Tiny demons with silver eyes coming out of the heating ducts to enact a violent revenge on a rich drug dealer and anyone else that should get between the them and their prey -- just the type of cheerful story you would read to put your young children to bed one snowy December night, right?  Well, if you were my Mother, then the answer would be yes.  The prologue to Darkfall by Dean Koontz ended up being a bedtime story for my little brother and I shortly before Christmas while we were in grade school and scared the shit out of us.  For days afterward I couldn’t go near or even look at the heating duct coverings anywhere in the house, even if the lights were on, and anytime I saw

Christmas lights glowing in the dark through a window they became the silver eyes of the demonic creatures from Hell.  Even worse, I never was able to find out what happened to these little demonic creatures because the book was considered too adult for us to read in its entirety, and therefore had to wait several years until I was old enough to buy it myself -- something that happened when I was sixteen.  Buy it I did, however, and read it in about three days, my eyes going from page to page as if on a quest, one that had been snagged up years earlier, but was now moving smoothly.

Originally intended as one of his ‘Owen West’ novels, but then published under his own name due to the success of Phantoms and other genera works, Dean Koontz’s Darkfall is a splendid little horror novel that is perfectly suited for someone in need of a fast scary read over the holidays (or any time of year really).  Set during a cold New York December, the story tells the tale of single parent police detective Jack Dawson who is working a series of bizarre murders with his partner Rebecca Chandler.  The murders are targeting a specific crime family and are incredibly brutal, often looking as if angry rodents had been unleashed upon the victims.  Making the situation even more disturbing is that some of the victims were under police surveillance at the time of their murders, yet no record of anyone going in or out of the houses was recorded.  Because of this Jack Dawson starts thinking there is more at work here than meets the eye, something which causes him to get very close to the man responsible for the crimes.  From there things get really bad as the man responsible decides to target Jack’s children, which sets the stage for an incredibly scary chase

scene through the blizzard choked streets of New York City.

It has been a long time since I read this book, even longer since my mother read us the prologue, yet I still sometimes catch myself growing weary of the heating ducts around the house and worrying that something might be watching from within, which is why I highly recommend this one.  Anything that has the ability to stick with someone this long, especially someone who has read so many novels since, has to be good and shouldn’t be missed.  What is even more astonishing is that Darkfall wasn’t the only book Dean Koontz published that year.  The Servants of Twilight (originally titled Twilight), which many fans considers to be another one of his bests (me included), was published under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols as well, which, again, was another book my Mother used to scare us to sleep with.