In the Heart of the Fire (Nameless: Season One, #1)

by Dean Koontz

The sky is the blue of a birthing blanket, the day newborn and filled with the light of innocence, when the air brakes of the bus whistle softly, waking him.

Most often, it’s good advice to open a story in the midst of action or with an ominous note. But sometimes I like to find ways to bury that ominous note deep enough that it speaks only to the subconscious. By opening with the birthing-blanket image and the reference to innocence, the suggestion is that all is well in this best of all possible worlds. . .but then the two words “waking him,” suggest that the serene sky and the light of innocence are figments of a dream, and that the waking world will not be as benign.

Life is a weave of infinite possibilities, though some are more likely than others.

Mere paragraphs into a new story, I worry that it won’t work, that at any moment it’ll come apart at the joints, but I usually start in a positive even ebullient state of mind. Not with this first Nameless story. I had written only one sentence when I realized the difficulty of persuading the reader to care about a character with amnesia for six novellas, a guy with no past and no idea why he’s compelled to undertake the dangerous missions to which he is committed. One of the ways I hoped to make him intriguing was to present him as a man who feels swept forward by Fate along a path “more likely than others,” even as he wishes for one of the other “infinite possibilities” that life offers. We all sometimes feel in the grip of Fate, not fully in control, so that becomes an aspect of Nameless with which——I hoped!——readers could identify and sympathize.

He knows—a better word is believes—that his amnesia is a medical matter beyond his control, but he senses that it’s also somehow a choice he has made.

This line furthers the question of how much of his current situation is Fate at work——a “medical matter” over which he had no control——and how much is free will, a “choice he had made.” Why would anyone choose amnesia? Would you? What event in the past would have been so traumatic as to make him want to have his entire past scrubbed from his mind? Both as a writer and reader, I want to find out.

Flying across the faces of the buildings, the shadows resemble dragons, as if Texas has gone Tolkien.

One way to bring a reader into the mind of an amnesiac and define that character as a person is by his observations of the material world and his sense of whether that world has a deeper meaning than what the surface of it reveals. If he doesn’t believe in meaning, we’re in noir territory. If he does believe in meaning, we know the story isn’t likely to end in hopelessness. In these two sentences, we see a man who is aware of the nuances of every scene he comes upon and who can think in metaphors—–the racing cloud shadows that resembled dragons. The rhythm of “as if Texas had gone Tolkien” is meant to focus you on the next sentence, which rather bluntly makes the point that he is a man whose five senses are acute and compensate for his lack of memory.

Some psychologists would argue that a man stripped of his past must be an emotional cripple, because we are made of memories. However, this long-enduring world, wrapped in more mysteries than Nameless, functions superbly, and he also thrives, an enigma even to himself but with a solemn purpose.

I don’t want the reader to get the idea that Nameless is either fumbling through this mission or a mere puppet whose strings are being pulled; neither condition would be appealing. “He also thrives” and he has a “purpose.” He might be caught in a storm of Fate, but he can stand up to it and even accomplish things that he finds of value.

Certain events are lightly sketched on the future and can be erased. Others are woven into the fabric of all that is to come and resist being unraveled.

Here we have the question of predestination or free will. If all time——past, present, and future——was present at the moment of the Big Bang, as many scientists tell us, then as T.S. Eliot put it, when “all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.” I dealt with this conundrum my own way in my novel ELSEWHERE, but Nameless deals with it in a different way, by assuming that perhaps the story of the universe was, on the macro scale, complete at the moment of the Big Bang, but that on the micro scale free will works. Therefore I hope that the reader sees him as a man of considerable humility, who knows his limitations, but is nonetheless determined to succeed in his mission.

This is his life: confrontation with the darkness that has nothing to do with an absence of light.

I like this line because it’s true of my career! In my fiction, I explore the darkness of the human condition and of human potential, but I have confidence that ultimately light and good will prevail.

His clairvoyance is time travel achieved without leaving the present. The curtains of the past part, and he sees what has been; the mists of the future clear, and he sees an event yet to occur.

These two sentences pleased me inordinately when I wrote them because I had never seen it said that clairvoyance is akin to time travel. For a couple of minutes I could stare at those words and think that I was too cool for this school. Then, of course, I let out a gross belch from the tacos I had for lunch, and the truth of my nature reasserted itself.

Those who are corrupted in turn corrupt the innocent. That is the only purpose of humanity: to deceive, to use, to dominate and destroy.

This is from the point of view of the antagonist, who is a sociopath. It is the only thing sociopaths and psychopaths believe in, which is why I find them more terrifying than villains who are just embezzlers and bank robbers and one-off murderers whose deeds an author attributes to a lack of nurturing by family or society. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway: This line does not reflect any aspect of my philosophy!

The story continues . . .

Behind a wall of amnesia, he can’t remember anything. Maybe he can’t bear to. Nameless knows only the mission: Directed by the mysterious Ace of Diamonds, he travels the country, turning predators into prey. But the pain in his past can’t hold him back when dark visions of the future lead him toward his greatest test yet. Nameless is closing in on a revelatory endgame in Nameless Season Two, available on June 10. It will be available free for Prime members as well as Kindle Unlimited subscribers.