Koontzland - Dean Koontz discussion
This topic is about
After Death
Stand Alone Novels 2021 & Beyond
>
After Death (Group Read - Summer 2023)
date
newest »
newest »
message 2:
by
Dustin the wind Crazy little brown owl, Colorful Colorado
(last edited Jun 29, 2023 03:03PM)
(new)
-
rated it 1 star
Mod
JUNE 20, 2023
The most disturbing villain I’ve written in a while (After Death).
June, moon, spoon. If you are of a younger generation, June and moon have no logical connection to spoon, because neither the month of June nor the moon can be eaten like a pudding. Back in the day, “to spoon” meant to show affection by kissing and caressing in a sentimental fashion. Thus a warm June night and a full moon provided an ideal environment for couples to cuddle on the front porch swing.
The word “cuddle” is more easily defined for moderns: It is what you do with your dog that reduces it to a delighted puddle of fur. This is not to say that, back in the day, young couples were reduced to puddles of fur when they cuddled. They were not. Pet rollers were not required to groom their clothing after cuddling. The human and canine reactions to cuddling are psychologically similar but physiologically different. For one thing, after cuddling for an hour on a sofa, two humans will not feel the urgent need to be taken outside to pee.
If I know well my readers of all generations, and I do, some of you are now saying, “Okay, if you’re so smart, explain the meaning of spoon in these lines from Shakespeare: High diddle diddle/The cat and the fiddle/The cow jumped over the moon/The little dog laughed/To see such craft/And the dish ran away with the spoon.
Challenge accepted. These lines are of course from “Ode to June, Not the Woman but the Month,” by William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon. Avon refers to Stratford-on-Avon, a riverside town in England, not to a line of beauty products sold door to door. In spite of the uncertainty of a writer’s income flow, Shakespeare never peddled skin creams and makeup to suburban housewives.
“Diddle diddle” was an Old English word for “moon,” and the poet is saying the moon was high on this particular night. The cat is fiddling, as cats in the first decade of the 17th century often did, when felines then were into music and had not yet discovered mice. The cow, charmed by the tune—or perhaps in a state of high agitation because of the farmer’s failure to milk her for a few days—jumps over the moon. This does not refer to the actual moon, the “diddle diddle,” because no cow could jump so high. The bard is using “moon,” which was in those days a synonym for “diddle diddle,” to create an exaggerated image to convey the degree of the cow’s emotional reaction to the situation.
Are you with me so far? All right. “The little dog laughed” is without subtext and must be taken to mean only what it says, that the dog is highly amused by what the cow has done, as you would have been as well if you had been there. The next line, “To see such craft,” reveals that even a poet as celebrated as Shakespeare can at times find it difficult to think of an appropriate rhyme. There is no “craft” involved when a cow jumps high, only an unlikely triumph of bovine will over bovine physiology. A better line would have been “To see something so daft,” which rhymes well enough with “laugh” in the line above.
And now to the brilliant conclusion of this masterpiece. “And the dish ran away with the spoon” might seem nonsensical to those who lack the power to undertake an exegesis of great poetry, but it’s quite clear to me. “Dish” refers to an attractive young woman, and “spoon” refers to the young man with whom she has been spooning. We are left to assume they ran away to be married, according to the conventions of the time, and brought a teaming brood of snot-nosed children into the world. Thus, for centuries, the words “June, moon, spoon” have been so linked in the minds of those in the English-speaking world that uncountable songwriters and poets have used them together in the production of a vast ocean of copyrighted works.
There are some litterateurs who see a darker end to the poem. They note that a cow jumping so high must soon come down, and they conjecture that it dropped on the dish and her spoon as they ran away, crushing them to death. Although Shakespeare had a dark side—he whacked Romeo and Juliette, after all—I believe this piece was written in one of his lighter moods, when the Ritalin and Prozac were really working in concert. I refuse—and I urge you to refuse—to imagine that the cat and the little dog were subjected to such a traumatizing sight as young lovers being squashed to oblivion by a plunging cow, for in that case, the cat would have gone mad, and the little dog would never have laughed again, which is just too sad.
The only news this time is that my new novel, After Death, will be available as a hardcover, eBook, and audio on July 18th. It moves very fast, with more twists and turns than a road in a chase scene in a James Bond movie. It is suspenseful, yet contains a love story (though with no time for spooning). It is scary, though not so scary that you’ll frequently have to be taken outside to pee. The villain is the most disturbing I’ve written in a while, so lock the doors and get your courage on before you start to read.
www.deankoontz.com
These great words by DK keep me laughing. Thanks dtwclbo
Because I don't do Kindle, don't like audio not on disk and dislike the weight of hardback books, I will have to wait 6 months for the trade paperback to read this one. Bummer.
Susan Beamon it'll be worth reading any time I believe.
I really like your notes. They are always entertaining. Thanks.
Mod
Dear Readers,
I was born in July. I remember telling the physician who attended my birth that I was going to be a male model and therefore needed to be sure that my belly button was a neat innie and not an outie. The doctor obliged, but as it turned out I didn’t have the right stuff to be a model. I was four weeks old, making the rounds of agents, getting one polite rejection after another, when I finally encountered a man who understood that what I needed to hear was not insincere encouragement but the blunt truth. “Kid,” he said, though I was still a mere infant, “take a long look in a mirror. A moldering turnip has a better chance of being a model than you do.”
Oh, I recall vividly the emotional turmoil that overcame me when he issued that judgment. He spoke the truth, but there was no need to phrase it so cruelly. I wanted to give him a thrashing he would never forget, but he was six feet four, and I was only twenty-six inches tall with inadequately developed musculature. I told him I’d be back to settle the score in twenty years, and I left his office red-faced with anger and shame.
