.
Harry Lyon was having a fine day until he had to shoot someone.
.
Harry was a cop and the opposite of his partner Connie Gulliver. They were the odd couple of peace enforcement. Where he was particular about his appearance and surroundings, rational, calm and orderly, Connie was unconcerned with these things. Instead, she chose her clothes by favorites regardless of their appearance, cluttered her desk, and seems to be angry with the world.
.
After six months working together Connie remained a closed book to Harry, refusing to reveal even the smallest glimpse into her personal life.
.
At the moment they are searching for Doyle Durner, a drifter surfing the subculture of the surfer world and main suspect in a series of violent attacks on women.
.
.
Sammy Shamroe, known as “Sam the Sham” when he was a Los Angeles advertising agency executive, now lives in a box. He lost his world to an addition to high end drugs and now lives in a fog of cheap wine.
.
Sammy is also haunted by a monster he calls The Ratman. The ratman has the appearance of a street person and is a bully. He beats Sammy and leaves him with a promise, “You’ve got thirtysix hours to live… Ticktock, ticktock.”
.
That’s right before the ratman turns into a squirming pile of rats.
.
.
Harry and Connie are eating lunch when a citizen in gray cords enters the restaurant. Dean Koonz loses me a little here when the man in gray cords assaults a waitress and the scene quickly turns into a firefight between him and the two cops with hand grenades and an upper level filled with mannequins in an act of random violence. The battle devolves into a game of hide and seek through the endless maze of mannequins with Connie communicating with the man by yelling Elvis song titles at each other.
.
.
Janet Marco is homeless and lives in her car with her five year old son Danny and a stray dog that adopted them. Living in a world of fear and on the run after escaping the brutality of an abusive husband the only way she could, by killing him, she does her best to look after herself and her son.
.
Now Janet is tormented by a new thug, a cop. This cop has a promise for her, “At dawn, I’m going to kill you and your boy.”
.
.
Harry is approached by a vagrant with a strange message. “Ticktock, ticktock. You’ll be dead in sixteen hours.”
.
.
Without knowledge of each other, the three are in a race against time to evade an impossible stalker who is going to kill them by morning. In a surreal world where mud and rats can turn into a man and time stops for everyone but them, time is running out to find a way to stop the ratman/cop/ticktock.
.
While Dean Koontz momentarily lost me with the battle among mannequins above a small restaurant with the perpetrator lobbing grenades, the story returns to drawn you through a strange series of events in a race against time and death at the hands of a merciless monster.
No comments:
Post a Comment