Intensity - Hardcover

Koontz, Dean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067942525X ISBN 13: 9780679425250

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

Chyna Shepherd is a twenty-six-year-old woman whose deeply troubled childhood taught her the hard rules of survival, and whose adult life has been an unrelenting struggle for self-respect and safety. Now rare trust has blossomed for Chyna into friendship with the woman whose family home she is visiting for the weekend: a farm in the Napa Valley surrounded by vineyards and hills, which Chyna can see from the guest-room window where she sits at one o'clock in the morning, fully dressed, unable to sleep. Suspicions she learned in childhood still make her uneasy in unfamiliar houses--even this one, where her closest friend is sound asleep down the hall. And in this case her most disturbing instincts prove reliable. A man has entered the house, a man who lives for one purpose: to satisfy all appetites as they arise, to immerse himself in sensation, to live without fear, remorse, or limits--to live with intensity.

His name is Edgler Foreman Vess. He likes to make words with the letters from his name--GOD, DEMON, SAVE, RAGE, ANGER, FEAR, FOREVER, are just a few of them--and then makes sentences with the words. One of his favorites, GOD FEARS ME, is sometimes the last thing he whispers to his victims. Edgler Vess is a self-proclaimed "homicidal adventurer": On this night, his adventure--murdering everyone in the house--becomes Chyna's long nightmare.

Trapped in Vess's deadly orbit, Chyna thinks only of getting out alive. But when she inadvertently learns the identity of Vess's intended next victim, waiting for him far from Napa Valley, Chyna is gripped with concern for this other person, who is as innocent as Chyna, and as endangered. Driven now by a sense of responsibility for another, by a purpose and meaning beyond mere self-preservation, Chyna rises to unexpected heights of courage and daring--her only hope as the threat of Edgler Foreman Vess closes in and grows more horrifying moment by moment.

Intensity unfolds over the course of just twenty-four hours, but within that brief time frame, Dean Koontz gives us what is perhaps his most inventive, emotionally intricate, and terrifyingly suspenseful novel yet.

About this title

About the Author

Dean Koontz was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He graduated from Shippensburg State College (now Shippensberg University) and won an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition while still a senior. Dean landed his first job after graduation with the Appalachian Poverty Program, where his assignment was to counsel and tutor underprivileged children on a one-to-one basis. On the first day of work, he discovered that his predecessor had been beaten up by the very children he had been trying to help and had landed in the hospital for several weeks.

The following year was filled with challenges, but Koontz never gave up on his desire to be a writer. He wrote at night and during weekends, a practice he continued after leaving the poverty program and becoming an English teacher in a suburban school district outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

After Dean had taught for a year and a half in Harrisburg, his wife, Gerda, made him an offer he couldn't refuse: "I'll support you for five years," she said, "and if you can't make it as a writer in that time, you'll never make it." By the end of the five years, Gerda had quit her job to manage the financial side of her husband's writing career.

Dean Koontz's books are published in 38 languages. Worldwide sales total more than 175 million copies, and that figure currently increases at a rate of more than 17 million copies a year. Six of his novels have risen to number one on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list (Lightning, Midnight, Cold Fire, Hideaway, Dragon Tears, and Intensity), and he has had eleven books at the number one position in paperback. His books have also been number one bestsellers in countries as diverse as Japan and Sweden.

The New York Times has called his writing "psychologically complex, masterly and satisfying." The New Orleans Times-Picayune said Koontz is, "at times lyrical without ever being naive or romantic. [He creates] a grotesque world, much like that of Flannery O'Conner or Walker Percy. . . scary, worthwhile reading." Of Cold Fire, a worldwide bestseller, the United Press International said, "An extraordinary piece of fiction. It will be a classic."

Dean has written the screenplay for the film adaptation of his novel Midnight, and he wrote and served as executive producer on The Face of Fear for Warner Brothers-CBS Television. Phantoms, based on the author's screenplay and starring Peter O'Toole and Joanna Going, is in production at Miramax. Intensity has been filmed by Peter Guber's Mandalay Entertainment as a miniseries for the Fox Network and is scheduled to air in the spring of 1997. Mandalay and Fox will team up again to develop Dean's latest work of fiction, Sole Survivor.

