Free Ebook 77 Shadow Street (with bonus novella The Moonlit Mind): A Novel, by Dean Koontz
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Welcome to the Pendleton. Built as a tycoon’s dream home in the 1880s and converted to luxury condominiums not quite a century later, the Gilded Age palace at the summit of Shadow Hill is a sanctuary for its fortunate residents. Scant traces remain of the episodes of madness, suicide, mass murder—and whispers of things far worse—that have scarred its grandeur almost from the beginning.
But now inexplicable shadows caper across walls, security cameras relay impossible images, phantom voices mutter in strange tongues, not-quite-human figures lurk in the basement, elevators plunge into unknown depths. With each passing hour a terrifying certainty grows: Whatever drove the Pendleton’s past occupants to their unspeakable fates is at work again. And as nightmare visions become real, as a deadly tide begins to engulf them, the people at 77 Shadow Street will find the key to humanity’s future . . . if they can survive to use it.
Includes the bonus novella The Moonlit Mind—first time in print
- Sales Rank: #271746 in Books
- Brand: Bantam
- Published on: 2012-08-28
- Released on: 2012-08-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.47" h x 1.75" w x 4.22" l, .86 pounds
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 720 pages
Features
Review
PRAISE FOR DEAN KOONTZ
“One of the master storytellers of this or any age.”—The Tampa Tribune
“Koontz writes first-rate suspense, scary and stylish.”—Los Angeles Times
“A rarity among bestselling writers, Koontz continues to pursue new ways of telling stories, never content with repeating himself. He writes of hope and love in the midst of evil in profoundly inspiring and moving ways.”—Chicago Sun-Times
“A master at spinning dark tales . . . Koontz knows how to dial up the terror.”—Associated Press
“Koontz is a superb plotter and wordsmith. He chronicles the hopes and fears of our time in broad strokes and fine detail, using popular fiction to explore the human condition [and] demonstrating that the real horror of life is found not in monsters, but within the human psyche.”—USA Today
“Koontz . . . is a master storyteller and a daring writer. . . . He gives readers bright hope in a dark world.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Dean Koontz . . . has the power to scare the daylights out of us.”—People
“Dean Koontz is not just a master of our darkest dreams, but also a literary juggler.”—The Times (London)
About the Author
Dean Koontz, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Anna, and the enduring spirit of their golden, Trixie.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
The North Elevator
Bitter and drunk, Earl Blandon, a former United States senator, got home at 2:15 a.m. that Thursday with a new tattoo: a two-word obscenity in blue block letters between the knuckles of the middle finger of his right hand. Earlier in the night, at a cocktail lounge, he’d thrust that stiff digit at another customer who didn’t speak English and who was visiting from some third-world backwater where the meaning of the offending gesture evidently wasn’t known in spite of countless Hollywood films in which numerous cinema idols had flashed it. In fact, the ignorant foreigner seemed to mistake the raised finger for some kind of friendly hello and reacted by nodding repeatedly and smiling. Earl was frustrated directly out of the cocktail lounge and into a nearby tattoo parlor, where he resisted the advice of the needle artist and, at the age of fifty-eight, acquired his first body decoration.
When Earl strode through the front entrance of the exclusive Pendleton, into the lobby, the night concierge, Norman Fixxer, greeted him by name. Norman sat on a stool behind the reception counter to the left, a book open in front of him, looking like a ventriloquist’s dummy: eyes wide and blue and glassy, pronounced marionette lines like scars in his face, head cocked at an odd angle. In a tailored black suit and a crisp white shirt and a black bow tie, with a fussily arranged white pocket handkerchief blossoming from the breast pocket of his coat, Norman was overdressed by the standards of the two other concierges who worked the earlier shifts.
Earl Blandon didn’t like Norman. He didn’t trust him. The concierge tried too hard. He was excessively polite. Earl didn’t trust polite people who tried too hard. They always proved to be hiding something. Sometimes they hid the fact that they were FBI agents, pretending instead to be lobbyists with a suitcase full of cash and a deep respect for the power of a senator. Earl didn’t suspect that Norman Fixxer was an FBI agent in disguise, but the concierge was for damn sure something more than what he pretended to be.
Earl acknowledged Norman’s greeting with only a scowl. He wanted to raise his newly lettered middle finger, but he restrained himself. Offending a concierge was a bad idea. Your mail might go missing. The suit you expected back from the dry cleaner by Wednesday evening might be delivered to your apartment a week later. With food stains. Although flashing the finger at Norman would be satisfying, a full apology would require doubling the usual Christmas gratuity.
Consequently, Earl scowled across the marble-floored lobby, his embellished finger curled tightly into his fist. He went through the inner door that Norman buzzed open for him and into the communal hallway, where he turned left and, licking his lips at the prospect of a nightcap, proceeded to the north elevator.
