Dean R. Koontz - Night Chills

[franklinmarsh]

Dean R Koontz – Night Chills (1976) Headline Reprint in (ptui!) 1990s hardback

Now this is an odd one. Starting with two fellows donning waders and scuba –like tanks and walking into a reservoir to spray the water with some mysterious liquid. They exit, drive off and go their separate ways, one to slash his wrist in a motel bathtub, the other to smash his landrover through a brick wall at high speed. That’s the intro, the book proper jumps all over the show, whizzing backward and forward in time, but concentrating on two basic stories – a maddish boffin who’s developed an infallible method of mind control using a mystery substance and subliminal messages concealed in films, TV broadcasts, magazines etc. His initial research was funded by the US government but he’s managed to find another backer in a religious billionaire, and there’s military type in the background as muscle. The other strand concerns a widower and his two small children who have an annual holiday in a remote backwoods community near a sawmill, which has a large reservoir nearby that also provides the communities’ drinking water. They always stop off at the local store where storekeeper and Santa lookalike Sam tells them that there’s been a strange outbreak of night chills amongst the local populace – it only lasted a day or so, and although it didn’t affect Sam himself or his daughter Jenny (who widower has eyes on) most folks seem over it now.
Maddish boffin is also in town, staying at a local guest house and posing as a travelling researcher, to see if he can bend the townsfolk to his will. He gets a waitress at a diner to ram a large fork through her hand via his mind control techniques, and is practically drooling at the thought of a whole town (especially the attractive women) at the mercy of his key-word influence and perverse desires.
He tries out a sub-pornographic fantasy with one personable young lady, and is about to enact another with the police chief’s wife (in front of the police chief and his goggle-eyed son – all under the ‘fluence) when disaster strikes in the form of the widower’s young son arriving to show the other lad his newly-tamed squirrel. The horrified youngster launches himself at the boffin, who, en flagrante, orders the police chief to kill the boy; this latter crime being witnessed by the widower’s daughter Rya who was following her brother.
Rya legs it back to the general store and tearfully blurts out her tale of seeing her young brother having his head repeatedly smashed against the police chief’s cooker to a shocked father, Sam and Jenny. Torn between what seems wildly unlikely and not believing his own daughter, widower leads a delegation to the police chief’s gaff, only to find the wife sitting in a pristine kitchen, nothing out of the ordinary…apart from the fact that her eyes seemed a little puffy, as though she’d been crying.
The boffin is now on a damage limitation exercise, which may involve more killing… Sam and the widower return to the police chief’s house when the wife has gone out to search for the son (there’s a freezer in the basement), there’s storms a-plenty, and Sam has a feeling that he’s seen the boffin somewhere before.