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A review by buildhergender
Ashley Bell by Dean Koontz
4.0
Ashley Bell by Dean Koontz
I am going to be doing Dean Koontz reviews differently than my normal reviews.
Personal feeling to the story: I was really surprised by this book. I thought I got where it was going and half way through there was a plot twist that came out of left field that threw me. It was such a twist that I for a few moments thought I had missed a chapter or two and initially I thought it was a cheap cop out. However, it was integrated into the story well and in the end elevated the novel story wise. I do have a big gripe. During the book the protagonist, a white woman, is trying to stay hidden in public and wishes that she had a burqa to wear. The line in the book reads “No one profiles or bothers a woman in a burqa” This was written in 2015, how in the world can you be so ignorant of a person to live in America and write that line without irony??!!! You have to be white as untoasted bread to do that.
From beginning to now Dean Koontz has been slowly moving from horror to life affirming, so I think his books should be gauged on a horror to life affirming measure.
With 1 being as horror filled as Ann Coulter showing up as your blind date and 10 being as life affirming filled as an alternate Titanic movie where the Rose allows Jack to share the door.
This was about a 6 on the meter. There is a bit of violence and some creep in the book, including something creeping through the room in the middle of the night going after a 10 year old girl, but the book mostly feels like a tribute to the imagination of humanity and our relationships with each other.
Weirdness/wacky content. A book written as straight with not at least a little bit of weirdness in them would not be a Dean Koontz book. This book does have his signature weirdness including:
Parents who are surfers and whose every other sentence has surf lingo in it.
An eight fingered waitress who beats people up if they ask what happened to the other fingers
A best friend named Pogo
A cartoon gingerbread cookie man coming to life and made out of rotting organic material
Corporate Nazis
Scrabblemancy
500 word or less synopsis.
Bibi has, besides being saddled with that terrible name, had a decent life, and is making waves as a newly published writer. However, her life takes a turn for the worse when she is diagnosed with brain cancer that will kill her within a year. She tells the doctor we’ll see about that. That night a mysterious man and a golden retriever visits her and she wakes up the next morning cured. After arriving home she finds that her parents have hired a woman who will talk to the spirits and determine why Bibi was spared. Using scrabble tiles, a silver bowl and blood, the psychic determines that Bibi needs to save a girl named Ashley Bell, oh and then tells Bibi that she needs to leave her apartment as the bad people are now coming for her. Over the next 48 hours Bibi struggles to find out who Ashley Bell is and how to save her while confronting a rapidly elevating level of conspiracy centered around bringing back the Third Reich. She believes it is all centered around something that happened to her when she was 10, something she can no longer remember because her grandfather, a former psyops warrior, taught her how to forget things permanently. It is here that the book drops a big surprise. Everything after the admission into the hospital has been a dream and Bibi is in a coma that can’t be explained by the doctors. Weirder bruises and injuries that she sustains in the coma dream are showing up on her body in the real world. Her fiance along with her best friend Pogo go off to investigate what could be happening and come upon a locked box in her closet. They learn that at 10 years old bibi realized that she had the ability to make what she imagined real. Her first attempt at it resulted in a minkin of a gingerbread man that would be worthy of inclusion in a Lovecraft story. Her grandfather in order to help her, taught her how to forget that she had this power. A trick she used throughout her life in order to suppress knowledge of this ability. However, with the brain cancer happening her subconscious has put her on a quest to remember her ability so that she can heal herself. In the dream world she finds Ashley Bell and defeats the want to be Nazi, which results with her waking up in the real world cancer free. She then resolves to remember the power but to use it sparingly as it could have devastating consequences. In the epilogue we see one of the consequences in the epiloge as the Nazi from her dream has crossed into the real world. Thankfully the name he chooses, based in part on Bibi’s self conscious is one that will eventually bring him to Bib’s attention and once he realizes this he waits in terror for her Seal assassin husband to show up.