His third-floor apartment was at the top of the building. He did not have a city view, only windows on the courtyard, and seven other apartments shared that level, but his unit was sufficiently well-positioned to justify calling it his penthouse, especially because it was in the prestigious Pendleton. Earl once owned a five-acre estate with a seventeen-room manor house. He liquidated it and other assets to pay the ruinous fees of the blood-sucking, snake-hearted, lying-bastard, may-they-all-rot-in-hell defense attorneys.
As the elevator doors slid shut and as the car began to rise, Earl surveyed the hand-painted mural that covered the walls above the white wainscoting and extended across the ceiling: bluebirds soaring joyously through a sky in which the clouds were golden with sunlight. Sometimes, like now, the beauty of the scene and the joy of the birds seemed forced, aggravatingly insistent, so that Earl wanted to get a can of spray paint and obliterate the entire panorama.
He might have vandalized it if there hadn’t been security cameras in the hallways and in the elevator. But the homeowners’ association would only restore it and make him pay for the work. Large sums of money no longer came to him in suitcases, in valises, in fat manila envelopes, in grocery bags, in doughnut-shop boxes, or taped to the bodies of high-priced call girls who arrived naked under leather trench coats. These days, this former senator so frequently felt the urge to deface so many things that he needed to strive to control himself lest he vandalize his way into the poorhouse.
He closed his eyes to shut out the schmaltzy scene of sun-washed bluebirds. When the air temperature abruptly dropped perhaps twenty degrees in an instant, as the car passed the second floor, Earl’s eyes startled open, and he turned in bewilderment when he saw that the mural no longer surrounded him. The security camera was missing. The white wainscoting had vanished, too. No inlaid marble underfoot. In the stainless-steel ceiling, circles of opaque material shed blue light. The walls, doors, and floor were all brushed stainless steel.
Before Earl Blandon’s martini-marinated brain could fully absorb and accept the elevator’s transformation, the car stopped ascending—and plummeted. His stomach seemed to rise, then to sink. He stumbled sideways, clutched the handrail, and managed to remain on his feet.
The car didn’t shudder or sway. No thrumming of hoist cables. No clatter of counterweights. No friction hum of rollers whisking along greased guide rails. With express-elevator speed, the steel box raced smoothly, quietly down.
Previously, the car-station panel—B, 1, 2, 3—had been part of the controls to the right of the doors. It still was there, but now the numbers began at 3, descended to 2 and 1 and B, followed by a new 1 through 30. He would have been confused even if he’d been sober. As the indicator light climbed—7, 8, 9—the car dropped. He couldn’t be mistaking upward momentum for descent. The floor seemed to be falling out from under him. Besides, the Pendleton had just four levels, only three aboveground. The floors represented on this panel must be subterranean, all below the basement.
But that made no sense. The Pendleton had one basement, a single underground level, not thirty or thirty-one.
So this could not be the Pendleton anymore. Which made even less sense. No sense at all.
Maybe he had passed out. A vodka nightmare.
No dream could be this vivid, this intensely physical. His heart thundered. His pulse throbbed in his temples. Acid reflux burned his throat, and when he swallowed hard to force down the bitter flood, the effort brought tears that blurred his vision.
He blotted the tears with a suit-coat sleeve. He blinked at the indicator board: 13, 14, 15. . . .
Panicked by a sudden intuitive conviction that he was being conveyed to a place as terrifying as it was mysterious, Earl let go of the handrail. He crossed the car and scanned the backlit control board for an emergency stop button.
None existed.
As the car passed 23, Earl jammed a thumb hard against the button for 26, but the elevator didn’t stop, didn’t even slow until it passed 29. Then rapidly yet smoothly, momentum fell. With a faint liquid hiss like hydraulic fluid being compressed in a cylinder, the car came to a full stop, apparently thirty floors under the city.
Sobered by a supernatural fear—fear of what, he could not say—Earl Blandon shrank away from the doors. With a thud, he backed into the rear wall of the car.
In his storied past, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had once been to a meeting in the bunker far beneath the White House, where the president might one day try to ride out a nuclear holocaust. That deep redoubt was bright and clean, yet it impressed him as more ominous than any graveyard at night. He had some experience of cemeteries from his earliest days as a state lawmaker, when he had thought that in such lonely places, from earth and graves and dust, no one could be raised up to witness the paying of a bribe. This quiet elevator felt far more ominous than even the presidential bunker.
He waited for the doors to open. And waited.
Throughout his life, he’d never been a fearful man. Instead, he inspired fear in others. He was surprised that he could be so suddenly and completely terrorized. But he understood what reduced him to this pathetic condition: evidence of something otherworldly.