Dean and Gerda Koontz live in southern California.

Reviews

Koontz's career has mirrored Stephen King's to a remarkable degree?the early pseudonymous novels, the bloated blockbusters, the increased use of horror as social commentary?albeit at a lag. Keeping step, this uncommonly sleek work is nothing less than Koontz's Gerald's Game: a distillation of what's come before and a slick play to regain the top by a writer whose popularity seemed to have peaked. Koontz even makes the centerpiece of Chyna Shepherd's battle against a serial killer her attempt to free herself from the restraints that bind her to a piece of furniture?the very same challenge faced by King's heroine. And just as Gerald's Game reinvigorated King's career and writing, this masterful, if ultimately predictable, exercise in high tension should do the same for Koontz's. This is basically a two-character novel, and both principals are compelling: the spirited Chyna, a youngish psychology student, and her nemesis, homicidal maniac Edgler Vess, who revels in sensation, be it pain or pleasure?in the intensity of experience. The two link when Vess kills Chyna's best friend as Chyna hides under a bed. Chyna pursues Vess but is eventually captured by him, after which she must combat not only those cuffs but also Vess's killer dogs, Vess himself and, of course, her own terror. For once, Koontz tamps down on his usual libertarian soapboxing to let the story race?which it does fast enough to give readers whiplash as they hold on to what may end up being the most viscerally exciting thriller of the year. 600,000 first printing; Literary Guild main selection.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Chyna Shepherd, at 26, is very much alone in the world. Growing up with a hippie mother, Chyna's bleak childhood was filled with fear and confusion. While visiting the home of her best and only friend Laura, Chyna miraculously survives the brutal and senseless murders of Laura and her entire family. Chyna's nightmare continues when she accidently gets trapped in the killer's mobile home. Although the homicidal Vess functions normally in the everyday world, he is abhorrent and terrifying in the extreme. When Chyna discovers that Vess's next victim is an adolescent girl, she tries to stop him. No longer helpless, Chyna matches wits with the brilliant Vess in a contest for her life and her sanity. Koontz's masterly pen once again builds the suspense to almost unbearable levels and readers will scarcely believe that the story takes place over a 36-hour period. Highly recommended.
-?Maria A. Perez-Stable, Western Michigan Univ. Libs., Kalamazoo
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Leopards can change their spots. Witness Dean Koontz. Long a reliable best-seller, he also was always a less than accomplished wordsmith. His thrillers, grabby though they were, were loaded with flat prose, flatter characters, and the flattest ideas--the book equivalents of movies starring such second-string Slys and Arnolds as Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal. Then he switched publishers and out have come Dark Rivers of the Heart (1994) and now this pulse pounder about a homey weekend gone 'way bad. Chyna Shepherd--child of a gorgeous slut who, on account of her taste for sociopaths as boyfriends, exposed the girl to plenty of mayhem until she fled Mom at age 16--goes for a pleasant Napa Valley weekend visiting the vintner parents of her best college friend, only to become the covert witness to the family's murder at the hands of thrill-addicted serial (and mass) murderer Edgler Foreman Vess. Hardened by her childhood against even this loathsome violence, Chyna determines to keep on the killer's trail until she can bring him to justice or exact it herself. Although it cops from Harris' Silence of the Lambs, Strieber's Billy, and Thompson's Killer inside Me, Intensity is tightly written and free of cliches, thus a real advance over virtually everything else, including the politically engaged Dark Rivers, that Koontz has written. Maybe that's what good editing has done. Ray Olson

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chyna Shepherd could not sleep comfortably in strange houses. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, her mother had dragged her from one end of the country to the other, staying nowhere longer than a month or two. So many terrible things had happened to them in so many places that Chyna eventually learned to view each new house not as a new beginning, not with hope for stability and happiness, but with suspicion and quiet dread.

