Intensity: A Novel by Dean Koontz (Epub)

Description

Past midnight, Chyna Shepard, twenty-six, gazes out a moonlit window, unable to sleep on her first night in the Napa Valley home of her best friend’s family. Instinct proves reliable. A murderous sociopath, Edgler Foreman Vess, has entered the house, intent on killing everyone inside. A self-proclaimed “homicidal adventurer,” Vess lives only to satisfy all appetites as they arise, to immerse himself in sensation, to live without fear, remorse, or limits, to live with intensity. Chyna is trapped in his deadly orbit.

Chyna is a survivor, toughened by a lifelong struggle for safety and self-respect. Now she will be tested as never before. At first her sole aim is to get out alive—until, by chance, she learns the identity of Vess’s next intended victim, a faraway innocent only she can save. Driven by a newly discovered thirst for meaning beyond mere self-preservation, Chyna musters every inner resource she has to save an endangered girl . . . as moment by moment, the terrifying threat of Edgler Foreman Vess intensifies.

User’s Reviews

Review “The most viscerally exciting thriller of the year.”—Publishers Weekly”Intensity chills the reader to the core and establishes Koontz as a master.”—Associated PressFrom the Paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly Koontz’s career has mirrored Stephen King’s to a remarkable degree?the early pseudonymous novels, the bloated blockbusters, the increased use of horror as social commentary?albeit at a lag. Keeping step, this uncommonly sleek work is nothing less than Koontz’s Gerald’s Game: a distillation of what’s come before and a slick play to regain the top by a writer whose popularity seemed to have peaked. Koontz even makes the centerpiece of Chyna Shepherd’s battle against a serial killer her attempt to free herself from the restraints that bind her to a piece of furniture?the very same challenge faced by King’s heroine. And just as Gerald’s Game reinvigorated King’s career and writing, this masterful, if ultimately predictable, exercise in high tension should do the same for Koontz’s. This is basically a two-character novel, and both principals are compelling: the spirited Chyna, a youngish psychology student, and her nemesis, homicidal maniac Edgler Vess, who revels in sensation, be it pain or pleasure?in the intensity of experience. The two link when Vess kills Chyna’s best friend as Chyna hides under a bed. Chyna pursues Vess but is eventually captured by him, after which she must combat not only those cuffs but also Vess’s killer dogs, Vess himself and, of course, her own terror. For once, Koontz tamps down on his usual libertarian soapboxing to let the story race?which it does fast enough to give readers whiplash as they hold on to what may end up being the most viscerally exciting thriller of the year. 600,000 first printing; Literary Guild main selection. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From the Inside Flap Past midnight, Chyna Shepherd, twenty- six, gazed out a moonlit window, unable to sleep on her first night in the Napa Valley home of her best friend’s family. Instinct proves reliable. A murderous sociopath, Edgler Forman Vess, has entered the house, intent on killing everyone inside. A self-proclaimed “homicidal adventure,” Vess lives only to satisfy all appetites as the arise, to immense himself in sensation, t o live without fear, remorse or limits, to live with intensity. Chyna is trapped in his deadly orbit.Chyna is a survivor, toughened by a lifelong struggle for safety and self-respect. Now she will be tested as never before. At first her sole aim is to get out alive-until, by chance, she learns the identity of Vess’s next intended victim, a faraway innocent only she can save. Driven by a newly discovered thirst for meaning beyond mere self-preservation, Chyna musters every inner resource she has to save an endangered girl–as moment by moment, the terrifying threat Edgler Foreman Vess intensifies.From the Paperback edition. –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chyna Shepherd could not sleep comfortably in strange houses. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, her mother had dragged her from one end of the country to the other, staying nowhere longer than a month or two. So many terrible things had happened to them in so many places that Chyna eventually learned to view each new house not as a new beginning, not with hope for stability and happiness, but with suspicion and quiet dread.Now she was long rid of her troubled mother and free to stay only where she wished. These days, her life was almost as stable as that of a cloistered nun, as meticulously planned as any bomb squad’s procedures for disarming an explosive device, and without any of the turmoil on which her mother had thrived.Nevertheless, this first night at the Templetons’ house, Chyna was reluctant to undress and go to bed. She sat in the darkness in a medallion-back armchair at one of the two windows in the guest room, gazing out at the moonlit vineyards, fields, and hills of the Napa Valley.Laura was in another room, at the far end of the second-floor hall, no doubt sound asleep, at peace because this house was not at all strange to her. From the guest-room window, the early-spring vineyards were barely visible. Vague geometric patterns.Beyond the cultivated rows were gentle hills mantled in long dry grass, silver in the moonlight. An inconstant breeze stirred through the valley, and sometimes the wild grass