Golden Retriever Watch:
2 different golden retrievers show up in this book, however one of them is a coma dream dog.
I am going to be doing Dean Koontz reviews differently than my normal reviews.
Personal feeling to the story: I was really surprised by this book. I thought I got where it was going and half way through there was a plot twist that came out of left field that threw me. It was such a twist that I for a few moments thought I had missed a chapter or two and initially I thought it was a cheap cop out. However, it was integrated into the story well and in the end elevated the novel story wise. I do have a big gripe. During the book the protagonist, a white woman, is trying to stay hidden in public and wishes that she had a burqa to wear. The line in the book reads “No one profiles or bothers a woman in a burqa” This was written in 2015, how in the world can you be so ignorant of a person to live in America and write that line without irony??!!! You have to be white as untoasted bread to do that.
From beginning to now Dean Koontz has been slowly moving from horror to life affirming, so I think his books should be gauged on a horror to life affirming measure.
With 1 being as horror filled as Ann Coulter showing up as your blind date and 10 being as life affirming filled as an alternate Titanic movie where the Rose allows Jack to share the door.
This was about a 6 on the meter. There is a bit of violence and some creep in the book, including something creeping through the room in the middle of the night going after a 10 year old girl, but the book mostly feels like a tribute to the imagination of humanity and our relationships with each other.
Weirdness/wacky content. A book written as straight with not at least a little bit of weirdness in them would not be a Dean Koontz book. This book does have his signature weirdness including:
Parents who are surfers and whose every other sentence has surf lingo in it.
An eight fingered waitress who beats people up if they ask what happened to the other fingers
A best friend named Pogo
A cartoon gingerbread cookie man coming to life and made out of rotting organic material
Corporate Nazis
Scrabblemancy
500 word or less synopsis.
Bibi has, besides being saddled with that terrible name, had a decent life, and is making waves as a newly published writer. However, her life takes a turn for the worse when she is diagnosed with brain cancer that will kill her within a year. She tells the doctor we’ll see about that. That night a mysterious man and a golden retriever visits her and she wakes up the next morning cured. After arriving home she finds that her parents have hired a woman who will talk to the spirits and determine why Bibi was spared. Using scrabble tiles, a silver bowl and blood, the psychic determines that Bibi needs to save a girl named Ashley Bell, oh and then tells Bibi that she needs to leave her apartment as the bad people are now coming for her. Over the next 48 hours Bibi struggles to find out who Ashley Bell is and how to save her while confronting a rapidly elevating level of conspiracy centered around bringing back the Third Reich. She believes it is all centered around something that happened to her when she was 10, something she can no longer remember because her grandfather, a former psyops warrior, taught her how to forget things permanently. It is here that the book drops a big surprise. Everything after the admission into the hospital has been a dream and Bibi is in a coma that can’t be explained by the doctors. Weirder bruises and injuries that she sustains in the coma dream are showing up on her body in the real world. Her fiance along with her best friend Pogo go off to investigate what could be happening and come upon a locked box in her closet. They learn that at 10 years old bibi realized that she had the ability to make what she imagined real. Her first attempt at it resulted in a minkin of a gingerbread man that would be worthy of inclusion in a Lovecraft story. Her grandfather in order to help her, taught her how to forget that she had this power. A trick she used throughout her life in order to suppress knowledge of this ability. However, with the brain cancer happening her subconscious has put her on a quest to remember her ability so that she can heal herself. In the dream world she finds Ashley Bell and defeats the want to be Nazi, which results with her waking up in the real world cancer free. She then resolves to remember the power but to use it sparingly as it could have devastating consequences. In the epilogue we see one of the consequences in the epiloge as the Nazi from her dream has crossed into the real world. Thankfully the name he chooses, based in part on Bibi’s self conscious is one that will eventually bring him to Bib’s attention and once he realizes this he waits in terror for her Seal assassin husband to show up.
Golden Retriever Watch:
2 different golden retrievers show up in this book, however one of them is a coma dream dog.