The Silent Corner Review (non-spoiler)

No Spoilers Ahead!!!!

Just yesterday I finally found myself once again so engrossed in a book that I could not put it down until completion. This book was “The Silent Corner.” by Dean Koontz This book is the first in a five book series and was certainly good enough to deserve a sequel. Why was this book that good though? Every book lover wants that experience. They want a book with such a good plot that it delivers such heightened intrigue that setting it down is not an option; they want a book that has characters so lovable that you have to keep reading about them to ensure that they will be fine. This was “The Silent Corner.” I’m going to use this book to talk about what every author wants to create, a page-turner. 

First I shall set the stage. The Silent Corner” is very much a paranoia, suspense thriller. Our protagonist, Jane Hawk, is an FBI agent on leave, who does not, and cannot, accept the suicide note left by her husband as reality. The note said, “I very much need to be dead,” but her husband had everything to live for. Jane goes on a quest to uncover what she believes to be a mind-control conspiracy, mind control so powerful it could make someone even commit suicide.

Now the stage is set! I don’t know about you all, but I found that synopsis just intriguing enough to warrant picking it up. After reading a little ways in, I did not notice much in the way of action and I was unsure if I wanted to continue. “Wait a second!!!!” You may be saying. “I thought you said this was a page turner!” Well, it was a page turner, but not at first. Koontz can sometimes take a moment to get into the meat of a story and unfortunately it took him around fifty pages into the book to really kick things into gear. It’s only because I like Koontz and saw that there was a lot of buzz around this book in the Koontz community that I persisted. After around fifty pages in though, this book turns into an action-packed, high stakes thrill ride that forces you to turn that next page. So now I will talk about what Koontz does that makes you turn them pages!!!! 

He tells action scenes perfectly. Perfect how though? Simple. He does not just tell you what each character does. He sets a scene. He envelops you in the world of his book before he even unleashes the action. You know what the air smells like, the lighting, the type of building she is in, the street she is driving on. Everything. You can see everything that he is writing about. No detail that is not germane to creating the atmosphere and the world around the protagonist is left out. It’s cinematic. You can feel the bullets whiz by and ricochet off of rain-slick pavement. You can see the rainwater streaming down her arm as she hides behind an object. Except he won’t just say an object. He will tell you exactly what that object is and every other object in that room and where the antagonist is among those objects. You can see it all. You feel like you are watching a movie and I mean that in the best possible way. 

This book does not let up. The action keeps coming, but it is at its best when the finale hits. The finale arrives, or at least the build up to the finale, long before you would think. You are over a hundred pages out and the build up has already begun. Jane Hawk is mad. You are mad. You know it’s coming even though you are clear over a hundred pages from the end. Once again, when the finale hits, when that final showdown occurs, you are engrossed. You do not want to put it down. The action is so riveting and cinematic because you can see everything that the characters are seeing. You feel like you are in the moment and you care. Why do you care though? You care because Jane Hawk is such a lovable character. 

The character of Jane Hawk might be the most important part of this story. The action does not start until over fifty pages in, but what about those pages before? Well Koontz used those pages to make you care about Jane Hawk, so when that first scene of action hits, you care, and you care a lot. This story only reinforces the idea in my head that a story needs to make you care about the main character within the first twenty pages of the book. I’m not talking about making you feel sorry for a character. Any writer can do that. Taking a character’s tragedy and using it not just to make you feel sorry for a character, but also to make you love a character. Not every writer can do that. Using tragedy to give a character depth is hard to do anymore because everyone is used to it and it no longer works that well. This is why writers like Koontz take a character’s tragedy and have them react to it in such a way that you can’t help but love them. Why though did I not care until the action picked up? This would likely have to do with me being heartless, but as La La Land proved, I am indeed not heartless! So who knows why. Jokes aside, I actually did care about Jans Hawk and when the bullets start flying I was scared one might hit Jane Hawk. That’s how you know you wrote your character well. When the protagonist is in danger, you don’t feel detached like it’s just a book. You feel like it’s the real world. Koontz wrote a believable character and made you see everything in the scene. When that happens. You get sucked in and you start caring.

The story took a little too much time at the beginning so I’m knocking a star off for that. Overall the book was staying consistently at a three star level, but that five star finale makes earns this book....

FOUR STARS!!!!