At four months of age, I was impatient to get on with a career as a private detective. To apply for a job, I visited the office of a gumshoe named Sam Hammer. The pitiless city had made him so tough that a pit bull had broken off its teeth when it tried to bite him. When I arrived, Sam was at his desk, eating a shark sandwich and practicing a series of intimidating expressions. Over the years, he’d had to kill a number of bad men, and he did so without remorse even when, on the spectrum of badness, some were just naughty rather than evil. Although Sam declined to hire me, he gave me some invaluable advice. “Kid, no one’s gonna mistake you for a tough guy when you’re wearing a powder-blue jumper with bunny rabbits on it.”
I was mortified but not angry, because Sam had taught me that appearances mattered and that I couldn’t rely on my mother to outfit me properly for work interviews. I spent the next eight months teaching myself karate—practicing my moves on an imaginary friend named Dirty Burt—and reading the novels of Mickey Spillane. By my first birthday, dressed all in black and carrying a candy cigarette that looked very real, I hitchhiked to the literary quarter of town, where I presented myself at the offices of a book agent, Geoffrey Chaucer XXV. Posing as a twentysomething little person to overcome the prejudice against hiring one-year-old children, I applied for a job correcting the grammar of some less than stellar authors. Only ten days passed before Mr. Chaucer elevated me to the status of a literary agent.
During the next five years, I guided the careers of nine talented novelists, six others with little talent, and seven more who were illiterate and incoherent. I learned a great deal about the publishing industry, not least of all that it was an equal-opportunity business in which the illiterate, incoherent authors had just as good a chance of success as those who were wildly talented and could spell.
Oh, but agenting is a demanding profession, in part because you come to adore your authors, all of them dear but emotional types who frequently call you at 3:00 a.m., in tears because a romantic relationship has gone sour or because they are having trouble with split infinitives and the subjunctive mood. By my sixth birthday, I was burnt out. I had been financially prudent, so I was able to take off two years to put myself through astronaut training. That dream was not fulfilled, for this was 1951-1953, when the country didn’t yet have a space program.
The path I followed that led me from that moment of my life to becoming the writer you now know is a tortuous story too long for a newsletter format like this. Before I run out of room in this issue, I must instead tell you that my new novel, After Death, is available in hardcover, eBook, and audio on July 18, the month I was born. Although when I was seven years old, I worked as a book reviewer, covering nonfiction volumes in foreign languages I couldn’t read, it would be inappropriate for me to review my own work with all the praise it deserves. I can only say that After Death is exactly the kind of thing that you tell me you love about my novels, so unless you’ve been lying to me, you should enjoy the heck out of it.
With warmest regards from everyone here in Koontzland,
Dean Koontz
www.deankoontz.com
Mod
Mod
by Dean Koontz
Michael Mace, head of security at a top-secret research facility, opens his eyes in a makeshift morgue twenty-four hours following an event in which everyone perished—including him and his best friend, Shelby Shrewsberry.
Having awakened with an extraordinary ability unlike anything he—or anyone else—has ever imagined, Michael is capable of being as elusive as a ghost. He sets out to honor his late friend by helping Nina Dozier and her son, John, whom Shelby greatly admired. Although what Michael does for Nina is life changing, his actions also evoke the wrath of John’s father, a member of one of the most violent street gangs in Los Angeles.
But an even greater threat is descending. And if Michael dies twice, he will not live a third time.
From Beverly Hills to South Central to Rancho Santa Fe, only Michael can protect Nina and John—and ensure that light survives in a rapidly darkening world.
Don’t miss the breathtaking new novel from bestselling master of suspense Dean Koontz.
Read After Death by Dean Koontz
Now Available!
I received After Death on Monday and I’m 2/3’s through the book already. Slowing down now. Great story….very unsettling!!!
Mod
51% thru. One of Dean’s quickest paced books since Velocity.
Mod
What happened to this group? I’ve been occupied with health issues. I just saw on Amazon another book for Summer/24; The Forest of Lost Souls. Besides the Bad Weather Friend in 3 months
Re: my post about Summer/24 release, while scrolling through comments of other posts, I came across one about expanding on Eve from Velocity way back in 2016. Possible title was to be Secret Forest.
Thanks for updating, I look forward to seeing more of the next books,
I'm waiting to read After Death until I can take it out of the library for longer than 7 days. It's still considered a "Hot Book" so can be taken out for no longer than a week. I read a couple books at once so it always takes me longer than 7 days to get through one. Looking forward to reading it, though!
Mod
Have not started it and now am discouraged that I paid for it. Oh, well.
Mod
Michael Mace, head of security at a top-secret research facility, opens his eyes in a makeshift morgue twenty-four hours following an event in which everyone perished―including him and his best friend, Shelby Shrewsberry.
Having awakened with an extraordinary ability unlike anything he―or anyone else―has ever imagined, Michael is capable of being as elusive as a ghost. He sets out to honor his late friend by helping Nina Dozier and her son, John, whom Shelby greatly admired. Although what Michael does for Nina is life changing, his actions also evoke the wrath of John’s father, a member of one of the most violent street gangs in Los Angeles.
But an even greater threat is descending: the Internal Security Agency’s most vicious assassin, Durand Calaphas. Calaphas will stop at nothing to get his man. If Michael dies twice, he will not live a third time.
From the tarnished glamour of Beverly Hills to the streets of South Central to a walled estate in Rancho Santa Fe, only Michael can protect Nina and John―and ensure that light survives in a rapidly darkening world.
Release Date: July 18, 2023