Just Finished Reading The House of Thunder by Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz is one of the most prolific novelists around. He began his career before fellow "K" writer (and bookshelf buddy) Stephen King and has consistently churned out his product to this day.  Earlier his career, Koontz wrote some of his books under pseudonyms, also like Mr. King (who occasionally wrote under the name Richard Bachmann)  Nowadays all of the pen names that Koontz used in his earlier books have been abandoned and his works are now uniformly published under his real name.  Leigh Nichols was one of the pseudonyms he used, and happens to be the name originally adorning his 1982 novel The House of Thunder.

The protagonist in The House of Thunder is a young woman, Sue Thorton, who finds herself incapacitated in an Oregonian small town hospital following a coma-inducing car accident.  She recovers most of her memory that she lost, including the fact that she is a physicist working at a California company.  Also remembered is that fact that thirteen years earlier when she was in college she witnessed the murder of her boyfriend by four members of the fraternity he was trying to join (and for which he was undergoing what he thought was traditional hazing).  The killing took place in a cavern known popularly as the "house of thunder".  Sue was also targeted for killing but escaped.  But now she keeps seeing the killers around the hospital thirteen years later, none of them appearing to have aged a day...although she remembers that at least two of them had already died years before.  She tries to convince nurses and doctors of her fears, but they refuse to believe her, attributing her concerns to lingering symptoms caused by the car accident.

This mystery of her old tormenters resurfacing like this (and renewing their pursuit of her) is the main driving force of The House of Thunder.  It is at this point that I withdraw from further commentary on the plot as I don't want to give away the ending.  But I will say this much (hopefully, it's not TOO much)...

The House of Thunder reminds me of sixties television series like Twilight Zone and The Prisoner, in which the protagonist is placed in a controlled environment and is deceived by others as to the nature of reality that he or she is experiencing.  In particular, I'm thinking about that one episode of The Prisoner, titled Living in Harmony, that has the kidnapped secret agent Number 6 (played by the late Patrick McGoohan) as a reluctant gunslinger in the old Wild West.  I don't know whether Koontz drew upon this when he envisioned his own story...or maybe he referenced his memory of the many Twilight Zone episodes that involve false realities (such as that classic episode Stopover in a Quiet Town in which a hung over couple wakes up in a strange abandoned town).  In spite of this old literary/television ploy, I still enjoyed the book's ending, in which Sue's perception of what is real get turned on its head...

The House of Thunder, like the typical Dean Koontz novel, isn't a very long read.  I think that's part of his appeal to his readers.  I for one find reading excessively long books...well, excessive.  Koontz has the ability to pack his story into a shorter space...good for him and good for me as well!

One final note: when Koontz had House of Thunder published in 1982, the United States and the Soviet Union had resumed their Cold War and it looked like peace was a remote prospect.  It is interesting for me to read this novel with this historical context in mind, and how Koontz was obviously playing up to the popular sentiment of that time...