Life Expectancy
Dean Koontz, 2004
Random House
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307414298
Summary
With his bestselling blend of nail-biting intensity, daring artistry, and storytelling magic, Dean Koontz returns with an emotional roller coaster of a tale filled with enough twists, turns, shocks, and surprises for ten ordinary novels. Here is the story of five days in the life of an ordinary man born to an extraordinary legacy—a story that will challenge the way you look at good and evil, life and death, and everything in between.
Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers' waiting room and his dying father's bedside. It's a strange vigil made all the stranger when, at the very height of the storm's fury, Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the frist and last time since his stroke.
What he says before he dies is that there will be five dark days in the life of his grandson—five dates whose terrible events Jimmy will have to prepare himself to face. The first is to occur in his twentieth year; the second in his twent-third year; the third in his twenty-eighth; the fourth in his twenty-ninth; the fifth in his thirtieth.
Rudy is all too ready to discount his father's last words as a dying man's delusional rambling. But then he discovers that Josef also predicted the time of his grandson's birth to the minute, as well as his exact height and weight, and the fact that Jimmy would be born with syndactyly—the unexplained anomaly of fused digits—on his left foot. Suddenly the old man's predictions take on a chilling significance.
What terrifying events await Jimmy on these five dark days? What nightmares will he face? What challenges must he survive? As the novel unfolds, picking up Jimmy's story at each of these crisis points, the path he must follow will defy every expectation. And with each crisis he faces, he will move closer to a fate he could never have imagined. For who Jimmy Tock is and what he must accomplish on the five days when his world turns is a mystery as dangerous as it is wondrous—a struggle against an evil so dark and pervasive, only the most extraordinary of human spirits can shine through. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 9, 1945
• Where—Everett, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Newport Beach, California
He is one of the most recognized, read, and loved suspense writers of the 20th century. His imagination is a veritable factory of nightmares, conjuring twisted tales of psychological complexity. He even has a fan in Stephen King. For decades, Dean Koontz's name has been synonymous with terror, and his novels never fail to quicken the pulse and set hearts pounding.
Koontz has a lifelong love of writing that led him to spend much of his free time as an adult furiously cultivating his style and voice. However, it was only after his wife Gerda made him an offer he couldn't refuse while he was teaching English at a high school outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that he had a real opportunity to make a living with his avocation. Gerda agreed to support Dean for five years, during which time he could try to get his writing career off the ground. Little did she know that by the end of that five years she would be leaving her own job to handle the financial end of her husband's massively successful writing career.
Koontz first burst into the literary world with 1970's Beastchild, a science fiction novel that appealed to genre fans with its descriptions of aliens and otherworldly wars but also mined deeper themes of friendship and the breakdown of communication. Although it is not usually ranked among his classics, Beastchild provided the first inkling of Koontz's talent for populating even the most fantastical tale with fully human characters. Even at his goriest or most terrifying, he always allows room for redemption.
This complexity is what makes Koontz's work so popular with readers. He has a true gift for tempering horror with humanity, grotesqueries with lyricism. He also has a knack for genre-hopping, inventing Hitchcockian romantic mysteries, crime dramas, supernatural thrillers, science fiction, and psychological suspense with equal deftness and imagination. Perhaps the Times (London) puts it best: "Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams, but also a literary juggler."
Extras
From a 2006 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Shortly after graduating from college, Koontz took a job with the Appalachian Poverty Program where he would tutor and counsel underprivileged kids. However, after finding out that the last person who held his job had been beaten up and hospitalized by some of these kids, Koontz was more motivated than ever to get his writing career going.
• Koontz was a senior in college, he won the Atlantic Monthly fiction competition.
• Koontz and Kevin Anderson's novel Frankenstein: The Prodigal Son was slotted to become a television series produced by Martin Scorsese. However, when the pilot failed to sell, the USA Network aired it as a TV movie in 2004. By that time Koontz had removed his name from the project.
His own words:
• My wife, Gerda, and I took seven years of private ballroom dancing lessons, twice a week, ninety minutes each time. After we had gotten good at everything from swing to the foxtrot, we not only stopped taking lessons, but also stopped going dancing. Learning had been great fun; but for both of us, going out for an evening of dancing proved far less exhilarating than the learning. We both have a low boredom threshold. Now we dance at a wedding or other celebration perhaps once a year, and we're creaky.
• On my desk is a photograph given to me by my mother after Gerda and I were engaged to be married. It shows 23 children at a birthday party. It is neither my party nor Gerda's. I am three years old, going on four. Gerda is three. In that crowd of kids, we are sitting directly across a table from each other. I'm grinning, as if I already know she's my destiny, and Gerda has a serious expression, as if she's worried that I might be her destiny. We never met again until I was a senior in high school and she was a junior. We've been trying to make up for that lost time ever since.
