Lightning - Dean Koontz

[goodreads]

Title: Lightning
Author: Dean Koontz
Genre: Suspense
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 384
Date read: November, 2012

A storm strikes on the night Laura Shane is born in 1955, and there is a strangeness about the weather that people will remember for years. As the dazzling blue-white jagged bolts of lightning split the heavens, a stranger materialises out of the raging blizzard to guard Laura from the not so tender mercies of a drunken doctor and ensure her safe passage into the world, before disappearing back into the night. Eight years later, Laura meets her mysterious saviour again, when he saves her from the perverted and deadly intentions of a durg-crazed robber.

Throughout her childhood, even more terrifying troubles beset the young girl, but with increasing courage, she finds the strength to prevail - even without the intervention of the stranger.

In time she marries and has a son, while also finding success as a novelist. Gradually the memory of her strange guardian and the troubles of her youth dim in the light of her happiness. Until the lightning strikes once more and shatters her world.

This time the stranger has become the angel of death. As Laura flees with er young son, Chris, she knkows she must prepare for the final confrontation that will come with the powerful forces that stalk her. The adventure - and the terror - has only just begun.

Probably my favourite Dean Koontz novel so far. Not as gory as some (which is a good thing!) and more a suspense novel than a thriller or a horror novel. Not that I mind neither thriller nor horror if it's well done, but those genres seem harder to get right, and Lightning just worked for me. The paradoxes of time travel were nicely explained and I really came to love Laura. I'm just sorry she had to go through so much... that's the problem with Dean Koontz' books (and those of Stephen King, for that matter) - if the main character is happy and content at the half-way point of the book, you know that's going to change soon.

I was fascinated by the idea of the lightning road and how it came to be used.