Darkfall by Dean Koontz

One of the fondest memories from my childhood revolves around a night when I was in the sixth grade a few days before Christmas. It was a snowy night and up and down the street houses were brightly lit with colorful lights, and inside, those same decorative lights glowed against the dark branches of our drying Christmas tree. Christmas, however, has nothing to do with the memory, though it is hard to think back to that night without seeing all the decorations and realizing how creepy such a cheerful season can be, especially during a winter storm that traps one inside the house, one which causes the colorful lights to sway back and forth and tap against the windows, one which makes you realize just how vulnerable you really are.

Now, for as long as I can remember my little brother and I have loved to be scared — well, being scared by the type of scare that couldn’t really hurt us (no one likes to be really, really scared, the way you are really, really scared during a intense firefight with Iraqi insurgents, or while being wheeled into major bowel resection surgery). These types of scares usually involved either watching a scary movie (I still remember watching Halloween and the original The Haunting with my mother while still in grade school and barely being able to sleep for a week) or being read a scary, so it wasn’t unusual for my mother to pick out the scary moments from the books she read and read them to us — she wouldn’t let us read the books due to sex scenes, but thought the scary parts were okay.

The prologue to the book Darkfall by Dean Koontz was one of those parts my mother read to us, doing so on that creepy snowy night mentioned above. The scene starts out with a little girl waking up in the middle of the night because she heard a strange scratching noise coming from under her little brother’s bed. At first she tries to rationalize the sound, but then realizes she can’t do that. Nothing happens to the little girl, which is good since she is one of the main characters of the book, and really this scene is just a build up for the more intense, more frightening scene that comes within the next few pages and features a mobster trapped inside his nice big house being hunted by thousands of tiny demon like creatures that have silver eyes that glow in the dark.

My mother did not read any more of the book to us, but that beginning scene with the little girl and then the mobster was enough to haunt our nighttime dreams for months, and helped make me realize how scary small little demon creatures can be, especially when they can move around the house through the heating ducks and behind the walls, their tiny little claws tapping against the metal pipes, their tiny little fingers unscrewing the screws in the vents, their tiny eyes glowing in the dark and looking down on you from their shadowy hiding places.

It was five years later before my mother finally allowed me to start reading Dean Koontz on my own. I remember sitting at Borders with her holding the book Ticktock and begging her to let me buy it (this was once again at Christmas time only now I was sixteen years old). After a long talk about the book my mother finally relented. I started reading it that night and have never been more frightened from an opening scene. Both Ticktock and Darkfall were the scariest books I have ever read (Misery by Stephen King which I read a year later had my heart going as well, but didn’t frighten me the way these two books did) and were probably the main reason why I have chosen the horror / suspense field when it comes to penning my own stories.