Books like The Mask

Fantastic! Here is a tale of trauma and misunderstanding echoing through time. Eventually, someone must stop the cycle. A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died young.-Edgar Allan Poe, "Lenore"And much of Madness, and more of Sin,And Horror the soul of the plot.-Edgar Allan Poe, "The Conqueror Worm"Extreme terror gives us back the gestures of our childhood.-ChazalBy the pricking of my thumbs,Something wicked this way comes.Open, locks,whoever knocks! -Shakespeare, MacbethEvil is no faceless stranger,living in a distant neighborhood.Evil has a wholesome, hometown face,with merry eyes and an open smile,Evil walks among us, wearing a maskwhich looks like all our faces.-The Book of Counted SorrowsThis was an interesting story. At first, I was confused how the prologue fit into the main story, but that soon became clear. If you like stories with bad kitties like we saw in The Bad Place, for example, you'll love this book! Upon second reading, I was even more pleased with the story - I even liked the ending because I am crazy :-) It's fun to read an earlier book by Dean Koontz with such a unique story idea - I didn't even mind that it was dated. I love retro - reading about a time when people were reliant on phone booths and phones attached to the walls of their homes. There are even printed newspapers in this story. Those were the good ol' days!I found this amusing (chapter 3):Every thirty seconds or so, a bleached blonde with a shrill voice repeated the same words of amazement: "I can't believe nobody got killed in all that! I can't believe nobody got killed." Each time she spoke, regardless of where she was in the room, her voice carried over the din and made Paul wince. "I can't believe nobody got killed." She sounded somewhat disappointed.I listened using the Brilliance audio book and the narrator did a good job with the different voices.This work holds up over time. Overall, I'm very impressed by this early Dean Koontz novel and highly recommend The Mask along with The Voice of the Night. Favorite Passages:Damn you to Hell, Mama.The top floor of the house caved in upon the ground floor with a sound like cannons blasting.Damn you, Mama! Damn you!The first two floors of flaming rubble broke through the already weakened cellar ceiling.Mama -________A calendar flapped off the wall and swooped around on wings of January and December, darting and soaring and kiting as if it were a bat._______As she stared up at the whirlwind, she had the mad notion that it was staring down at her. _______The terrifying sound in the dream was caused by something considerably more disturbing than the mere banging of an unmoored shutter. Furthermore, she was sure she had heard precisely that sound on another occasion, too. Not in the nightmare. In real life. In another place . . . a long time ago . . .As she let the hot water stream over her, sluicing away the soap, she tried to recall where and when she had heard exactly that same unsettling sound, for it suddenly seemed important for her to identify it. Without understanding why, she felt vaguely threatened as long as she could not recall the source of the sound. But remembrance hung tantalizingly beyond the limits of her reach, like the title of a hauntingly familiar but unnameable piece of music._______The construction of the walls was open for inspection; the pink fiber glass insulation, which somewhat resembled raw meat, and the regularly spaced supporting studs, like ribs of bone, were visible._______The seizure of deja vu wasn't in reference to the words on the Scrabble board; not directly anyway. The thing that was so frighteningly familiar to him was the unusual, soul-shaking feeling that the coincidental appearance of those words aroused in him; the iciness that came from within rather than from without; the awful hollowness deep in his guts; the sickening sensation of teetering on a high wire, with only infinite darkness below. He had felt exactly the same way in the attic last week, when the mysterious hammering sound had seemed to issue out of the thin air in front of his face, when each thunk! has sounded as if it were coming from a sledge and anvil in another dimension of time and space._______"Refresh my memory, if you will," Grace said."What was the Bektermann case about?"He laughed good-naturedly and shook his head."Wasn't about what I thought it was about. That's for damned sure. I wrote it up as a tangled, Freudian puzzle. You know - the iron-willed father, with perhaps an unnatural attraction for his own daughter, the mother with a drinking problem, the poor girl caught in the middle. The victimized young girl subjected to hideous psychological pressures beyond her understanding, beyond her tolerance, until at last she simply - snapped. That's how I saw it. That's how I wrote it up. I thought I was a brilliant detective, digging to the deepest roots of the Bektermann tragedy. But all I ever saw was the window-dressing. The real story was far stranger than anything I ever imagined. Hell, it was too strange for any serious reporter to risk handling it. No reputable paper would have printed it as news. If I had knows the truth, and if I had somehow gotten it published, I'd have destroyed my career."What the devil's going on? Grace wondered. He seems obsessed with telling me about this in detail, compelled to tell me, even though he's never even seen me before. Is this life imitating art - Coleridge's poem reset in a rose garden? Am I the partygoer and Wainwright the Ancient Mariner?_______"You're the one who's behind all of these weird things that've been happening. Get off my property, you son of a bitch.""Grace, there are forces aligned . . . "_______She held out her hand. In reality it was not bloody, but in the mirror it was sheathed in a glove of gore.A vision, she thought. A weird illusion. That's all. I didn't hurt anyone. I didn't spill anyone's blood.As she struggled to understand what was happening, her mirror image faded, and the glass in front of her turned black. It seemed to have been transformed into a window that looked out onto another dimension, for it reflected nothing that was in the bathroom.