Ashley Bell: A Novel

“Expertly blending the mystical and the everyday, [Dean] Koontz creates alternate universes for his characters while playing hide-and-seek with the truth. . . . A mind-bender filled with satisfying surprises.” — People (book of the week) “Dean Koontz outdoes himself with his latest journey, which solidifies his reputation as one of the best storytellers in the book business. . . . [With] lyrical writing and compelling characters . . . Koontz stands alone, and this novel is a prime example of literary suspense. . . . [He] knows what he’s doing, and the baffling story with the stellar character of Bibi Blair makes this thriller one of his best.” —Associated Press “Grabs you on page one and keeps you enthralled with ever widening loops of intrigue, spine-tingling plot twists, absorbing characters and emotional involvement . . . extraordinary.” — Bookreporter “A fascinating exploration of destiny that is heart-pounding and mind-boggling . . . Koontz is a masterful plotter, capable of juggling the many threads of this story without losing sight of the whole. . . . [He] knows how to captivate and surprise; readers will be handsomely rewarded by this well-paced thriller that blurs the line between what is real and what is imagined, between past and present, present and future. Ashley Bell is a rarity of a thriller—one that asks big questions about life and destiny while succeeding in creating such an eerie sense of reality that sleeping with the lights on might seem like a sane idea.” — Shelf Awareness “Strap in and hold on. . . . The most stunning, flat-out crazy reading experience yet from a writer who specializes in surprises. If you’ve ever wondered how much fun it would be to feel a book unfold in real time along with its characters, you need to read Ashley Bell right now. . . . Along the way, Koontz salts [the] journey with a sweeping assortment of characters, some of whom threaten to shoplift the narrative and take it home. . . . When a writer has managed to catch this kind of lightning in a bottle, every reader should experience the full jolt.” — BookPage “In every industry there exist ‘artists’ that are not only unforgettable, but know their craft better than the rest. Dean Koontz, yet again, proves that he is among these craftsmen. . . . There is so much to say about this treasure. The mystical plays a part, the reality of life on the edge plays a part and . . . nothing can be given away. What can be stated is that Koontz was born with that unbelievable gift to, in one paragraph, write a line that makes readers want to hide under their beds, followed by a joke that makes them laugh, and end with a line so beautiful they are stunned. If there was ever an author that deserved praise, it is, was, and remains, Dean Koontz. Do not miss this!” — Suspense Magazine “[The] opening is gorgeous and crushing, and will shake awake anyone who thinks Koontz is just grinding out genre tomes. . . . It’s gripping stuff, but Koontz doesn’t stop there, adding a series of flashbacks regarding the alchemy of creativity and the fuel of trauma, and that’s before the Say what? twist that upends everything. . . . Fans will adore it. Koontz hits the canny nexus of horror, mystery, and fantasy here.” — Booklist “Koontz crafts a story shifting between reality and imagination, highlighted by distinct descriptions. . . . Bibi’s a believable protagonist surrounded by interesting bit players. . . . Koontz’s setting, with California coastal fog a metaphor for illness and for knowledge beyond understanding, makes real the often surrealistic narrative. . . . [ Ashley Bell ] cuts between the fantastical and the believable to dissect evil, explore the power of imagination, and probe the parameters of consciousness.” — Kirkus Reviews “Throughout his long and outstanding career, Koontz has made a habit of melding and crossing genres to create his own brand of unforgettable fiction. Just when you think he can’t top himself, Koontz proves us wrong by creating his most mind-blowing and amazing book to date. Ashley Bell is an astonishing novel that sucks you in from the first page and delivers so many twists, you are bound to get whiplash.” — RT Book Reviews “Dean Koontz has become an essential part of my library and my creative life, influencing me at the keyboard, an invisible mentor. Ashley Bell might be his finest and most personal novel yet. It is everything you’d expect from Koontz—multilayered and richly told and fueled by page-turning suspense—but it is also as tender as it is terrifying, a story about love, mortality, and the redemptive power of imagination.” —Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding “A mighty fan of Koontz’s story-making, I found his newest, Ashley Bell, to possess that rare hypnotic pull that I can’t get away from. It unfolds like a tricky Oriental fan, with layers and more layers of intrigue seeping through porous pages. But what makes my heart throb is not just the beauty of Koontz’s masterful prose, but the depth of his heart and the dizzying height of his wicked imagination, enchanted by his artless playfulness, easily making this novel about novel-making the best book of literary genre fiction on the landscape.” —Da Chen, New York Times bestselling author of Colors of the Mountain, Brothers, and My Last Empress “ Ashley Bell is a lyrical, surprising, and sensitive novel, with the narrative propulsion that is Koontz’s signature. You won’t want to put it down except to contemplate its thought-provoking twists. Koontz manages to recruit a terrifically suspenseful story as part of a fascinating meditation on the hidden interactions of literature, health, and inner strength.” —Matthew Pearl, author of The Last Bookaneer “Readers will fall hard for Bibi Blair, the fierce and dangerously smart heroine of Dean Koontz’s mind-bending thrill ride, Ashley Bell . Koontz delivers a sharp, unsettling, philosophically stimulating examination of consciousness, memory, and the intense power of story. He doesn’t just ask the big questions, he turns them inside out. A philosophically stimulating nightmare you won’t want to wake up from.” —Michelle Richmond, author of The Year of Fog and Golden State Dean Koontz , the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirit of their goldens, Trixie and Anna. