Life Expectancy

For Christmas, over half of my presents were books by Dean Koontz, possibly my all-time favourite author. So the only logical thing to do was to read as many of these books as possible. The first book from this list is the book Life Expectancy.

From the flap:

Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital... Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the first and last time since his stroke.

He says... that there will be five dark days in the life of his grandson -- five dates whose terrible events Jimmy will have to prepare himself to face.

Rudy Tock is ready to discount his father's last words as a dying man's delusional rambling. But then he discovers that Josef also predicted the time of his grandson's birth to the minute, as well as his exact height and weight, and the face that Jimmy would be born with syndactyly.

And it just gets eerier from there.

From the opening chapter where a pissed-off clown goes postal, kills the doctor and takes his baby away, to the closing chapters with a final showdown against the man that started it all, this book is guaranteed to keep you turning pages until the very end.

What's interesting about this book is that it's from the point of view of Jimmy Tock. He describes the night of his birth (as told by his father, of course), as well as all five cursed days, through which he meets his wife, starts a family, gets shot twice in the chest, etc. But suddenly, toward the end of the book, the point of view switches to Lorrie's (Jimmy's wife), where the rest of the story is told from. An interesting twist, but it just made it all that more enjoyable.

There was just the perfect mix of humour and action that kept me reading until the very end of the book. My favourite character by far was Grandma Rowena, an 80-year-old woman who just doesn't give a rip about what people think of her anymore. She'll say and do what she wants to, and it makes for some very entertaining moments in the book.

Life Expectancy is 401 pages in length (hardcover) and published by Bantam Books.