I managed to get one thing accomplished this weekend. I finished Dean Koontz's Your Heart Belongs to Me. While it wasn't a bad book, it wasn't the kind of Dean Koontz fiction that kept me up at night in high school. Back then, there was always some supernatural being hiding in the shadows, ready to pounce on the story's protagonist at every turn of the page. I stayed up not because I was scared of the things that went bump in Dean Koontz's fictional night but because I had to finish just one more chapter to see if that being did, in fact, pounce. The boogie man and monster in the closet motif are now mostly gone from Dean Koontz's work. These days you would rarely classify his work as horror. Some of his newer books wouldn't even make the cut for suspense.Take this book for instance. I don't want to give away any plot lines so I'll stick to the information on the jacket cover. According to the synopsis, Your Heart Belongs to Me is supposed to be about a man, Ryan Perry, who, one year after undergoing a heart transplant, is pursued by a woman who claims that the heart he received belongs to her. That jacket is correct up to a point. The book goes in that direction two-thirds into the story, but up until that part it's really just about Ryan pre-transplant. That part, despite the red herring (a brief, suspected poisoning) that Dean Koontz drops a third of the way in, is slow, not as slow as some of his other, more recent works, but slow nonetheless.
As for the big pursuit part, it, in contrast to the first part of the book, moves far too quickly. Ryan catches up to the antagonist in a couple of chapters, and the confrontation between the two and all the issues therein involved are resolved within a couple of more. I would have much rather the two had played cat and mouse throughout the book, as Ryan took several wrong turns trying to identify the woman and why she was after him, than have the entire pursuit wrapped up in a pretty little bow in a handful of chapters. That's the reason I buy books in the mystery and suspense genre. I like the whodunit. I like the chase. If I wanted to ponder the philosophical aspects of a heart transplant, which is essentially what the first two thirds of the book is about, I would have dug around in the garage for one of my old philosophy textbooks. I wouldn't have picked up a novel.
All in all, Your Heart Belongs to Me wasn't what I had expected. Still it was better than anything that was on TV this weekend.
