Koontz was good, became great

Just finished The Vision by Dean Koontz. It's one of his earlier works, 1977, and it's interesting to see how far he's come. His stuff is just tighter now, more precise, and doesn't need to resort to shocking sex scenes to captivate you. Perhaps the most interesting part in the newer edition paperback version I bought is the afterward, where he describes the circumstances under which he was living at the time - in Las Vegas with "tortoises, mad doctors, and con men."

My favorite underlined (I'm an underliner) portion from The Vision, is a description of their friend, the small town newspaper editor who drinks too much (damn stereotypes! hiccup):

"He argued that if you understood how screwed up the world was, if you saw how like a paradise it could be, if you understood that what could be never would be because most people were hopeless jackasses -- well, then you needed a crutch to get through life with your sanity intact. For some people, he said, it was money or drugs or any of a hundred other things. His crutch was Scotch. And damned good bourbon."