‘Seize’ Will Take You To The Darker Side
“Seize The Night” by Dean Koontz (Bantam Books. 401 pages. $26.95)
Moonlight Bay on the coast of central California looks like the perfect pastoral place. Ashdon College is there. It has beautiful beaches and friendly people. But as narrator Christopher Snow, age 28, tells us, “In Moonlight Bay we live in a police state so artfully imposed that it is virtually invisible.”
Snow was born with xeroderma pigmentosium, a genetic disorder that renders normal light intolerable. Even minor exposure to ultraviolet light causes lesions, which can quickly turn into melanoma. He was picked on as a kid and harbors those never-surrendered wounds. So he goes out only at night, a time when Moonlight Bay looks very different: “I am at home in the darkness,” he says.
This is one of the scariest, most gripping gothic techno-thrillers I have ever read.
It seems that in Moonlight Bay lies the abandoned Fort Wyvern, all 134,456 acres of it. It “was never entirely vacated (with its) secret facilities, far beneath its increasingly weathered surface (that) continue to be manned to carry out clandestine projects … .”
On the night of April 11, Snow on his bicycle with his dog Orson comes across Lilly Wing, whose son Jimmy has just been kidnapped. Orson, more than unusually intelligent because of his own peculiar genetic background, picks up the boy’s scent - and leads Snow to Fort Wyvern.
Several years earlier, a retrovirus had infected too many lab animals. Which escaped. And are still at large. But it infected people as well. And they are in the process of changing, “becoming” something other than human. Snow’s mother, Wisteria Jane, a genetic scientist, may have been responsible for that nightmare. So the police have been co-opted by “higher authorities” to keep the epidemic a secret in hopes that a vaccine can be created before “becoming” becomes “being.”
The book never slows down. It covers two frightening nights and one horrific day. “One cat, four kids, one dog, one deejay-songwriter, one animal communicator, one Viking, and the poster child for Armageddon - that’s me” join forces in a run for their lives.
They come upon strange cocoons, a troop of genetically enhanced rhesus monkeys, coyotes, snakes, men in strange insulated suits, red skies and black trees, the carving of a crow which levitates out of stone, the vibrating egg room, and miles of subterranean, underground corridors, tunnels, tubes and chambers they must navigate. It’s H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and a demented Disneyland all rolled into one.
Through it all, the horrors match Snow’s “baroque ranting,” while the jokey adolescent lingo with his surfer buddy, Bobby Halloway, gives the reader some breathing room. Snow sees himself as a “two-bit philosopher,” and he can be both eloquent and sentimental when he stops to discuss fear, friendship and nature. But his real skill lies in his frightening imagery, the play of light and shadow, and his exact descriptions of Wyvern’s secret places.
He tells us of his murdered parents, his mother who mysteriously plunges off a road in her car, and his father, the professor of poetry, who filled his boyhood imagination with images and has recently died of cancer. “Higher authorities” have arranged their demise.
Koontz knows exactly when to speed up and slow down. Paranoia lingers in every dark hallway and just behind every cocoon discovered on the ceiling of the haunted bungalow in Dead Town. His book will leave you breathless. And when it’s done - read it in the daytime only! - you’ll see shadows that you hadn’t seen before. One’s intelligence generates “a sense of mystery,” Christopher Snow reminds us. “Superstition is the dark side of wonder.”
Welcome to the dark side.
Sam Coale teaches at Wheaton College.