"Ashley Bell", by Dean Koontz

This is one bizarre story I have read in a long time as we go deeper into one of those strange and baffling adventure only Mr. Koontz knows how to write we see through the main character how lives are shaped by memories.

This is by far an overstuffed novel, this latest follow a similar style that has populated Mr. Koontz novels for a long time. Some will love “Ashley Bell” and some would wish as I did to make a quick exit and read something else. It took 1/3 of the book before the name Ashley Bell came to light. All that time I felt frustrated that this overly verbose was doing very little and delivered much less. In hindsight I lost my time reading what at the most a sequence of bad dreams is. This story has way too much fluff and is strange and gets stranger and stranger till we get blindsided. The idea is good and the writing is occasionally brilliant although infuriatingly boring. Mr. Koontz failed the emotional development of his characters by using cheap tricks and continues on using the same pattern of obstacles to gain our sympathy. This story should have been streamlined by cutting the nonsense.

Nevertheless the author explored a fascinating concept about imagination and transformation and is told from the perspective of, Bibi Blair, a 22 year old woman diagnosed with incurable brain cancer.

Nothing is as it seems, the past, the present mix and as readers we easily could be overwhelmed by the numerous passages and the lengthy diatribes. Not my favourite and by far not a must read thriller…..