Slow-Acting Prescription for Paradise

Strangers by Dan R. Koontz (Putnam’s: $17.95)

This is a most unusual and charming book, a fat best seller from the publishers of Stephen King--a chunky volume full of the standard paraphernalia associated with popular wacko-science thrillers. We have poltergeists here, and fiendish villains, and several likable characters across the nation afflicted simultaneously with parallel hallucinations.

So, in effect, we’re reading versions of, revisits of films like “The Exorcist” (a little girl is possessed and urinates on the living-room carpet to the dismay of her mom) and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”--only instead of pictures of a mountain peak, all these unknowing visionaries drift about, either crayoning pictures of the moon, or physically calling up the glowing aura of (what they think of as) the moon, or chattering and gibbering along in their sleep, and awake: “The moon! The moo--oon! “

A Dozen Times Already

All of the above would suggest that this is a novel to stay away from, on the grounds that you’ve seen it in a movie theater a dozen times already, except, except --this really is a charming and unusual book. Oh, sure, you have to sit through the obligatory scenes of Father Brendan Cronin losing his faith--just as he’s learning about how to heal the hopelessly ill. Or Dr. Ginger Marie Weiss--who’s just breaking into a brilliant medical career as an open-heart surgeon--focusing on particular objects, like drains and black leather gloves, and then just “losing it” in a frenzy of terror--and waking up somewhere else. Or Dom Corvaisis ( here’s a fantasy!) changing from a timid man to a risk-taker, writing a first novel which, within weeks, has more than 100,000 copies in the bookstores, but, on the other hand, Dom suffers panic attacks of sleepwalking. He writes--in his sleep--”I’m scared” hundreds of times on his word processor.

In fact, this compendium of symptoms, these introductions to characters who (think they) don’t know each other, this catalogue of strangers, is a trial to get past, since, by definition, these people can’t interact with each other until about halfway into the book.

And one character, Jack Twist, an ex-Ranger, double-crossed by his country and left to rot in a Central American dictatorship while his wife lies in a coma in the Northern Hemisphere, is so contrived as to try the patience of even the most fervid of potboiler readers: Twist is there merely to carry around with him the latest assortment of burglary and military equipment, the better to challenge the villains in this drama.

U.S. Military on the Job

Again, it’s all been done before, in many a movie. These strangers actually were together one night a couple of years ago, in a motel outside of Elko, Nev. Something amazing happened (surely I don’t have to say what it is; the author reveals it on page 473, but a 10-year-old would know within the first 100 pages), and true to the conventions of this kind of story (besides the previously mentioned movies, throw in “Splash” and “Cocoon”), the American military is out there trying to squash the news of what has actually occurred. So a few good guys battle the entire American military complex, and win, thank heavens.

Patience: Praise is coming. But before that, something must be said about the author’s seeming insistence on fear: Everyone in “Strangers” is scared to death for the first two-thirds of the book.

For years, since the first atomic bomb, there has been a long spurt of end-of-the-world literature, but recently American writers have begun to postulate that perhaps we, as a race, stand perched not at the end of the world but at the end of the old world, and at the beginning of a new one. That’s what “Strangers” is about.

The Energy of Friendships

Since the author is fanatically, maddeningly close-mouthed about giving away the central mystery of this long and woolly yarn, I won’t. But I can say that, past the poltergeists and those parallel hallucinations, is the imaginative and interesting part of “Strangers”--that all strangers have within them the miraculous ability to turn themselves into families; that friendships generate an energy equal to the lunatic militarism of any government. That couples can stay together for years and years and love each other, and that this is to be expected; this is the loveliest part of the human species.

So, in the last hundred pages, when these strangers get together to battle evil and fight for good, you could say this is where the real fantasy, the really thrilling part, begins. Dean Koontz has taken a broken-down warhorse of a popular literary form and fed it a lot of oats to make its coat shiny. What if you wanted to get ideas--of healing and spiritual powers, of overwhelming love and of prevailing over our nightmarish weapons--into the heads of the greatest number of people? What better way to do it than through a potential best seller advertised as a study in fear?