The Bad Place

By: Dean Koontz

Narrated by: Carol Cowan, Michael Hanson

Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

Frank Pollard awakens in an alley, knowing nothing but his name - and that he is in great danger. Having taken refuge in a motel, he wakes again only to find his hands covered in blood. As far as he knows, he's no killer. But whose blood is this, and how did it get there?

Over the next few days Frank develops a fear of sleep, because each time he wakes, he discovers strange objects in his hands and pockets - objects far more frightening than blood.

Husband-and-wife detective team Bobby and Julie Dakota specialize in high-ticket corporate security investigations, but when a distraught and desperate Frank Pollard begs them to watch over him, they can't refuse. Out of compassion - and curiosity - they agree to get to the bottom of his mysterious, amnesiac fugues.

It seems a simple job: just follow a client who wants to be watched and tell him where he winds up. But as the Dakotas begin to discover where their client goes when he sleeps, they are drawn slowly into ever-darkening realms where they encounter the ominous figure stalking Frank. Their lives are threatened, as is that of Julie's gentle, Down's-syndrome brother, Thomas.

To Thomas, death is "the bad place" from which there is no return. But Julie and Bobby - and their tortured client - ultimately learn that equally bad places exist in the world of the living, places so steeped in evil that, in contrast ,death seems almost a relief.

©2004 Dean Koontz (P)2004 Brilliance Audio

Critic reviews

"A master storyteller, sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking, but always riveting. His characters sparkle with life. And his fast-paced plots are wonderfully fiendish, taking unexpected twists and turns." ( The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Surprise

First off I didn't realize this was an earlier Koonze, but when ther detectives were looking for a gas station to find a pay phone I realized this wasn't new. This is one of those books that you can't say a lot about without giving away too much. It begins with a man who wakes up in an alley with four major questions..."Where am I, Who am I, Who is trying to kill me, and why." That's a pretty good start and from there it just get's more interesting as you go along, but like I said....It's tough to say very much without saying too much in this story. I'll just say this...It's a good damn ride and Koontz at his best.....One thing though.....If you're a Koontz fan you might think early on that you have an idea where this is all going because of other Koontz stories....You'll be surprised at how wrong you are....

Entertainment for the mind

Enjoyed the book. Not his best work but as always. Interesting. Would buy it again given the opportunity. I'm pleased

Great book, horrible presentation.

Why do audio book readers feel the need to whisper? There is a lot of this in this book, almost made me stop listening. But I'm glad I stayed with it, the story was great.

One of his best

Very clever story. Loved male and female narrators. The ending was a wonderful way to bring this tale to an imaginative close.

Different and unexpected

The audiobook was cleverly presented. The different voices for the different facets was a good vehicle. I enjoyed the story even though it was preposterous at times.

maybe Koontz's most twisted

"But, to Thomas, the Bad Place wasn’t just Hell. It was Death. Hell was a bad place, but Death was the Bad Place. Death was a word you couldn’t picture. Death meant everything stopped, went away, all your time ran out, over, done, kaput. How could you picture that? A thing wasn’t real if you couldn’t picture it. He couldn’t see Death, couldn’t get a picture of it in his head, not if he thought about it the way other people seemed to think about it. He was just too dumb, so he had to picture it in his head as a place. They said Death came to take you, and it had come to take his father one night, his heart had attacked him, but if it came to take you, then it had to take you to some place. And that was the Bad Place."

"He was already afraid of the night. All that big empty. The lid off the world. So if just the night itself was so scary, the Bad Place would be lots worse. It was sure to be bigger than the night, and daylight never came in the Bad Place.
Outside, the sky got darker.
Wind blew the palms.
Rain ran down the glass.
The Bad Thing was far away.
But it would come closer.
Soon."

"A puff of wind swirled around him. Then calm returned, as if the dead night was trying to come back to life but had managed just one shuddering breath."
The Bad Place by Dean Koontz

"being hit immediately by a score of bullets, jerking and twitching in a spasmodic death dance across the blacktop street, like a broken marionette jerked around on tangled strings."

"she, more than food, sustained him."

"She wanted to kick his teeth down his throat, all the way into his stomach, so he could re-chew whatever he had last eaten."

"Everyone harbored a special fear, a private boogeyman built to his own specifications and crouched in a dark corner of his mind,"

"Fear and love were indivisible. If you allowed yourself to care, to love, you made yourself vulnerable, and vulnerability led to fear. He found meaning in life through his relationship with her, and if she died, meaning and purpose would die too."

“Deep down,” the dream-victim had said, “you know that you’re already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you’ve killed them than before.”

"Her lips were slightly parted, as if they had been gently prised open by her spirit as it departed her. Her wonderfully blue, clear eyes seemed enormous, too big for her face—and as wide as a winter sky."

"he might have been a blind man using his hands to describe an inner vision of ideal beauty."