• Gerda and I worked so much for the first two decades of our marriage that we never took a real vacation until our twentieth wedding anniversary. Then we went on a cruise, booking a first-class suite, sparing no expense. For more than half the cruise, the ship was caught in a hurricane. The open decks were closed because waves would have washed passengers overboard. About 90% of the passengers spent day after day in their cabins, projectile vomiting. We discovered that neither of us gets seasick. We had the showrooms, the casino, and the buffets virtually to ourselves. Because the crew had no one to serve, our service was exemplary. The ship dared not try to put into the scheduled ports; it was safer on the open sea. The big windows of the main bar presented a spectacular view of massive waves and lightning strikes that stabbed the sea by the score. Very romantic. We had a grand time.
• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is his answer:
The high-school grammar textbook with which my teacher, Winona Garbrick, repeatedly rapped my head.
Otherwise, hundreds of books have had an effect on me. Perhaps the book with the most impact on my career, after the aforementioned textbook, was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, which I did not read until I was in my thirties. The final scene reduced me to tears. More important, I began to think about how modern publishing had compartmentalized fiction into so many narrow genres. A Tale of Two Cities, as a new piece of fiction, would be hard to place on a contemporary publisher's list. It's too much of an adventure story and too much of a love story to win the favor of most editors of "literary" fiction. It is a serious novel of politics and revolution but is also darkly comic in places. Dickens does not shrink from the depiction of evil, and some scenes are horrific, but he also tells a story of redemption and self-sacrifice and hope that some (never me!) would consider almost sentimental.
The more I thought about A Tale of Two Cities, the more determined I became to write novels that bridged genres. This began to bear fruit with Strangers, and to a much greater degree with Watchers. My publisher at the time resisted both the variety I was delivering, book to book, but also the mix of genres within each book. Pressure was exerted to stay within the limits of one label. We had some wonderful rows! In time, readers responded with enthusiasm to my attempts to tell stories with the flavors and the techniques of multiple genres. I doubt I would have had a career half as successful if I had followed another path.
(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Life Expectancy is an inventive, often hilarious fable about decency adrift in a world of madness; Koontz is an adroit storyteller, and the adventures of the Tocks, although they could use some trimming, are funny, scary and entertaining.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post
Koontz has near-Dickensian powers of description, and an ability to yank us from one page to the next that few novelists can match.
Los Angeles Times
Of all bestselling authors, Koontz may be the most underestimated by the literary establishment. Book after book, year after year, this author climbs to the top of the charts. Why? His readers know: because he is a master storyteller and a daring writer, and because, in his novels, he gives readers bright hope in a dark world. His new book is an examplar of his extraordinary work. Suspense is difficult to sustain; suspense that's buoyed steadily by humor, even as it deals with the most desperate of circumstances, is nearly impossible—yet Koontz manages it here. As in last year's brilliant Odd Thomas, Koontz writes again in the first person, employing a cleaner, more instantly accessible line than in some of his other work (e.g., this year's The Taking). His narrator is Jimmy Tock, a pastry chef in a Colorado resort town. On the day he was born, Jimmy's dying grandfather predicted five future dates that would be terrible for Jimmy; he might have mentioned, but didn't, the birth day itself, which sees a mass slaying by a bitter, deranged circus clown in the hospital where Jimmy is born. The bulk of the narrative concerns the first terrible day, about 20 years later, when the vengeful son of that clown takes Jimmy and a lovely young woman, Lorrie Hicks, hostage in the local library, with an eye toward destroying the town; Jimmy and the woman live to marry, but will they and their family survive the four subsequent terrible days? Like most of Koontz's novels, this one pits good versus evil and carries a persuasive spiritual message, about the power of love and family and the miracle of existence. As such it deals with serious, perennial themes, yet with its steady drizzle of jokes and witty repartee, it does so with a lightness of touch that few other authors can match. Koontz is a true original and this novel, one of his most unusual yet, will leave readers aglow and be a major bestseller. If the literary establishment would only catch on to him, it might be an award-winner too.
