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

by Dean Koontz

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.