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 The Girl Whose Mind Was Always Spinning The year that Bibi Blair turned ten, which was twelve years before Death came calling on her, the sky was a grim vault of sorrow nearly every day from January through mid-March, and the angels cried down flood after flood upon Southern California. That was how she described it in her diary: a sorrowing sky, the days and nights washed by the grief of angels, though she didn’t speculate on the cause of their celestial distress. Even then, she was writing short stories in addition to keeping a diary. That rainy winter, her simple narratives were all about a dog named Jasper whose cruel master had abandoned him on a storm-swept beach south of San Francisco. In each of those little fictions, Jasper, a gray-and-black mongrel, found a new home. But at the end of every tale, his haven proved impermanent for one reason or another. Determined to keep his spirits high, good Jasper traveled southward, hundreds of miles, in search of his forever home. Bibi was a happy child, a stranger to melancholy; therefore, it seemed odd to her then—and for years after—that she should write multiple woeful episodes about a lonely, beleaguered mutt whose search for love was never more than briefly fulfilled. Understanding didn’t come to her until after her twenty-second birthday. In one sense, everyone is a magpie. Bibi was one, but she didn’t know it then. Much time would pass before she recognized some truths that she had hidden away in her magpie heart. The magpie, a bird with striking pied plumage and a long tail, often hoards objects that strike it as significant: buttons, bits of string, twists of ribbon, colorful beads, fragments of broken glass. Having concealed these treasures from the world, the magpie builds a new nest the following year and forgets where its trove is located; therefore, having hidden its collection even from itself, the bird starts a new one. People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they’re children. That sodden winter when she was ten, Bibi lived with her parents in a small bungalow in Corona del Mar, a picturesque neighborhood of Newport Beach. Although they were just three blocks from the Pacific, they had no ocean view. The first Saturday in April, she was home alone, sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of the quaint shingled house as warm rain streamed straight down through the palm trees and the ficuses, as it sizzled on the blacktop like hot oil on a griddle. She was not a child who lazed around. Her mind remained always busy, spinning. She had a yellow lined tablet and a collection of pencils with which she was composing yet another installment in the saga of lonesome Jasper. Movement at the periphery of her vision caused her to look up, whereupon she discovered a soaked and weary dog ascending the sidewalk from the distant sea. At ten, her sense of wonder had not been worn thin; and she sensed that a surprising turn of events was about to occur. In the grip of an agreeable expectation, she put down the tablet and the pencil, rose from the chair, and went to the head of the porch steps. The dog looked nothing like the lonely mongrel in her stories. The bedraggled golden retriever halted where the bungalow walkway met the public sidewalk. Girl and beast regarded each other. She called to him, “Here, boy, here.” He needed to be coaxed, but eventually he approached the porch and climbed the steps. Bibi stooped to his level to peer into his eyes, which were as golden as his coat. “You stink.” The retriever yawned, as if his stinkiness was old news to him. He wore a cracked and filthy leather collar. No license tag dangled from it. There wasn’t one of those name-and-phone-number plates riveted to it, which a responsible owner should have provided. Bibi led the dog off the porch, through the rain, around the side of the house, into a brick-paved thirty-foot-square courtyard flanked by stuccoed privacy walls along the property lines to the east and west. To the south stood a two-car garage that opened onto an alleyway. Exterior steps rose to a small balcony and an apartment above the garage. Bibi avoided glancing up at those windows. She told the retriever to wait on the back porch while she went into the house. He surprised her by being there when she returned with two beach towels, shampoo, a hair dryer, and a hairbrush. He ran with her across the courtyard, out of the rain and into the garage. After she turned on the lights, after she took the stained and mud-crusted collar from around his neck, she saw something that she had not previously noticed. She considered dropping the collar in the garbage can, burying it under other trash, but she knew that would be wrong. Instead, she opened a drawer in the cabinet beside her father’s workbench, took one of several chamois cloths from his supply, and wrapped the collar in it. A sound issued from the apartment overhead, a brief hard clatter. Startled, Bibi looked at the garage ceiling, where the open four-by-six joists were festooned with spider architecture. She thought she heard a low and anguished voice, too. After listening intently for half a minute, she told herself that she must have imagined it. Between two of the joists, backlit by a bare dust-coated bulb in a white ceramic socket, a fat spider danced from string to string, plucking from its silken harp a music beyond human hearing. Bibi thought of Charlotte the spider, who saved Wilbur the pig, her friend, in E. B. White’s book Charlotte’s Web. For a moment, Bibi was all but unaware of the garage as an image rose in her mind and became more real to her than reality: Hundreds of tiny young spiders, Charlotte’s offspring fresh from her egg sac many weeks after her sad death, standing on their heads and pointing their spinnerets at the sky, letting loose small clouds of fine silk. The clouds form into miniature balloons, and the baby spiders become airborne. Wilbur the pig is overcome with wonder and delight, but also with sadness, while he watches the aerial armada sail away to far places, wishing them well but sorry to be deprived of this last connection to his lost friend Charlotte.u2008.u2008.u2008.xa0 With a thin whine and soft bark, the dog brought Bibi back to the reality of the garage. Later, after the retriever had been washed and dried and brushed, during a break in the rain, Bibi took him into the house. When she showed him the small bedroom that was hers, she said, “If Mom and Dad don’t blow their tops when they see you, then you’ll sleep here with me.” The dog watched with interest as Bibi dragged a cardboard box out of the closet. It contained books that wouldn’t fit on the already heavily laden shelves flanking her bed. She rearranged the volumes to create a hollow into which she inserted the chamois-wrapped collar before returning the box to the closet. “Your name is Olaf,” she informed the retriever, and he reacted to this christening by wagging his tail. “Olaf. Someday, I’ll tell you why.” In time, Bibi forgot about the collar because she wanted to forget. Nine years would pass before she discovered it at the bottom of that box of books. And when she found it, she folded the chamois around it once more and sought a new place in which to conceal it. Read more