Publishers Weekly
While a man is dying in the ICU, his daughter-in-law is giving birth in the same hospital's maternity ward. As his final moment approaches, this man bursts forth with a string of predictions about his unborn grandson. Rudy Tock, the father-in-waiting and the man's soon-to-be grieving son, faithfully records the ten predictions on the back of a circus pass only moments before confronting an enraged and murderous clown in the obstetrical unit's waiting room. And thus our tale begins. Koontz's latest is a sardonic narrative that follows Jimmy Tock through the trials and ordeals alluded to in his grandfather's predictions. Although the elements of magic realism employed here lend literary authority to Koontz's exploration of how attitude and perspective can shape one's reality, the black humor that underlies the tale threatens to topple his precarious construct. Those among Koontz's readership who support his sojourns from suspenseful horror will, no doubt, welcome this offering. Others may choose to pass. —Nancy McNicol, Ora Mason Lib., West Haven, CT
Library Journal
Koontz shoots for a seriocomic horror novel and takes a dive. Following the failure of The Taking (2004), which began so brilliantly, then faded into Dullsville with an alien invasion, Koontz strives for high entertainment with a ton of witty dialogue, which fans may find passable but others will deem tiresome. The problem is that the story opens with murders in a maternity ward and a crazed clown raving about the excremental existence of the world-famed Vivacemente aerialists. From this emerges a forecast that Jimmy Tock, a lummox born at the same moment his grandfather dies in the same blood-strewn hospital, will have to face five ghastly days in his future. When the first ghastly day arrives, the adult Jimmy is in his small-town library. Punchinello Beezo, the same hospital maniac who appeared at his birth, shoots a librarian and holds Jimmy and Lorrie Lynn Hicks hostage while Beezo and two grisly buddies plant explosives in secret tunnels linking the library to the courthouse and two other buildings. At this point Koontz starts whipping out the witty exchanges between Jimmy and Lorrie as they seemingly face death. It's a dire authorial misstep: the second act of a Grand Guignol bloodfest is no place for Nick-and-Nora-style repartee from The Thin Man. True, a genius could get away with it, and Koontz has genius—but not for humor. Doubtless he amused himself, but his lines are forced blooms. Since logic dictates that Jimmy must survive at least the first four ghastly days (three of which turn out to be humdrum melodrama), the suspense is minimal despite all the guns and dread. The climax turns on incest, but we'll say no more. Readers will need all the suspense possible to keep them wading through the comedy lines. Koontz is a topflight suspense writer, but this error only the fans will love.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Life Expectancy:
1. First, start with your experience reading the book: did you find it a suspense-filled page-turner? Did the novel engage you...or not particularly? Were you able to accept Koontz's use of fantasy (Josef's predictions) as the basis for this story? Or was it unnacceptable for you?
2. Do you find Jimmy Tock convincing as a narrator? Do you like his "voice"—his warmth and humor? How does he present himself to the reader; how does he react to the dangers that he faces—with tinges of self-pity, acceptance, fortitude...or what? How would you react to such a prophecy in his place?
3. What about Lorrie? Do you find her convincing as a character? Some have found her glibness unrealistic and inappropriate, even irritating. Others feel her humor reflects her inner strength. What do you think?
4. Speaking of humor: overall, did you enjoy the narrator's sarcasm, witticisms, and attempts at quirky humor? Or did you find them overworked and tiresome? What reason might Koontz have had for using humor in this work?
5. What about the residents of Snow Village? Are they well drawn? Are there any you particularly enjoy?
6. Then, of course, there are the villains. What do you make of them? They appear rather stupid, but continually evade capture. Are they realistic...or isn't that the point? What are the motives? Why do you think Koontz made them circus performers...clowns v. aerialists? What might Koontz be getting at...or getting at nothing at all, just having fun!
7. Jimmy knows what lies ahead—not precisely what will happen, but that something dire will happen. He even knows the specific dates—which brings up interesting questions: one, can fate (if, indeed, there such a thing) be avoided; two, is it better to know what lies ahead, even if bad, or is it better for life to unfold in unexpected ways? If given a choice, which would you choose?
8. As he narrates the story, Jimmy relates a number of rather minor details. Some of those details end up playing a larger than expected role in the story. Try to recall some of the details, and talk about the way in which Koontz, as author, cleverly passes them off as insignificant.
9. Talk about the significance of the titles for Parts 4, 5, and 6: "All I Ever Wanted Was Immortality," "Just Like Pontius Pilot...," and "I Am Moonlight...." Also, discuss the title of the novel itself—and it's double meaning.
10. Talk about a moral conundrum! What do you make of Jimmy's agreement to become an assassin in order to save his child? What would you do?
11. Were you surprised by the ending? Is it satisfying? Do the events unfold naturally, or did you feel manipulated? What does Jimmy come to learn about who he is? How do those webbed digits come into play?
12. If you've read other books by Dean Koontz, how does this one compare? How do you rank it in his body of work?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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