Going Home in the Dark

by Dean Koontz

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened. —Thomas Hardy

Rebecca Crane’s backyard, forty steps led to the beach, where sharp-billed sandpipers

enfevered

Her mother, Sally,

Sally refused to reveal the identity of her daughter’s father, whom she hated for reasons she wouldn’t discuss.

had wonderful friends who, with her, called themselves the four amigos.

Three had fled Maple Grove after high school, but they remained in touch with one another almost two decades later.

Becky Crane from Maple Grove,

[For those readers who have never heard of a fugue state in the dull kind of fiction they usually read, please allow me to explain.

that moment will come in Chapter Six, after he is on the road to Maple Grove and

“I’m quite sure. Everyone endures salad years at the start.” “Back then—thirty thousand, forty thousand per canvas.” “Ah. Are we talking about the currency of the United States, Venezuela, Sri Lanka?” “US dollars. Recent works

“Whatever talents you might possess, Spencer, you must never pretend to others or yourself that you are to any extent whatsoever a good judge of character. You are of little importance to me, but because you are a friend of my son, I would prefer that you didn’t embarrass yourself with such a manifestly false claim.”

“I have not yet made my revelation. Now I will. My son, Ernest, has fallen into a coma, and his doctor says he will most likely die within twenty-four hours.” Spencer’s voice broke. “Ernie and I, we’ve been through so much together. We’re brothers. I love Ernie.”

And in those days, he would have been less fearful about crashing into an immense Chinese spy balloon that carried a surveillance package

Wayne Louis Hornfly.

Wanda Saurian. When Ernie was twelve and Wanda was fifteen, she murdered her parents, stole the car, and ran away with Randy Docker, her twenty-year-old psychopathic boyfriend.

Alma May Wickert had been the town’s librarian for an astonishing sixty years.

At the age of ninety-four, she perished in her sleep from what Dr. Sweeny Feld called “spontaneous mummification,” though the physician was known to imbibe to excess at times and to have a macabre sense of humor.

Curiously, the library burned down on the night of Alma May’s death. Voters eventually declined to fund a new one for pretty much the same reason that they wouldn’t fund a buggy-whip factory or an encirclement of massive catapults to protect the town from invading barbarians.

Consequently, even if Ernie had survived the year when he was thirty-five, he could not have become the town librarian when the town had no library.

This is not the place to reveal whether Ernie came out of his coma and lived; maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. These immediate pages are for the purpose of introducing the fourth of the four amigos so that readers—or their robots—will understand who all the principal characters are, thus allowing the wheels of the narrative to turn faster from this point.

We must consider how extraordinary it is that all four of these people, although social outcasts in their youth, became outstandi...

Ernie Hernishen no less than the others. He was just eighteen when he wrote his first song, “The Girl Next Door Is to Die For,” which Garth Brooks came out of retirement to record; it spent eleven weeks as the number one country song in the USA, even crossing over to rise to number two on the pop charts. That was of course quickly followed by “Mama...

If the amigos endured some torment or terror in their youth, some ordeal they had been made to forget, perhaps the stress and trauma of the experi...

acres a few miles outside town, where a hundred thousand tons of worn-out solar panels were to be buried along with undisclosed thousands of cumbersome burnt-out wind turbines. His activism had led to unannounced visits by Britta, his mother, who insisted that his priorities were foolish.

“Sustainability. Renewables. A cleaner way. What about this don’t you understand, Ernest?”

“What is it you claim not to smoke, Ernest?” “How can such a question be answered?”

“Your father passed his anger down to you.” “I never knew my father.” “He was handsome but ignorant. He thought he could tame me. When I wouldn’t leave the university and wallow in ignorance with him, he couldn’t bear to live as a shadow in my light.” “What does that mean—‘as a shadow in my light’?” “If you had furthered your education, you would understand such things. Here is your potato peeler.”

“Ernest, there’s no point speaking to God. You might as well have a conversation with a rock.” “I know the feeling,” Ernie said, returning to the potatoes. “I ask only that you keep your strange environmental views to yourself and cause me no further embarrassment in the community. By the way, it would behoove you to eat fewer potatoes and more lean protein.”

However, he could not explain his obsession with novels about characters who suffered from amnesia or eradication of memories by brainwashing. He’d read hundreds of such stories with fascination.

This edition contained the original text; Ernie refused to purchase revised editions that had been rendered into gibberish by aggressive “sensitivity readers” and published for semiliterate mobs with the hope they might read it instead of burn it either symbolically or literally.

By far the artists most sensitive to smells are sculptors; no one knows why, though this matter is the subject of hundreds of scientific studies conducted at prestigious universities.

If it had been painful, Ernie’s agony would be described here so vividly that the reader would cringe, shudder violently, and become nauseous.

Lying face up on this four-foot-wide ten-foot-long formation was his doppelgänger, in the very same clothes that he wore. This Other Ernie appeared to be sleeping.

“Listen to me, boy. Great is my frustration. Greater still is my anger. Greatest of all is my determination. I will probe your brain for answers.” The unseen speaker laughed merrily. In a pleasant voice, he said, “Just joking. There will be a little coma, but you’ll be okay. I’m pretty sure.”

Because this account of the travails of the amigos is based on a true story and isn’t a work of fiction (or is not strictly such a thing),

One strategy is to divide long chapters into two shorter ones, wherever possible, to distract the reader from the amount of character detail and to contribute to the illusion of headlong suspense. That is why the material in this chapter was moved from Chapter Three, where it appeared in the first draft.

Anyway, after having lived alone for years in his dad’s house, he began to suffer horrific dreams in which his parents came back, remarried, and turned their attention to him. He fled.

he rented an apartment and fell into a fugue state, though the second action wasn’t intentional. He woke six weeks later to discover five enormous canvases aswirl with eerie, colorful images that made him question his sanity.

Because he had no idea what he had meant to say, if he had meant to say anything at all, Spencer said, “If there were words to express my intentions, I wouldn’t have expressed them in images.”

“Everyone who views them must follow a unique path to their meaning. Imagine function first. Then you’ll know their purpose. They’re revealed to me, but they don’t come with an explanatory pamphlet.”

wouldn’t read such a pamphlet. These objects are mystical in nature.

The meaning that anyone else imposed on them would be limited by his power of interpretation.

“Some of these objects actually seem to be entities, organisms.” “Don’t they?” said Spencer. “Some might say they find them frightening or even disgusting. What would your response be to that?” Channeling Bobby the Sham, Spencer said, “That is a danger one faces when interpreting art. One can inadvertently reveal more about oneself than about the work under discussion.”

Dusterheit said, “One thing.” “What’s that?” “You talk too much.” “I can fix that.”

And so it was that Spencer Truedove became a wildly successful, critically acclaimed artist without any formal training and without any memory of having painted anything.

subconscious attempt to remember what the amigos had endured together.

the kind of tolerant and convivial town where Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy could cohabit in cross-species bliss without exciting any locals to commit a hate crime.

Having provided needed atmosphere and a sense of threat when the story required those things, the storm with its fierce display of lightning quickly passed,

However, when they opened their snacks, those with teeth filed to points and with tongues surgically split proved to be noisy eaters.