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

by Dean Koontz

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.