Anatomy of a good read

MR. MURDER took me where I thought I’d never go.

Dean Koontz’s novel pits a mystery writer with a successful career and happy family life against a professional assassin who is also a madman.

After I finished this book recently, I posted on Goodreads: “Wow. I had to make myself read this after a friend suggested I might find it interesting to study the way Dean Koontz alternated POVs, including the antagonist's viewpoint. Usually, I don't read psychological thrillers, because I'm a wimp and get too scared. This book captivated me with riveting story, clean prose and wonderful characterizations. It also surprised me a number of times. Excellent storytelling, and I'm so glad I got over my scaredy-catness and read it. And I have to agree that he handled POV switches masterfully and to great effect.”

I’m writing in alternating POVs in my WIP, a fractured fairy tale, switching at times to the antagonist. My villain is twisted and unpredictable, and I’m having a great time creating her, adding as much depth to her as to my protagonist.

Reading MR. MURDER now (published 18 years ago) is perfect timing for me. His antagonist is so twisted and frightening, but I grew to understand what made him tick through Koontz’s carefully-built character arc. This was the best part of reading this book for me as I study how Koontz made the story more chilling by letting us walk in the killer’s shoes and see through his eyes.

We learn just enough in the first scenes to be scared of this man who carries fake identification, a pistol with a silencer and admits to having holes in his memory. He dispassionately sizes up women he might have sex with and then kill, as long as he draws no attention to himself or messes up his scheduled assassinations. Everything he does is planned, calculated, and apparently orchestrated by some handler he can’t remember. He doesn’t know his real name or family.

He feels empty, as Koontz writes, “He feels as if he is a hollow man, made of the thinnest glass, fragile, only slightly more substantial than a ghost.”

All this before the reader is 30 pages in. Then the killer goes renegade, pulled by some destiny to find a life. “I need to be someone,” he says.

Because I don’t like to give spoilers, that’s all I’m going to say about a story that gallops headlong into terrifying territory. I strongly suggest reading the book if you haven’t and are interested in writing a great antagonist.

As for overall viewpoint, I’m one of those readers who must have clean POV changes or I’m booted out of story. I like the viewpoint switches to occur by chapter or by scenes separated by breaks and with action anchoring the reader in the new character’s perspective. There are very few authors skillful enough to do it within scenes, Neil Gaiman being one of them.

Koontz used multiple POVs in MR. MURDER. He did it with scene breaks, and the opening lines of each scene made it clear which person was thinking. I never questioned where I was or why I was there. That’s another key issue—the reason to switch heads is to convey information or perspective that can’t be gotten another way and is important to the story arc. It should add depth, not just words.

Dissecting Koontz’s viewpoint changes, the opening lines if each break include the following (this is not verbatim, just partial lines)
1(protagonist)—Martin Stillwater suddenly realized he was repeating the same two words in a dreamy whisper. . . “I need. . . I need. . .I need. . .”
2(antagonist)—The killer’s flight from Boston arrives on time. . .At the rental agency counter he discovers that his reservation has not been misplaced or misrecorded, as often happens. . .Everything seems to be going his way.
3(protagonist’s child)—Daddy wasn’t Daddy.
4(antagonist)—Like a shark cruising cold currents in a night sea, the killer drives. This is his first time in Kansas City, but he knows the streets.
5(protagonist)—While the girls were upstairs, brushing their teeth and preparing for bed, Marty methodically went from room to room on the first floor, making sure all the doors and windows were locked.

This book is too wickedly good to give away the plot, so I don’t want to go into who the killer really is or what happens to the family. But here is a snippet I loved as a writer:

He said, “You and I were passing the time with novels, so were some other people, not just to escape but because. . .because, at its best, fiction is medicine.”
“Medicine?”
“Life is so damned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn’t seem any point to so much of what we go through. Sometimes it seems the world’s a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story is over, it meant something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had to say was simple, even naïve, but there is meaning. And that gives us hope, it’s a medicine.”

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I hope this is useful to other writers, or readers. I was fascinated.

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I may or may not have Internet access this coming week, so if I don't respond to comments, that's why. Have a great week, everyone.