Now she was long rid of her troubled mother and free to stay only where she wished. These days, her life was almost as stable as that of a cloistered nun, as meticulously planned as any bomb squad's procedures for disarming an explosive device, and without any of the turmoil on which her mother had thrived.

Nevertheless, this first night at the Templetons' house, Chyna was reluctant to undress and go to bed. She sat in the darkness in a medallion-back armchair at one of the two windows in the guest room, gazing out at the moonlit vineyards, fields, and hills of the Napa Valley.

Laura was in another room, at the far end of the second-floor hall, no doubt sound asleep, at peace because this house was not at all strange to her.
From the guest-room window, the early-spring vineyards were barely visible. Vague geometric patterns.

Beyond the cultivated rows were gentle hills mantled in long dry grass, silver in the moonlight. An inconstant breeze stirred through the valley, and sometimes the wild grass seemed to roll like ocean waves across the slopes, softly aglimmer with lambent lunar light.

Above the hills was the Coast Range, and above those peaks were cascades of stars and a full white moon. Storm clouds coming across the mountains from the northwest would soon darken the night, turning the silver hills first to pewter and then to blackest iron.

When she heard the first scream, Chyna was gazing at the stars, drawn by their cold light as she had been since childhood, fascinated by the thought of distant worlds that might be barren and clean, free of pestilence. At first the muffled cry seemed to be only a memory, a fragment of a shrill argument from another strange house in the past, echoing across time. Often, as a child, eager to hide from her mother and her mother's friends when they were drunk or high, she climbed onto porch roofs or into backyard trees, slipped through windows onto fire escapes, away to secret places far from the fray, where she could study the stars and where voices raised in argument or sexual excitement or shrill drug-induced giddiness came to her as though from out of a radio, from faraway places and people who had no connection whatsoever with her life.

The second cry, although brief and only slightly louder than the first, was indisputably of the moment, not a memory, and Chyna sat forward in her chair. Tense. Head cocked. Listening.

She wanted to believe that the voice had come from outside, so she continued to stare into the night, surveying the vineyards and the hills beyond. Breeze-driven waves swelled through the dry grass on the moon-washed slopes: a water mirage like the ghost tides of an ancient sea.

From elsewhere in the house came a soft thump, as though a heavy object had fallen to a carpeted floor.

Chyna immediately rose from the chair and stood utterly still, expectant.

Trouble often followed voices raised in one kind of passion or another. Sometimes, however, the worst offenses were proceeded by calculated silences and stealth.

She had difficulty reconciling the idea of domestic violence with Paul and Sarah Templeton, who had seemed as kind and loving toward each other as toward their daughter. Nevertheless, appearances and realities were seldom the same, and the human talent for deception was far greater than that of the chameleon, the mockingbird, or the praying mantis, which masked its ferocious cannibalism with a serene and devout posture.

Following the stifled cries and the soft thump, silence sifted down like a snowfall. The hush was eerily deep, as unnatural as that in which the deaf lived. This was the stillness before the pounce, the quietude of the coiled snake.

In another part of the house, someone was standing as motionless as she herself was standing, as alert as she was, intently listening. Someone dangerous. She could sense the predatory presence, a subtle new pressure in the air, not dissimilar to that preceding a violent thunderstorm.

On one level, six years of psychology classes caused her to question her immediate fearful interpretation of those night sounds, which conceivably could be insignificant, after all. Any well-trained psycho-analyst would have a wealth of labels to pin on someone who leaped first to a negative conclusion, who lived in expectation of sudden violence.

But she had to trust her instinct. It had been honed by many years of hard experience.

Intuitively certain that safety lay in movement, she stepped quietly away from the chair at the window, toward the hall door. In spite of the moonglow, her eyes had adjusted to darkness during the two hours that she had sat in the lightless room, and now she eased through the gloom with no fear of blundering into furniture.

She was only halfway to the door when she heard approaching footsteps in the second-floor hall. The heavy, urgent tread was alien to this house.

