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Dark Rivers of the Heart by Dean Koontz
Koontz novels are always good for a nice list of unfamiliar words, many of them sinister or dark in nature. This book is about a nice man, a nice woman, and a nice dog, and a bad, bad man who wants to kill them.
- deliquesced: to melt away: disappear as though by melting. Buildings blurred into one another, traffic flowed sluggishly, and streets deliquesced into gray mists.
- prie-dieu: a small kneeling bench designed for use by a person at prayer. In scores of towns, those countless taverns were, in their essence, the same church confessional; sitting on a barstool instead of kneeling on a prie-dieu, he murmured the same admissions to strangers who were not priests and could not give him absolution.
- rataplan: the iterative sound of beating. The night was silent except for the incessant rataplan of the rain.
- cicatricial: relating to or having the character of a scar.
- keloid: a thick scar resulting from excessive growth of fibrous tissue. How many new scars if he survived - how many pale and puckered cicatricial welts or red keloid monstrosities from hairline to chin?
- coruscate: to gleam with intermittent flashes. Pain coruscated through his legs, weakening him and testing his balance.
- jalousied: having horizontal slats. If it had been fixed or jalousied he would have been trapped. Fortunately, it was a single pane that opened inward from the top on a heavy-duty piano hinge.
- coelenterate: any of a species of radially symmetrical invertebrate animals including the corals, sea anemones, jellyfishes, and hydroids. Down the middle of the hall is an intricately patterned Persian runner, in which the curved and curled and undulant shapes absorb the radiance of the full moon and glow dimly with it: Hundreds of pale, luminous coelenterate forms seem to be not immediately under my feet but well below me, as if I am not on a carpet but am walking Christlike on the surface of a tidepool while gazing down at the mysterious denizens at the bottoms.
- lumpen: of or relating to dispossessed and uprooted individuals cut off from the economic and social class with which they might normally be identified. "I would hate to think," Spencer said, "that you are a dropout, resigned to the status of a lumpen mammal, unconcerned about being exploited, all fur and no fury."
- ormolu: golden or gilded brass or bronze used for decorative purposes. Early-nineteenth-century French furniture, with elaborate marquetry and ormolu.
- lambent: softly bright or radiant. Under the lambent light of the laser, another print appeared.
- reliquary: a container or shrine in which sacred relics are kept. Reluctantly, while stopped at a traffic light, he returned the hand to the container. He put that reliquary and its precious contents under the driver's seat.
- philtrum: the vertical groove on the median line of the upper lip. Nothing about the set or width of her mouth, the contours of her philtrum, or the shape of her teeth was even intriguing, let alone electrifying.
- glabella: the smooth prominence of the forehead between the eyebrows. Slowly, he moved his finger toward her face as he said, "You. Have. The. Most. Exquisite. Glabella. I. Have. Ever. Seen."
- lagniappe: a gratuity of any kind, tip "Yes, I'm sure that without the lagniappe of Ackblom's art, things here would be grim indeed."
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Jeremy
13 years ago
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I bet the reliquary in your list wasn't a tupperware container with a severed hand inside!
I would say that Dark Rivers of the Heart is toward the bottom of the Koontz scale for me. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't recommend it, I have not read any Koontz that I wouldn't recommend. This novel was a little too compartmentalized and spent too much time on technology. You know how it is when you read a 15 year old book that spends a lot of time talking about super-advanced technology? It may have seemed super advanced 15 years ago, but nowadays linking to a remote computer from a car or plane is something just about anyone can do!
So, I would recommend you read any of these other Koontz novels first: Cold Fire, One Door Away From Heaven, The Face, The Husband, or The Darkest Evening of the Year. Cold Fire was one of the most riveting books I've ever read, in particular, it contains a 50-page extremely detailed, first-person account of a passenger airline crash. However, Cold Fire is not for the faint of heart, I was so scared I stayed up almost all night to finish the last 300 pages.
Koontz often, but not always, writes about the paranormal, frequently coming up with characters and situations that are "as close to sheer physical terror as the printed page can produce", to quote a book review in Cold Fire.
Jeremy
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Odd Thomas was good and I thought Fear Nothing was good. I didn't like Intensity that much, it was far too straightforward for Koontz. I have not read Lightning nor Strange Highways, but I did mooch them both recently. I met a woman the other day who had read one Koontz book and written him off for good. She said it was about high school jocks who took performance enhancing drugs and then became supernatural evil beings. I don't know which book this is, but it sounds as if it could be Koontz. I also know that if my first Koontz book had been Dark Rivers of the Heart, I probably would not have been in a hurry to read more. And I think, thus lies the interest in this author. He's not a Nora Roberts, who always pleases all her fans. Every Koontz reader, I'm sure, has their favorites and least favorites, and those choices probably differ drastically from other fans. He is a very divergent author, including all sorts of different elements of mystery, suspense, horror, crime fiction, and the paranormal in each of his works. Truthfully, I don't really even understand how a single author can stray so far from his comfort zone from book to book. I apologize for any incoherence, I've had a few drinks tonight. Jeremy
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Cicatricial (from the French 'cicatrice', scar), keloid, philtrum and glabella are familiar for me - since they are all part of medical terminology - as are prie-dieu (directly from French) and reliquary (the last two are maybe more common to Europeans?).
I didn't know 'jalousied' as an English word, but 'jaloezie' (from the French 'jalousie') is a 'every-day' Dutch word for a blind with adjustable horizontal slats.A 'Prie-Dieux' is often seen on medieval paintings, like the one of “The Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin” by Jan van Eyck, a Belgian painter living in the 15th Century.
In many European churches, you can see medieval reliquaries, like the Shrine of the Three Kings in the Cologne Cathedral. (In Dutch, we even call it a 'reliekschrijn', literally 'reliquary-shrine'.) The other words were completely new for me.
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