seemed to roll like ocean waves across the slopes, softly aglimmer with lambent lunar light. Above the hills was the Coast Range, and above those peaks were cascades of stars and a full white moon. Storm clouds coming across the mountains from the northwest would soon darken the night, turning the silver hills first to pewter and then to blackest iron. When she heard the first scream, Chyna was gazing at the stars, drawn by their cold light as she had been since childhood, fascinated by the thought of distant worlds that might be barren and clean, free of pestilence. At first the muffled cry seemed to be only a memory, a fragment of a shrill argument from another strange house in the past, echoing across time. Often, as a child, eager to hide from her mother and her mother’s friends when they were drunk or high, she climbed onto porch roofs or into backyard trees, slipped through windows onto fire escapes, away to secret places far from the fray, where she could study the stars and where voices raised in argument or sexual excitement or shrill drug-induced giddiness came to her as though from out of a radio, from faraway places and people who had no connection whatsoever with her life.The second cry, although brief and only slightly louder than the first, was indisputably of the moment, not a memory, and Chyna sat forward in her chair. Tense. Head cocked. Listening. She wanted to believe that the voice had come from outside, so she continued to stare into the night, surveying the vineyards and the hills beyond. Breeze-driven waves swelled through the dry grass on the moon-washed slopes: a water mirage like the ghost tides of an ancient sea.From elsewhere in the house came a soft thump, as though a heavy object had fallen to a carpeted floor. Chyna immediately rose from the chair and stood utterly still, expectant. Trouble often followed voices raised in one kind of passion or another. Sometimes, however, the worst offenses were proceeded by calculated silences and stealth. She had difficulty reconciling the idea of domestic violence with Paul and Sarah Templeton, who had seemed as kind and loving toward each other as toward their daughter. Nevertheless, appearances and realities were seldom the same, and the human talent for deception was far greater than that of the chameleon, the mockingbird, or the praying mantis, which masked its ferocious cannibalism with a serene and devout posture. Following the stifled cries and the soft thump, silence sifted down like a snowfall. The hush was eerily deep, as unnatural as that in which the deaf lived. This was the stillness before the pounce, the quietude of the coiled snake.In another part of the house, someone was standing as motionless as she herself was standing, as alert as she was, intently listening. Someone dangerous. She could sense the predatory presence, a subtle new pressure in the air, not dissimilar to that preceding a violent thunderstorm. On one level, six years of psychology classes caused her to question her immediate fearful interpretation of those night sounds, which conceivably could be insignificant, after all. Any well-trained psycho-analyst would have a wealth of labels to pin on someone who leaped first to a negative conclusion, who lived in expectation of sudden violence. But she had to trust her instinct. It had been honed by many years of hard experience. Intuitively certain that safety lay in movement, she stepped quietly away from the chair at the window, toward the hall door. In spite of the moonglow, her eyes had adjusted to darkness during the two hours that she had sat in the lightless room, and now she eased through the gloom with no fear of blundering into furniture. She was only halfway to the door when she heard approaching footsteps in the second-floor hall. The heavy, urgent tread was alien to this house. Unhampered by the interminable second-guessing that accompanied an education in psychology, reverting to the intuition and defenses of childhood, Chyna quickly retreated to the bed. She dropped to her knees.Farther along the hall, the footsteps stopped. A door opened.She was aware of the absurdity of attributing rage to the mere opening of a door. The rattle of the knob being turned, the rasp of the unsecured latch, the spike-sharp squeak of an unoiled hinge–they were only sounds, neither meek nor furious, guilty nor innocent, and could have been made as easily by a priest as by a burglar. Yet she knew that rage was at work in the night. Flat on her stomach, she wriggled under the bed, feet toward the headboard. It was a graceful piece of furniture with sturdy gable legs, and fortunately it didn’t sit as close to the floor as did most beds. One inch less of clearance would have prevented her from hiding under it. Footsteps sounded in the hall again. Another door opened. The guest-room door. Directly opposite the foot of the bed. Someone switched on the lights.Chyna lay with her head turned to one side, her right ear pressed to the carpet. Staring out from under the footboard, she could see a man’s black boots and the legs of his blue jeans below mid-calf. He stood just inside the threshold, evidently surveying the room. He would see a bed still neatly made at one o’clock in the morning, with four decorative needlepoint pillows arranged against the headboard. She had left nothing on the nightstands. No clothes tossed on chairs. The paperback novel that she had brought with her for bedtime reading was in a bureau drawer. She preferred spaces that were clean and uncluttered