Martie is an ordinary woman with an ordinary life until one morning she develops a terrifying phobia: autophobia, fear of oneself. As Martie's condition worsens, her husband Dusty is determined to learn what triggered her illness and so encounters Dr Mark Ahriman, a leading psychiatrist, who runs a local support group for sufferers. Dusty's suspicion is aroused when he discovers that two of Mark's patients have recently committed suicide. It becomes apparent to Dusty that Mark, although a doctor, is not a healer. As Dusty comes ever closer to the truth, he too is struck by a debilitating psychological disorder even more unusual and frightening than that afflicting Martie...
Not a continuation of the
Moonlight Bay series (
Seize the Night and
Fear Nothing) as many fans were expecting,
False Memory is nonetheless just as powerful and compulsive as anything Koontz has written before.
Martie Rhodes is a successful young computer games designer with a loving husband, Dusty, and a seemingly normal life. Her best friend, Susan, however, suffers from agoraphobia, or a fear of open spaces, and relies on Martie to take her to weekly therapy sessions. Suddenly and inexplicably, Martie herself begins exhibiting worrying signs of a mental disorder, fearing herself capable of inflicting great harm on her loved ones. At the same time, Dusty's brother Skeet also succumbs to irrational mental behavior and tries to throw himself from a roof. It soon becomes clear that these four characters are involved in something much more than a sinister coincidence.
Koontz's great skill, as he demonstrates so well in this novel, is creating believable characters and thrusting them into seemingly impossible but--for the period of the story--completely plausible situations. The plot is as carefully layered as the most intricate orchestral compositions, and Koontz conducts the proceedings with almost unbearable tension. One of his greatest abilities as a writer, however, is tapping into the dark paranoia of society. As we approach the Millennium, and an age in which we are becoming increasingly desensitized to death and violence, Martie's fear of herself, known as autophobia, seems a terrifying warning that soon the only thing we will have left to fear is ourselves.
Deeper meanings aside, this is easily one of his best thrillers. The prose moves at a breakneck speed, and the denouement will leave you with a pounding heart and chills up and down your spine. Koontz delivers exciting, boundary-breaking fiction better than anyone else in the game, and False Memory (though at times shocking and disturbing) is a perfect example of a master author in top form. --Jonathan Weir, Amazon.co.uk