Unhampered by the interminable second-guessing that accompanied an education in psychology, reverting to the intuition and defenses of childhood, Chyna quickly retreated to the bed. She dropped to her knees.

Farther along the hall, the footsteps stopped. A door opened.

She was aware of the absurdity of attributing rage to the mere opening of a door. The rattle of the knob being turned, the rasp of the unsecured latch, the spike-sharp squeak of an unoiled hinge--they were only sounds, neither meek nor furious, guilty nor innocent, and could have been made as easily by a priest as by a burglar. Yet she knew that rage was at work in the night.

Flat on her stomach, she wriggled under the bed, feet toward the headboard. It was a graceful piece of furniture with sturdy gable legs, and fortunately it didn't sit as close to the floor as did most beds. One inch less of clearance would have prevented her from hiding under it.

Footsteps sounded in the hall again.

Another door opened. The guest-room door. Directly opposite the foot of the bed.

Someone switched on the lights.

Chyna lay with her head turned to one side, her right ear pressed to the carpet. Staring out from under the footboard, she could see a man's black boots and the legs of his blue jeans below mid-calf.

He stood just inside the threshold, evidently surveying the room. He would see a bed still neatly made at one o'clock in the morning, with four decorative needlepoint pillows arranged against the headboard.

She had left nothing on the nightstands. No clothes tossed on chairs. The paperback novel that she had brought with her for bedtime reading was in a bureau drawer.

She preferred spaces that were clean and uncluttered to the point of monastic sterility. Her preference might now save her life.

Again a faint doubt, the acquired propensity for self-analysis that plagued all psychology students, flickered through her. If the man in the doorway was someone with a right to be in the house--Paul Templeton or Laura's brother, Jack, who lived with his wife in the vineyard manager's bungalow elsewhere on the property--and if some crisis was unfolding that explained why he would burst into her room without knocking, she was going to appear to be a prime fool, if not a hysteric, when she crawled out from under the bed.

Then, directly in front of the black boots, a fat red droplet--another, then a third--fell to the wheat-gold carpet. Plop-plop-plop. Blood. The first two soaked into the thick nylon pile. The third held its surface tension, shimmering like a ruby.

Chyna knew the blood wasn't that of the intruder. She tried not to think about the sharp instrument from which it might have fallen.

He moved off to her right, deeper into the room, and she rolled her eyes to follow him. The bed had carved side rails into which the spread was tightly tucked. No overhanging fabric obstructed her view of his boots.

Obversely, without a spread draped to the floor, the space under the bed was more visible to him. From certain angles, he might even be able to look down and see a swatch of her blue jeans, the toe of one of her Rockports, the cranberry-red sleeve of her cotton sweater where it stretched over her bent elbow.

She was thankful that the bed was queen-size, offering more cover than a single or double.

If he was breathing hard, either with excitement or with the rage that she had sensed in his approach, Chyna couldn't hear him. With one ear pressed tightly to the plush carpet, she was half deaf. Wood slats and box springs weighed on her back, and her chest barely had room to expand to accommodate her own shallow, cautious, open-mouth inhalations. The hammering of her compressed heart against her breastbone echoed tympanically within her, and it seemed to fill the claustrophobic confines of her hiding place to such an extent that the intruder was certain to hear.

He went to the bathroom, pushed open the door, and flicked on the lights.

She had put away all her toiletries in the medicine cabinet. Even her toothbrush. Nothing lay out that might alert him to her presence.

But was the sink dry?

On retiring to her room at eleven o'clock, she had used the toilet and then had washed her hands. That was two hours ago. Any residual water in the bowl surely would have drained away or evaporated.

Lemon-scented liquid soap was provided in a pump dispenser at the sink. Fortunately, there was no damp bar of soap to betray her.

She worried about the hand towel. She doubted that it could still be damp two hours after the little use she had made of it. Nonetheless, in spite of a propensity for n...

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067942525X
• ISBN 13: 9780679425250
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 307