so the three begin their flight from danger. But their flight takes on various directions, as they are lead by Dylan's new ability of precognition.

Our heroes are Dylan O'Conner, who is an artist and guardian of his autistic brother, Shep. Dylan is a man who has sacrificed everything to take care of his brother. Then there is Shep, Dylan's autistic brother. Who is a walking thesaurus. His episodes may seem redundant, but imagine what it is really like. I think that Koontz did a good job of writing this character. And finally our heroine, Jillian Jackson. Jillian is a comedienne that is just filled with

Each Koontz book is better than the last
Another fantastic thriller from Dean Koontz with more than a little humour injected into it by way of the eccentric comedian Jillian and her pet plant.
Unlike most books that try to combine chilling suspence and laugh-out-loud humour, this book succeed and really makes the cross-genre work. This is a brilliant novel that will have you laughing one moment and ducking under the covers the next.
I would reccomend this book to all fans of Dean Koontz or of the thriller/horror genre especially if you like books to be scary but still manage to have a nice, lighthearted feel to them.

Some have greatness thrust upon 'em
"You're no scientist. You're a monster. Science shines light into darkness. But you *are* the darkness. You do *your* work by the light of the moon."
- victim to mad scientist, herein

The plot of this story can be summarized succinctly: the origin story for three not-quite-super superheroes in the mold of Jim Ironheart from COLD FIRE (superheroes whose powers mainly lie in knowing what's going on that needs their intervention, leaving the work of figuring out *how* to help to their ingenuity). The three protagonists' changes are forced upon them by a mad scientist seeking to preserve his life's work, who ambushes them and injects them with a mysterious substance that soon brings on terrifying changes. He arranges matters so that he has enough lead time to escape from them while still allowing them to escape from *his* pursuers, leaving them to identify him and figure out exactly what he did to them when they can take time out to do some research on the net later in the story.

I recommend the unabridged audio edition read by Stephen Lang over the plain text itself, as I think this book shows to best advantage when performed rather than simply read on the page. While the story draws in the reader and has plenty of action and character exploration, it's rather slow-paced if one steps back and considers it carefully (it takes ten chapters for the three main characters to be assaulted, injected, shake off their temporary confinement, meet, and hit the road - about 40 minutes of story time).

Of the three main characters, Koontz spends a lot of time in the heads of two of them - Jilly Jackson, stand-up comedian, and Dylan O'Conner [sic], professionally a painter but also in the full-time role of caregiver to the third protagonist, his autistic younger brother Shep. Shep's character is explored less directly, and his personal situation is in a way illustrated by the setting (the desert of the southwest) and the experiences his companions are put through - their changes result in sensory overload as they acquire strange new psychic abilities, and they come to understand all too well Shep's occasional urges to take time out when life becomes too much for him.

Koontz's vivid, detailed descriptions will make this story appealing for some readers, but might annoy others since they're partly responsible for the slow development even of action scenes (when one bad guy takes a twenty foot fall, for example, we're given a careful description of the clothes worn by the people sitting near the spot where he lands). It's ironic that Koontz has had such bad luck in having his work adapted to the screen - the descriptions make the sequences easy to visualize. They're particularly effective in describing Jilly's precognitive visions, which tend to be surreal combinations of elements from future events with the landscape around her, like the dream sequences in the original film adaptation of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE or in SPELLBOUND: an ordinary bathroom reflected in a mirror showing a combination of stalls and confessional booths; a stream of silvery birds flying from nowhere to nowhere; images of gunfire shattering windows in slow motion.

Finally, the development of the story is rather patchy. Once Jilly and the O'Conner brothers link up and begin fleeing the mysterious forces chasing the mad scientist, there isn't much of a plot, in one sense - they have the simple objective of fleeing, and it takes quite a while for them to begin even trying to acquire more information about their situation. The book more or less functions as a quest for the truth about what happened to them, but is so dominated by intermittent adventures in saving people that the searching-for-truth aspects boil down to "do net search during a breather, and at the end of the book stumble into one last sequence that ties up the loose ends." (The adventures do contribute, though, in forcing them to learn what they can do and face some of the personality changes compelling them to do it.)

If the reader can just sit back and enjoy the lovingly described scenes and forays into character exploration, rolling with the adventure scenarios as they come along without expecting much of a linearly developed plot, this can be quite an enjoyable book.