to the point of monastic sterility. Her preference might now save her life.Again a faint doubt, the acquired propensity for self-analysis that plagued all psychology students, flickered through her. If the man in the doorway was someone with a right to be in the house–Paul Templeton or Laura’s brother, Jack, who lived with his wife in the vineyard manager’s bungalow elsewhere on the property–and if some crisis was unfolding that explained why he would burst into her room without knocking, she was going to appear to be a prime fool, if not a hysteric, when she crawled out from under the bed. Then, directly in front of the black boots, a fat red droplet–another, then a third–fell to the wheat-gold carpet. Plop-plop-plop. Blood. The first two soaked into the thick nylon pile. The third held its surface tension, shimmering like a ruby.Chyna knew the blood wasn’t that of the intruder. She tried not to think about the sharp instrument from which it might have fallen.He moved off to her right, deeper into the room, and she rolled her eyes to follow him. The bed had carved side rails into which the spread was tightly tucked. No overhanging fabric obstructed her view of his boots.Obversely, without a spread draped to the floor, the space under the bed was more visible to him. From certain angles, he might even be able to look down and see a swatch of her blue jeans, the toe of one of her Rockports, the cranberry-red sleeve of her cotton sweater where it stretched over her bent elbow. She was thankful that the bed was queen-size, offering more cover than a single or double. If he was breathing hard, either with excitement or with the rage that she had sensed in his approach, Chyna couldn’t hear him. With one ear pressed tightly to the plush carpet, she was half deaf. Wood slats and box springs weighed on her back, and her chest barely had room to expand to accommodate her own shallow, cautious, open-mouth inhalations. The hammering of her compressed heart against her breastbone echoed tympanically within her, and it seemed to fill the claustrophobic confines of her hiding place to such an extent that the intruder was certain to hear. He went to the bathroom, pushed open the door, and flicked on the lights. She had put away all her toiletries in the medicine cabinet. Even her toothbrush. Nothing lay out that might alert him to her presence. But was the sink dry? On retiring to her room at eleven o’clock, she had used the toilet and then had washed her hands. That was two hours ago. Any residual water in the bowl surely would have drained away or evaporated. Lemon-scented liquid soap was provided in a pump dispenser at the sink. Fortunately, there was no damp bar of soap to betray her. She worried about the hand towel. She doubted that it could still be damp two hours after the little use she had made of it. Nonetheless, in spite of a propensity for n… –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Booklist Leopards can change their spots. Witness Dean Koontz. Long a reliable best-seller, he also was always a less than accomplished wordsmith. His thrillers, grabby though they were, were loaded with flat prose, flatter characters, and the flattest ideas–the book equivalents of movies starring such second-string Slys and Arnolds as Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal. Then he switched publishers and out have come Dark Rivers of the Heart (1994) and now this pulse pounder about a homey weekend gone ‘way bad. Chyna Shepherd–child of a gorgeous slut who, on account of her taste for sociopaths as boyfriends, exposed the girl to plenty of mayhem until she fled Mom at age 16–goes for a pleasant Napa Valley weekend visiting the vintner parents of her best college friend, only to become the covert witness to the family’s murder at the hands of thrill-addicted serial (and mass) murderer Edgler Foreman Vess. Hardened by her childhood against even this loathsome violence, Chyna determines to keep on the killer’s trail until she can bring him to justice or exact it herself. Although it cops from Harris’ Silence of the Lambs, Strieber’s Billy, and Thompson’s Killer inside Me, Intensity is tightly written and free of cliches, thus a real advance over virtually everything else, including the politically engaged Dark Rivers, that Koontz has written. Maybe that’s what good editing has done. Ray Olson –This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ If long, rambling inner dialogues equal “intensity,” then friends, you are in for one heck of a ride!I stopped reading Dean Koontz books about a decade ago. Now I remember why.Told from two perspectives, Chyna’s and Edgler’s, I just about gave up on this novel about a third of the way in…when Edgler started waxing philosophical (2 or 3 pages worth) about the power of Redwoods. And then around the two-thirds mark, the “table” scene lasted throughout CHAPTERS. I literally felt myself skimming because those passages were so beyond boring, my eyes crossed.If I’m being totally honest, Edgler’s sections were more interesting than Chyna’s. All Chyna did was dwell on her past and her mother. Frankly, she wasn’t particularly interesting. Edgler, on the other hand, is a very unique breed of serial killer. I’ve never read of another quite like him. He’s the reason for the extra star…because this story was well on it’s way to a 1 star rating. But then I got to the end and subtracted a half star because of the poor dogs.Ultimately, I could not WAIT to get through this dull, not remotely intense book.1.5 stars.