A strict materialist, Earl believed only in what he could see, touch, taste, smell, and hear. He trusted nothing but himself, and he needed no one. He believed in the power of his mind, in his singular cunning, to bend any situation to his benefit.
In the presence of the uncanny, he was without defense.
Shudders passed through him with such violence that it seemed he should hear his bones knocking together. He tried to make fists, but proved to be so weak with dread that he could not clench his hands. He raised them from his sides, looked at them, willing them to close into tight knuckled weapons.
He was sober enough now to realize that the two words tattooed on the middle finger of his right hand could have made his insult no clearer to the clueless third-world patron in the cocktail lounge. The guy probably couldn’t read English any more than he could speak it.
As close to a negative self-judgment as he had ever come, Earl Blandon muttered, “Idiot.”
As the car doors slid open, his enlarged prostate seemed to clench as his fists would not. He came perilously close to peeing in his pants.
Beyond the open doors lay only a darkness so perfect that it seemed to be an abyss, vast and perhaps bottomless, into which the blue light of the elevator could not penetrate. In this icy silence of the tomb, Earl Blandon stood motionless, deaf now even to the pounding in his chest, as if his heart were suddenly dry of blood. This was the quiet at the limit of the world, where no air existed to be breathed, where time ended. It was the most terrible thing he had ever heard—until a more alarming sound, that of something approaching, arose from the blackness beyond the open doors.
Ticking, scraping, muffled rustling: This was either the blind but persistent questing of something large and strange beyond the power of the senator’s imagination . . . or a horde of smaller but no less mysterious creatures, an eager swarm. A shrill keening, almost electronic in nature yet unmistakably a voice, quivered through the blackness, a cry that might have been of hunger or desire, or bloodletting frenzy, but certainly a cry of urgent need.
As panic trumped Earl’s paralyzing dread, he bolted to the control panel, scanning it for a close door button. Every elevator offered such a feature. Except this one. There was neither a close door nor an open door button, neither one labeled emergency stop nor one marked alarm, neither a telephone nor a service intercom, only the numbers, as if this were an elevator that never malfunctioned or required service.
In his peripheral vision, he saw something loom in the open doorway. When he turned to face it directly, he thought the sight would stop his heart, but such an easy end was not his fate.
Most helpful customer reviews
243 of 248 people found the following review helpful.
Worth reading -- but not among Koontz's best
By Kathy Cunningham
Dean Koontz's 77 SHADOW STREET is not an easy book to describe. On the one hand, it's a fairly familiar haunted house tale in which generations of residents at a posh Victorian mansion are sucked into a terrible nightmare. On the other hand, it's Koontz's little jab at the modern world, which he sees as disintegrating around us, leaving us unprepared to combat the ultimate forces of evil. The house itself, once called Belle Vista and now the Pendleton, happens to have been constructed on something Koontz calls a "space-time trapdoor," which opens every 38 years to suck in the hapless people unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. This can be scary, if a bit derivative (you'll be reminded of THE SHINING, 1408, THE MIST, and even the TV series AMERICAN HORROR STORY). There's an evil presence called "One" (who wants ultimate dominion), and another called "Witness" (who will help him achieve it). There are creepy creatures galore, and a few really grotesque happenings. But somehow the novel didn't work for me.
The biggest problem with 77 SHADOW STREET is the way Koontz tells his story. There is a huge cast of characters, which are introduced slowly over the first half of the book through a series of vignettes told from differing perspectives. At first it's difficult to keep track of all of them; it's also difficult to get very attached to any of them. Devon Murphy is a security guard still mourning the loss of his mother, Bailey Hawkes is an ex-marine investment counselor, Silas Kinsley is a retired litigation attorney who finds himself researching the history of the Pendleton, Twyla Trahern is a country music composer with a precocious 8-year-old son, Mikey Dime is a hit man with psychopathic tendencies, the Cupp sisters are octogenarian cake-bakers, Sparkle Sykes is writer with an autistic daughter - the list honestly goes on and on (and I haven't even mentioned the characters from past generations of Pendleton residents). It's not that these characters aren't interesting - some of them are. It's just that there are so many of them, and the story jumps from one to the other in little mini-chapters which never allow the reader to become really invested in any of them. This makes it hard to care all that much what happens to them when things go crazy at horror house.
Additionally, there is an amazing lack of dialogue in this novel. For almost the entire first half, Koontz's many characters are isolated from each other, each in his/her own apartment. The story unfolds from their many perspectives, with Koontz telling us what's happening, describing events, even summarizing conversations that we never actually get to hear. It's an odd way of telling a story, especially with so many characters involved. It leaves us, as readers, distanced from the core of the action, and kept separated from the characters we're supposed to root for.
