Dean Koontz’s ‘Cold Fire‘ centers on the incredible talents of Jim Ironheart. Somehow Jim can tell when someone is going to die. He seems to have no control over this power. He just gets feelings that he needs to be in certain places at certain times to save some stranger from death. A reporter named Holly Thorn soon begins to suspect his involvement in multiple cases. Each one involves a mysterious stranger saving someone from certain death. Jim has never been too clear on what guides him to saving certain people. He just believes that it’s a higher power. Holly begins to suspect that something else is guiding Jim. What is certain is that there is another power, separate from the benevolent force guiding Jim to save others. This other power is dangerous and wants to prevent Jim and Holly from discovering the truth.

‘Cold Fire‘, like Stephen King’s ‘Blaze’, is told from a limited perspective, but unlike King’s work, this novel suffers from the limitation. Not only are Jim and Holly the only perspectives used, they’re almost the only characters in the entire book. I was very disappointed to see a promising premise devolve into cheap psychology. The idea of a man who is forced to travel the world because a voice in his head demands that he save people’s lives is an very interesting one. That got me hooked. The evolution of an interesting idea into a pedestrian one was very disappointing, especially with the lengthy explanation of every detail that composed the conclusion of the story.

So, for future reference, if you’re going to take a cool idea and start explaining it, make sure that your explanation is cool too.

I just finished reading (I guess ‘listening’ would be a more appropriate term, since they were audiobooks) ‘Blaze: A Novel‘ by Stephen King and Dean Koontz’s ‘Cold Fire’. Both books are fairly representative of each author’s work, but both also seem to be told from a fairly unique perspective.

King’s novel was released as one of the “Bachman” books that had been sitting in a shorter format, forgotten for decades before King rediscovered, rewrote, and published it. The novel is told almost exclusively from the perspective of Blaze, a hulking man with a dented forehead that has left with a somewhat diminished mental capacity. Blaze and his partner, George, are in the process of planning the ‘one, last, big score’. In this case the crime they are planning is the kidnapping and ransom of the infant grandchild of local millionaires. George is smarter, older, and more pessimistic than Blaze, but as the story unfolds, we also discover that he’s dead. The question as to whether George exists solely in Blaze’s head or in a supernatural form that guides Blaze’s crimes is constantly raised throughout the book.

The interesting perspective that this book takes is that there is essentially only one character. George is around and constantly talks with Blaze, but he’s not physically there. If this story is ever filmed, Blaze would be the only character that you see for most of the running time. Regardless, the story never suffers from this limitation. It occasionally moves through flashbacks, and these detours let us see more and more of Blaze’s tragic life. The end seems inevitable but is never strained like some of King’s other works. King sometimes seems to get a great idea for a story, but writes himself into a corner. His endings sometimes bare the scars of these literary cul-de-sacs as he struggles to wrap things up at the end. Books like ‘It’, ‘Salem’s Lot’, ‘The Shining’, and ‘Blaze‘ show King at his best throughout the entire novel. However, books like ‘The Stand’, ‘The Dark Tower’, and others leave me thinking that I liked the setup but wished the ending had been different. Kind of like a joke with a great setup, but a punchline that’s just not funny. In any case this is one of Stephen King’s stronger novels, exploring the tragedy of one man’s life.