⭐ I’ve been such a huge Koontz fan that I kept trying to like this book, and I’ve resisted saying anything negative. But with all the love of another dog and sci-fi fan, this one was not up to standard. Many of the scenes were excruciatingly detailed, losing the page-turning pace I expect from Koontz and boring me into skipping page after page. The bad guy was especially perverse, and we spent far too much time psychoanalyzing this freak. I’d always found fun in a Koontz novel, even when it gets unusually weird, but there was no fun, no humor and nothing really lovable in this book. Glad I’m done. Sorry Dean. Hope you got this one out of your system.

⭐ I discovered Dean Koontz is a Christian by reading his brilliant introduction to “A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy” by Wesley Smith. I decided to read Koontz’ own work for the first time because I wanted to see how his worldview comes through in his fiction. Most won’t notice or care, but the antagonist is a product of existential nihilism whose life pursuit is feeding his “reptilian” desires while the protagonist is one holding to a traditional moral view and who sees a world of personal responsibility, hope, and meaning. I could go on with observations of symbolism and irony but I don’t want to spoil it. It is not the best story I’ve ever read, but it’s adequately entertaining and gets the point across.”She had to trust that there was justice in the universe and meaning in the redwood mists, for without that trust, she would be no better than Edgler Vess, no better than a mindlessly seeking palmetto beetle.”

⭐ I don’t read much Koontz because they’re expensive on Kindle, but I found this on Bookbub one day for $1.99 so I snagged it. I’m soooo glad I was able to. This has to be one of the most alarming, horrifying, sinister books I’ve ever read. I’d give it 10 stars if I could! The story grabbed me from the very beginning and I was in Koontz’s grip until the harrowing ending!My only objection was Chyna’s inability to stay away. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her! Some of her decisions were just ridiculous. But without them, I guess we would had had such an intense story, would we?

⭐ This is one of the most intense books I have ever read! It keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very end. The writing is terrific, the characters are well developed and the action leaves you breathless. The author does a wonderful job providing an amazing amount of imaging giving the reader a detailed and often terrifying picture of events. Well done!

⭐ By the time I had read the first chapter I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue. I persevered through the next couple of chapters thinking I don’t read horror stories, I’m glad I did- this is a great book. Loved Chyna, she is a wonderful character.

⭐ the title does not lie. this book is INTENSE from page one to the end. chyna shepherd is one of my favorite female protagonists (second only to Lillith from Octavia Butler’s series “Lillith’s Brood” which I also recommend if you love a great female lead and sci-fi books.) I’ve likely read this a dozen or so times in my life. It’s the kind of book you can read once a year and enjoy it as much every single time. If you’re a Koontz fan, you won’t be disappointed. If you’re a suspense fan, you won’t be disappointed. If you’re a thriller fan, you won’t…well, you catch my drift, guys. Read this book, okay?

⭐ I’m truly weary of the headstrong heroine who thinks no one else can fix things, and puts herself and others in needless danger. There were a couple of opportunities that she refused to take. I get it, though, there wouldn’t have been much of a story left if she’d been entirely logical. I just hope that our tried and true authors will move away from this type of heroine.That aside, it’s still a 5 star, what you’ve come to expect from Dean Koontz. It’s so well thought out, well written, and relentless that it can’t be anything less.If you haven’t read Velocity, consider it, I liked it better.I’m sorry, this is just an aside, but I can’t bring myself to pay $10 or more for an e-book, so I wait for a promo/sale. Prices have risen for Kindle books so much just during the past year or so it seems. I’m not really sure why. I can’t help thinking they may be shooting themselves in the foot, the reason being that it could discourage new readers—or even hurt reader retention. Of course some authors are worth more than others, and with good reason. On the other hand, there’s a bumper crop of superb new and existing authors that keep their prices down. OK, soap box goes back in the closet, for now.

⭐ Very well written. Heavy–loaded with suspense. I would give it a 10 if I could. Beautiful main character–you will not be able to put it down even when your stomach is so clenched you have to get away from the book to breathe. Great!

⭐ Within the first few pages this story will grab you by the soul, twist and rip at your core beliefs until you want to scream…. or discontinue the journey… but you cannot. And then that same journey down hill begins anew ….. and will scare the hell out of you.

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