Ultimately, Koontz's story is interesting, and I can't say the book isn't worth reading. I grew tired of it, however, which isn't what I expected from a Dean Koontz thriller. And by the end, I wasn't invested enough in any of the characters to really care why all this was happening and what we were supposed to learn from it. "This world," one character says, "is a dark place, and hard." That much comes through very clearly in 77 SHADOW STREET. I was disappointed, however. Two stars for the novel; the additional one is for Mr. Koontz, whose books I have loved for decades. I will always be a fan.
115 of 123 people found the following review helpful.
Wow...where do I begin?
By EmilyJane1818
I WANT to like books that I buy. I realize that it takes authors a great deal of time and effort to bring a book to fruition, and I feel horrible when I leave a negative review. Unfortunately, I'm about to feel horrible.
I've been a faithful Koontz fan for ages...Odd Thomas is one of my all-time favorite characters. And having read Dean Koontz for so long, I've come to think of his books ("Odd Thomas" and "Frankenstein" aside -- those are special) along the lines of, "If you've read one, you've read them all." He thinks of so many different ways to tell "good versus evil" stories, that even though the premise was the same in most of his books, they were still entertaining. However, not only was this book not, "Odd Thomas" or "Frankenstein," but it was also not like anything else I've ever read by this author. In fact, as I was reading this book, I wondered if Dean Koontz actually wrote it (the plethora of incomplete sentences was a big, unwelcome surprise).
The plot was far more science-fiction than horror or thriller. The storyline was weird. The suspense was lukewarm. Character development was pretty much nil. The ending was anticlimactic. I'm sorry to say that much of this book was REDUNDANT and BORING; I eventually got to the point where I just wanted to get reading it over with. It was during this time that I read only the first sentence of each paragraph for many of the chapters, and guess what? I DIDN'T MISS ANYTHING.
I guess the only part of this book that I actually did like was the advertisement for the new Odd Thomas book at the end.
85 of 90 people found the following review helpful.
Who wrote this? It surely couldn't be Dean Koontz!!
By Sojourner
As a huge fan of Dean Koontz, I could scarcely contain my anticipation while waiting for the release of his latest offering. I was looking forward to a heart-racing romp through the unknown with one of my favorite authors, so I cleared the decks of all book-interfering obligations, poured myself a glass of my favorite beverage, and settled in for a good read. I doggedly kept at it thinking "77" must just be a slow starter or that my mood wasn't right, but after all is said and done, this is one of the worst books I've read in a very long time.
I don't normally write reviews, but I'm an avid reader of them, especially when approaching authors new to me. I've come to rely on my invisible Amazon friends to help identify the stars and the stinkers. When I find someone who likes the same books I do and for the same reasons, I'll go look at their other reviews for hints about what to read next. Folks, my disappointment with this book was so huge, that I found my voice. No, I take that back. I felt compelled to issue a warning to the virtual community of people who enjoy the written word: If you are looking for Dean Koontz, you will not find him here. Instead of being caught up in the suspense, my mind kept puzzling over how this book ever got published and what on earth was the editor doing. Who kidnapped Dean Koontz and when will they release him? His reading public is worried and anxiously awaits his return.
You can read the other reviews for a summary, but my personal experience is that I had a very difficult time reading this to completion. My thoughts would wander, I would need tea, I would need to call for a dental appointment, but mostly I needed many, many little mini-naps. When my snoring would wake me yet again, I'd have to check my notes before I could remember who occupied which apartment. I cared so little for the people caught in this haunted manse, that I had to have a crib sheet.
Normally I devour Mr. Koontz's offerings as though in a single gulp, staying up far later than I should, attempting to cook with one hand while coddling the book with the other, ignoring family and social life just because I simply can't stop until he leads me breathless across the finish line. My usual experience is that finishing his books brings me blinking my way into reality aware that I've just had a terrific time. I've been known to tell people that I can't interact during the last 50 pages and they need to come back later. Unfortunately, this book just did not resonate in that way. I found myself actually eyeing constant companion, my Kindle, with a feeling of dread and finding more and more reasons not to read. If you knew me, you'd laugh when I tell you that scrubbing the grout in the bathroom at one point rated at a higher priority to reading yet another tedious chapter. The weirdest thing was that I felt guilty for avoiding this book, and the only way I pushed myself back into the story was by bribing myself that I could order something new and delightful for my Kindle, but first had to take my medicine and finish this book. Silly, huh?
Mr. Koontz, if you read this, writing this review nearly broke my heart. I generally enjoy your work and I believe I have purchased everything you've written. It would be interesting to someday hear your thoughts on why this one just didn't work for readers like me.
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