"The sun had touched the horizon and begun to melt into it. The golden light deepened swiftly to orange and then to bloody red."

"They said the pictures and voices and music on the TV were sent through the air, which he first thought was a lie, that they were making fun of his being dumb, expecting him to believe anything, but then Julie said it was true, so sometimes he tried to TV his thoughts to her, because if you could send pictures and music and voices through the air, thoughts ought to be easy."

"Computers were instruments of freedom, and governments were to one degree or another instruments of repression; the two could not always exist in harmony."
The Bad Place by Dean Koontz

"The computer that Lee had been born with was not functioning as smoothly as the ones made by IBM in his office, and he needed a moment to grasp the implications of the information"

"perpetrators had been high on amphetamines and low on common sense and compassion."

"All of her life, Violet had lived at the confluence of many rivers of sensation, bathed in great churning currents of sound and scent and sight and taste and touch, experiencing the world not only through her own senses but those of countless surrogates."

“No need for gremlins,” Julie said. “Life itself gives us all the torment we can handle.”

"He was a big man and obviously tough from years of military training and discipline, but the shimmering, watery evidence of grief brimmed in his eyes, and at the moment he seemed as lost and helpless as a child."

"He was a big man and obviously tough from years of military training and discipline, but the shimmering, watery evidence of grief brimmed in his eyes, and at the moment he seemed as lost and helpless as a child."

“No one really dies, Mr. Pollard. They just go on from here. Grief is good, but guilt is pointless.”

"a picture poem that would have the feeling of eating ice cream and strawberries, not the taste but the good feeling, so some day when you didn’t have any ice cream or strawberries, you could just look at the poem and get that same good feeling even without eating anything. Of course, you couldn’t use pictures of ice cream or strawberries in the poem, because that wouldn’t be a poem, that would be only saying how good ice cream and strawberries made you feel. A poem didn’t just say, it showed you and made you feel."

"thick with shadows as dusk introduced night to the world."

"issued a call of desire without making a sound. There was a powerful lubricity in this mysterious woman that made her the equal of any siren that had ever induced sailors to run their ships onto hull-gouging rocks."

"she didn’t think a noble end could remain purely noble if arrived at by immoral means."

"Sirens were the background music to this night’s adventures"

"Fate played as cruelly with the innocent as with the guilty."

"Though Fogarty’s house was spotless, she wouldn’t have felt clean after drinking or eating anything in it."

"filled her with a dark suspicion that nature was even stranger and more hospitable to anarchy than she had feared."

"LIKE A MEMORY from wars past or a presentiment of an ultimate war to come, a searing flash of lightning and a sky-shattering crash of thunder shook the night."

"So many people admire those murderers who are bold about it and who cloak their bloodlust in noble causes like brotherhood and political reform and justice—and social responsibility."

"For the next two years, he’d periodically return here, just appear like a ghost that wanted to haunt me instead of a place."

"It is all meaningless. We’re not good, and we’re not bad, we’re just meat. We don’t have souls, there’s no hope of transcendence for a slab of meat, you wouldn’t expect a hamburger to go to Heaven after someone ate it.”

"resistance was suicidal."

"Gutters overflowed, and a sudden wind wound skeins of rain, like silver yam, through his headlights."

"favored him with the most subtly textured smile Bobby had ever seen: it was mocking, but it was a would-be lover’s invitation, as well; it was tentative with fear, but simultaneously challenging; hot with lust, cool with dread; and above all, it was wild, as uncivilized and ferocious as any expression on the face of any creature that roamed any field or forest in the world."

"That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and family performed for one another: they tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an endorsement of order and of meaning."

"She no longer felt she could save the world, and he no longer needed to help her save herself."She said she had been wrong that night in Santa Barbara when, in her despair, she had claimed no dreams ever came true. They came true all the time. The problem was, you sometimes had your sights set on a particular dream and missed all the others that turned out your way: like finding him, she said, and being loved."

This Story is so amazing!

I absolutely love the unexpected turn in the final pages. Great book, of course it is, it’s Koontz!!

a very very bad place

an original story filled with compelling and karizmatik characters I could not wait to finish this book one of my favorite books from my favorite author a bad place not a good place to be I'm very very bad place

Koontz at his very BEST!!!

If you could sum up The Bad Place in three words, what would they be?

So Many Layers

What about Carol Cowan and Michael Hanson ’s performance did you like?

Everything.... every characters voice was so believable

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes

Any additional comments?

Koontz takes you to so many new and different places in this book that you want to keep listening to see what's going to happen next!! I loved everything about this book and highly recommend giving it a listen.... you will not be disappointed!!!

Good theme & story. Long.

The story, theme, and plot was complex and very good. At times, the author diverges into mundane unnecessary detail like a Moby Dick narrative on whale biology; upon returning to the main story, I had to back track (re-listen) to regain my prior understanding of events so add 3 hours to the full listen for this one.