Cold Fire - Dean Koontz

***** Believable characters and beautiful prose

I rarely read supernatural thrillers, because I have a hard time finding these kinds of stories credible. So I was pretty sceptical as I approached this book. I read the beginning in which the protagonist, Jim Ironheart, is driven by a voice in his head to leave his city to prevent that a certain event takes place. It isn’t clear exactly what it is about.

What won me and pushed me to go on was the author’s style and his beautiful prose. Koontz with a few words takes you inside the mind of the character and does so with a very suggestive language. It works so well that I decided to put aside my distrust of the paranormal theme and continue reading.

And I haven’t regretted it at all.

Although the paranormal element is central in this novel, the way it is told, the empathy that the author manages to create towards the two main characters (Jim and Holly) and being able to live their emotions firsthand shifts the focus from the supernatural to the characters themselves. The novel becomes their story. The ambiguity of Jim (and ambiguous characters are always my favourite) and the fears of Holly catch you. And that’s what makes the difference, because, when you create a bond with the characters, they become credible and with them everything that surrounds them, resulting in a solid suspension of disbelief.

Faced with this, had the book treated any other theme, it would still be able to conquer me.

In fact, although the events are impossible in real life, which usually makes me lose interest in the story (unless it is science fiction), this has not happened with this book, because the way they are presented makes them perfectly logical.

Finally, to conclude in the best way this novel, there is the open ending that makes you smile imagining what might happen next.

Cold Fire on Amazon.