A New Author

Today I am embarking on a long foretold journey.  I have known that this day would come since high school and here it is.  Today I opened and began to read a novel by Dean Koontz.

In high school my best friend and I often read books by the same authors.  However, she soon branched off and took to reading Dean Koontz's books.  Gobbling them up just as I did other authors, all the while telling me what I was missing out on.  In this way, I learned that I would one day follow in her footsteps and fall prey to the prolific writer.

When my sister in law moved in with my husband and I for a year, she and I discussed and read many novels.  We would set out to read some of the same books in tandem, all the better for discussion of course.  Inevitably we went back to our own comfort zones, reading the respective series we each coveted along with the authors that dream them up.  For my sister in law that man was the one and only, Mr. Koontz.  During this period, after hearing about his greatness from my best high school friend years ago, and then my husband and sister in law extolling his virtuosity as a writer, I did read one novel pressed upon me.  The novel was Intensity, and I loved it.  I read through it madly held in suspense and awe as only mastermind authors can accomplish with such force.  However, it just wasn't the right time.  There is no other way to explain it.  I had plenty on my reading list, tons on my to do list, and work and school to contend with as well.  There simply was no room in my life for a new author with an extensive body of work.  Possibly if there were only two books or maybe a trilogy, Dean Koontz and I could have tangoed, that simply was not the case.

Here we are almost 15 years after those initial promptings by my great friend, and about 7 years after my first rendezvous with the novel Intensity.  Today I opened and read the first two chapters of Strangers, by Dean Koontz.  As I always knew deep down, because millions of fans (two of them dear) cannot be wrong, I am being swept away.  Most likely these two chapters will lead to months of reading; checking books out from the library, borrowing from my sister in law, downloading on the kindle.  I will likely be in a fugue state.  Unable to account for where the hours have gone, which novels I have finished and how many are left, where will the next book come from and which will it be are all questions to which I'll have no answers.  Then, unlike most fugue victims, everything that was read and happened in the time lost will resonate in my mind.  There will be clarity and I will understand what two dear people have been telling me all along.

So I embark.  I am on a journey, a familiar and happy one, yet one where the landscape and all the signposts are totally new.  I am approaching a new author and the characters and realms that he has put to print, of this I know.  Where it will take me and what I will see, hear, smell, think, emote, ponder upon; of this I know not.  That is the glorious reward of being an avid reader.