The Voice of the Night is the second of
Koontz's books I've read in the past couple weeks. The first was
Brother Odd, part of the "Odd Thomas" series.
The Voice of the Night has a well-developed main character, Colin, though falls into some of the traps of the "shy, skinny, brainy and bespectacled 14-year-old", including the essential overactive imagination and sci-fi addiction.
Narration is third person.
Dialogue
Koontz uses rushes of alternating dialogue without attribution:
"Is she taking good care of you?"
"Sure."
"Are you eating well?"
"Yeah."
"You're still so skinny."
"I eat real well."
"She's not much of a cook."
"She does okay."
This technique keeps a fast pace and it's clear who's talking; however, it's a tennis match which may lead to a reader skimming rather than digesting the content. It's like eavesdropping on a conversation in fast forward.
Conjunctions
Koontz, also uses the conjunction "for" in a number of instances instead of "because".
"When the telephone rang, he had to run into his mother's room to answer it, for he had no extension of his own."
The book was written in 1980 and is a modern theme. Using "for" as a conjunction gives the passage an older feel which doesn't fit with the overall language of the story.
Notable Descriptions
Describing the family of Roy, the villain:
"There was a peculiar stiffness in the way they talked among themselves, as if they were reciting lines from a script they hadn't learned very well. They were so formal. They almost seemed ... afraid of one another."
Describing the shooting of sea gulls with shotguns from the deck of the
Erica Lynn fishing boat:
"The guns fired and the gulls burst apart in the sky. Thousands of tiny droplets of blood sprayed up like beads of molten copper ..."
Cheese ...
Describing Colin's first movie date with classmate Heather:
"Sitting in the cool theater, in the velveteen shadows, in the pale, flickering light cast back by the screen, holding his girl's hand, he thought he knew what heaven must be like."
Interesting Words (a.k.a. Say what?)
rictus
rictuses, plural
Noun: A fixed grimace or grin: "Ned's smile had become a rictus of repulsion".
reconnoiter
Noun: An act of reconnoitering.
Verb: Make a military observation of (a region): "they reconnoitered the beach before the landing"; "the raiders were reconnoitering for further attacks".
References to Other Books
The narrator refers to the 1951 sci-fi novel
The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein as "great". Also, refers to John Campbell's
Who Goes There? and Theodore Sturgeon's
The Professor's Teddy Bear as "pulsing with a rich vision of evil" [paraphrased].
