The Forbidden Door (Jane Hawk, #4)

by Dean Koontz

“Sir, with all due respect, if you’ve just got to be in Killeen inside an hour, may I suggest you best stick a propeller in your ass and fart your way there.”

He pictured the sadness as a gray brick of lead weighing on his heart. He pictured putting it into a FedEx box and addressing it to someone who really needed to be weighed down by sadness, like some terrorist bomber who killed people. He pictured the FedEx truck driving away, dwindling into the distance…gone from sight.

Carter Jergen winces at the memory of the gross slabs of meat and cheese Dubose consumed. In time, that festival of flesh is going to inspire a butt-horn serenade, and Jergen lacks a gas mask.

sometimes bad people had an advantage over good guys just because they were good.

The population of Beaumont is approximately 120,000, so if the locals want to be part of the Great Orwellian future, they better get busy having babies.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. Judging by the cover, it’s a work of nonfiction set in Nazi Germany.

“It’s brilliant, actually. A chilling depiction of an entire society descending from normalcy into almost universal madness in just a year or so. I feel a disturbing parallel to our own times and that long-ago Nazi ascendancy.”

“They were precisely what you say—a cabal of clowns, foolish misfits and geeks and thugs, pretenders to philosophical depth, ignorant know-nothings who fancied themselves intellectuals.”

“Yes, how? Look at them. Goering had a soft baby face. Horst Wessel was a chinless wonder. Had he been an actor, Martin Bormann would’ve been typecast as a gangster. Himmler, a sexless nebbish. Hess really looked like a Neanderthal! But they understood the power of symbols—swastika, Nazi flag—the power of rituals and costumes. Those Nazi uniforms, the SS especially. Hitler in trench coats and battle jackets! A bunch of dishrags made glamorous with costumes. They were pretenders, actors, assigning to themselves leadership roles and giving stellar performances…for a while.

Beware actors who can become anyone they wish to be; they are in fact no one at all, cold and empty, though they can be pied pipers to the masses.”

“Passion!” the professor declares. “They had more passion than those who resisted them. A passion to rule, to tear down society and remake it more to their liking, a passion to silence all dissent and to make a world in which they wouldn’t have to hear an opinion at variance with their own. The passion for destruction always has more appeal to more people than does the passion to preserve and build. It’s an ugly truth of human nature. Passion, sir. The kind of raw passion that breeds ruthlessness.”

“They so believed in the rightness of their cause that they could kill without compunction. If you can kill without remorse, then you can slaughter your way to absolute power.”

“If you want to be a leader,” Gottfrey continues, “embrace the role. Don’t just go along for the ride. Symbols, costumes, glamour, and passion can make even clowns appear to be godlike. The least likely among us can triumph.”

In Carter Jergen’s mind, the hills of West Virginia, from which Dubose hails, are populated with rustic soothsayers and grizzled old men who, with a forked stick, can divine what they claim is the best place to drill for water, toothless old women who call themselves haruspices and foretell the future from the entrails of slaughtered animals, bible-thumping prophets of Apocalypse, and other backwoods Cassandras in great variety. Growing up among such occult-oriented hayseeds, Radley Dubose’s mind, such as it is, must be woven through with so many threads of superstition that the dons of Princeton had no chance of instilling in him the secular superstitions that they prefer.