Even more than writing, I love reading.  This weekend, I devoured a new book by Dean Koontz, Relentless, a terrific thriller by one of the masters of the genre.  I’d like to share a few thoughts about it with you.

I haven’t read Koontz for a while, but coming back is like coming home.  I used to be one of his biggest fans but for a while there, he seemed to have lost something.  I suspect there was something serious going on but what it was I don’t know.  I now have a ton of things to get caught up on.

This man used to scare the crap out of me.  I read Phantoms a long time ago and nearly peed myself.  He hasn’t been able to scare me for a while (no one has), but in Relentless, there were a few parts that gave me chills. I wasn’t reading it at night; I was sitting in the waiting area at the car repair place!

Relentless doesn’t hit the ground running like a lot of suspense thrillers.  Koontz takes the time to introduce the small family—Cubby Greenwich, wife Penny Boom, son Milo and dog Lassie—with whom we’ll be spending the next 356 pages.   Soon we care about them.  They are funny, endearing, and intelligent.

Cubby and Penny are writers.  Ordinarily I can’t stand reading books about writers, or watching TV shows about people with their own TV shows.  It’s all so meta, and fails at irony most of the time.  Cubby, the narrator, is likeable and funny, so you don’t immediately think, “Oh, another writer writing about writers.”  Both Milo and Lassie are unusual, nearly magical, and we know this will be important later.  (It is.)  The special canine is a trademark of Koontz, a longtime dog lover, used most effectively in Watchers.

The premise is simple.  An eminent but eccentric critic, Shearman Waxx, writes a scathing review of Cubby’s book.  Cubby goes to the restaurant where the critic is having lunch to get a look at the man, and inadvertently, or so he thinks, irritates him.  Waxx begins a campaign of terrorism against the writer.  To survive, Cubby and his family must uncover the motives behind his bizarre behavior, while desperately running for their lives.

Koontz tells the story in first person, which provides a tight, personal point of view and keeps the focus on what is most important to Cubby.  It also serves to make the villain more enigmatic.  Who is Shearman Waxx?  Why is he doing what he’s doing?  We never get inside his head, so we can’t know.

He uses short, sharp paragraphs, many of them one-liners.  Paragraph length is a personal style choice, and also one of pacing.  Shorter paragraphs move the reader through the text quickly.   He also favors long stretches of dialogue with no tags and you have to pay close attention to remember who is speaking.  It’s a Koontz signature; I would know it was his writing even if he wrote under the name Hortense Bandicoot.

When he gets to an important flashback, he changes tense (from past to present). The entire flashback has its own chapter and Koontz takes his time with it.

These two techniques make a long flashback stand out.  A shorter one is better incorporated into the scene in which it appears.   Writers often do a quick tense change from past perfect (He had thought about it long and hard) to regular past tense to describe what is happening in the flashback (His hands trembled as he cocked the gun) and back to past perfect (It had been his defining moment) to indicate the transition back to the current events of the story.

He plants several things and waters them with hints more than once, but holds revelation back until their significance can be both realized and utilized in the battle for survival.  We think we know.  We’re dying to see if we’re on the right track.  Wisely, Koontz doesn’t explain everything but lets us find out as we go along.  A classic suspense technique, it holds reader attention and allows for character development as Cubby’s situation changes.

The supporting characters in Relentless are very cool; they have everything the pursued family needs when they need it.  This seems very convenient, but most thrillers require a suspension of disbelief the same way horror, fantasy or sci-fi does.  Scenes where the protagonists find or learn sophisticated survival techniques without any help would make the book too long.  This genre is all about fast pacing.  Certain things have to happen at the right time for the heroes to escape or win a battle.  It’s better if they can pick up what they need as they go along, like characters in a video game.

Koontz uses one device I don’t like, foreshadowing at the end of a chapter:  “And we didn’t know then about the bad thing in the future.” Dan Brown gets criticized for this a lot.  Personally, I find this device irritating; I’d much rather get to the bad thing and be surprised.  Also, if I’ve gotten more than halfway through a book, chances are I’m going to finish.  The writer doesn’t have to be so obvious about manipulating me to turn the page.

A sociopathic villain chasing the protagonist has been done before.  TONS of times.  But Koontz has found a fresh twist here.  So easy to do it the other way around; most writers would have the writer chasing the critic who gave him a bad review.  Koontz turned it upside down.  This is a great way to get a fresh perspective on a story.  Since most or all stories are variations on the same few premises, it’s a good exercise to use.

Sometimes you won’t find a twist this way, but you will find a more effective perspective on a scene or a whole book.  For example, if you’re retelling a classic conflict such as an abusive marriage, switch sexes on the characters.  Have the wife beating the husband (it happens, really).  Change the POV to a supporting character, like Nick in The Great Gatsby, or the servant girl in Mary Reilly (a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).  Have that character tell the story instead, his/her insights or misunderstandings driving the narrative.

I liked this book.  I recommend it even if you’re not a Koontz fan.  When I really get into a book, either I read it in two days or drag it out forever, depending on the length.  This was a two-day book, not too long and not too short.  It’s a good read for budding and experienced thriller writers and readers alike.  Enjoy it if you get the chance.

After I finished Rose’s Hostage, the novel I’m querying now, I realized a couple of things.

First, that the story wasn’t done, at least not in terms of the couple, Joshua and Libby. Where are they going from here?  I don’t want to spoil it, but there’s more to come.

Second, that my detective has more potential than I thought.  Pierce and his partner Rossberger can have more adventures.  They live and work in a great big city, and everyone knows great big cities are full of crime.  I could have a series on my hands.

Creating a series character is a daunting task.  You have to give a character room to grow over the course of the series.  In addition, each situation must give your character fresh challenges. And he should have the skills, the talents and the knowledge to overcome them.  A few endearing or astonishing quirks don’t hurt.

I’ve been reading thrillers because it’s the genre I want to work in, and I enjoy them.  Writing them is more fun than I ever imagined.  I’ve noticed that no matter how over the top you get, you can’t possibly go too far.  Ever.  Look at Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series.  In Angels and Demons, Robert Langdon has to jump out of a helicopter and float down to earth using a makeshift parachute.  In The Lost Symbol, he gets kidnapped, buried alive, and appears to die.

Michael Palmer’s medical thrillers get equally crazy.  I can’t remember which one it was, but the villain trapped the protagonists in a cave filling with water and in a desperate attempt to save themselves and others trapped with them, they had to swim out through a tiny hole.

My poor detectives might have to stretch themselves.  I strove for realism in the book, which, after re-reading some of this other stuff, makes me wonder if it’s too sedate.  In real life, cop stuff usually isn’t that exciting.

My absolute favorite, by the authors other than Stephen King who would inspire a Wayne’s World-type salaam from me, is Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child‘s Aloysius Pendergast series.  These two write terrific thrillers independently, but their collaboration boasts the best character I’ve come across in years.  Pendergast is an FBI special agent unlike any you’ve ever seen before.

The man is filthy rich, impeccably dressed, cultured but not snobbish (although he has moments of condescension that somehow manage not to sully him), pale, cadaverous and spooky.  He is the kind of person to whom weird things gravitate.  An unexpected ward born in the nineteenth century, an evil brother (not a twin, thank God), various monstrous cases.  With real monsters.

Pendergast can have a quiet cup of imported tea with you and in the next two seconds disarm a crazed assassin.  He picks locks, is a master of disguise, and frequently operates outside the bounds of the law, all while maintaining a unique propriety.

I LOVE this guy.

He started in Relic as a peripheral character; the real protagonist in that one is NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta.  Vinnie ends up as Pendergast’s sidekick in the series, heavily involved in his many outrageous adventures, to the disgust of his captain and new lover, Laura Hayward.  I always feel when reading that first book that the authors liked the character so much that they ran with him.  And the results are not disappointing.

In their latest, Fever Dream, Pendergast, along with Vinnie, must solve the mystery of his wife’s murder.  You don’t see Helen in the series until now; she’s already dead.  Most thrillers rely on suspense to move the story forward.  You might already know who the antagonist is, and the momentum lies in the hero’s attempts to thwart him/her, or resolve a situation that seems insurmountable.  For example, will Cowboy Sam be able to free Pearlie Sue, tied to the railroad tracks by Mad Marvin, before the 5:15 arrives?  Fever Dream contains a genuine mystery, and the stakes are tremendously high.

Worse, it leaves bits hanging at the end.  Boo!  Now I have to wait until the next one.  It’s torture, I tell you!  Sheer torture!

I also liked this book because Pendergast comes unglued.  Every one of us has a breaking point.  For him, it’s the discovery that the one person he allowed into his cloistered emotional world was actually murdered.  Pendergast’s early life was not exactly a stereotype of comfortable wealthy leisure.  (Evil brother, remember?)  Usually, this character is an ice cube.  Here, you get to see another side of him.  And it ain’t pretty.

A strong character needs to have facets.  He’s not believable unless he does.  No one acts/feels/thinks one way all the time, and neither should a book character.  In a series, these facets are great ways to advance not only the character development, but the story arc.  Do you have something in mind for your hero?  Does he strive for a goal like Harry Potter’s revenge against Voldemort for killing his parents, or Roland Deschain’s quest for the Dark Tower?  Reaching that goal will likely end your series.  Yet the journey can wring your character out like a rag.  No fun if it doesn’t, for reader or writer.

Or you can leave it open-ended, but explore different aspects of the character.  Preston and Child let us into Pendergast’s traumatic past in the Diogenes trilogy, in which Pendergast must confront his brother.  Theoretically, they could milk his complex psyche until they die.  In the back of Fever Dream, the authors announced the coming debut of a new character, but that they would not abandon Pendergast.   That’s great, because we Pendergast fans can’t get enough.  Unless he started doing ridiculously out-of-character things, I’d certainly keep buying the books, and I don’t even wait for paperback anymore.

The key to keeping a series character alive is love, I think.  You have to love putting this person through his paces.  You must love spending time in his world.  I love Detective Pierce.  He’s a bit prickly, not exaggeratedly so, but a good man overall, trying to do the right thing.  I can’t wait to see what tips the scales for him, or how he deals with the myriad nightmares I can throw at him.

I’ll give it a shot.  Or maybe the bad guys will.