The City (Thorndike Press Large Print Core), by Dean Koontz
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The City (Thorndike Press Large Print Core), by Dean Koontz
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There are millions of stories in the city - some magical, some tragic, others terror-filled or triumphant. Jonah Kirk's story is all of those things as he draws readers into his life in the city as a young boy, introducing his indomitable 'piano man' grandfather; his single mother, a beautiful, struggling singer; and the heroes, villains and everyday saints and sinners who make up the fabric of the metropolis in which they live - and who will change the course of Jonah's life forever.
The City (Thorndike Press Large Print Core), by Dean Koontz - Amazon Sales Rank: #1162122 in Books
- Brand: Large Print Press
- Published on: 2015-03-03
- Format: Large Print
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x 1.00" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 572 pages
The City (Thorndike Press Large Print Core), by Dean Koontz Review Praise for The City “Beautifully crafted and poignant . . . The City is many things: serious, lighthearted, nostalgic, courageous, scary, and mysterious. . . . [It] will have readers staying up late at night.”—New York Journal of Books “[Koontz] can flat-out write. . . . The message of hope and depiction of how the choices you make can change your life ring true and will remain with you once the book has been closed.”—BookreporterAcclaim for Dean Koontz “Perhaps more than any other author, Koontz writes fiction perfectly suited to the mood of America: novels that acknowledge the reality and tenacity of evil but also the power of good . . . that entertain vastly as they uplift.”—Publishers Weekly“A rarity among bestselling writers, Koontz continues to pursue new ways of telling stories, never content with repeating himself.”—Chicago Sun-Times “Tumbling, hallucinogenic prose. ‘Serious’ writers . . . might do well to examine his technique.”—The New York Times Book Review “[Koontz] has always had near-Dickensian powers of description, and an ability to yank us from one page to the next that few novelists can match.”—Los Angeles Times “Koontz is a superb plotter and wordsmith. He chronicles the hopes and fears of our time in broad strokes and fine detail, using popular fiction to explore the human condition.”—USA Today “Characters and the search for meaning, exquisitely crafted, are the soul of [Koontz’s] work. . . . One of the master storytellers of this or any age.”—The Tampa Tribune “A literary juggler.”—The Times (London)
About the Author Dean R. Koontz, the author of many #1 "New York Times" bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Trixie, in southern California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. chapter 1My name is Jonah Ellington Basie Hines Eldridge Wilson Hampton Armstrong Kirk. From as young as I can remember, I loved the city. Mine is a story of love reciprocated. It is the story of loss and hope, and of the strangeness that lies just beneath the surface tension of daily life, a strangeness infinite fathoms in depth.The streets of the city weren’t paved with gold, as some immigrants were told before they traveled half the world to come there. Not all the young singers or actors, or authors, became stars soon after leaving their small towns for the bright lights, as perhaps they thought they would. Death dwelt in the metropolis, as it dwelt everywhere, and there were more murders there than in a quiet hamlet, much tragedy, and moments of terror. But the city was as well a place of wonder, of magic dark and light, magic of which in my eventful life I had much experience, including one night when I died and woke and lived again.2When I was eight, I would meet the woman who claimed she was the city, though she wouldn’t make that assertion for two more years. She said that more than anything, cities are people. Sure, you need to have the office buildings and the parks and the nightclubs and the museums and all the rest of it, but in the end it’s the people—and the kind of people they are—who make a city great or not. And if a city is great, it has a soul of its own, one spun up from the threads of the millions of souls who have lived there in the past and live there now.The woman said this city had an especially sensitive soul and that for a long time it had wondered what life must be like for the people who lived in it. The city worried that in spite of all it had to offer its citizens, it might be failing too many of them. The city knew itself better than any person could know himself, knew all of its sights and smells and sounds and textures and secrets, but it didn’t know what it felt like to be human and live in those thousands of miles of streets. And so, the woman said, the soul of the city took human form to live among its people, and the form it took was her.The woman who was the city changed my life and showed me that the world is a more mysterious place than you would imagine if your understanding of it was formed only or even largely by newspapers and magazines and TV—or now the Internet. I need to tell you about her and some terrible things and wonderful things and amazing things that happened, related to her, and how I am still haunted by them.But I’m getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn’t just one story; it’s thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.Also, I’m not tapping this out on a keyboard, and I tend to ramble when I talk, like now into this recorder. My friend Malcolm says not to call it rambling, to call it oral history. That sounds pretentious, as though I’m as certain as certain can be that I’ve achieved things that ensure I’ll go down in history. Nevertheless, maybe that’s the best term. Oral history. As long as you understand it just means I’m sitting here shooting off my mouth. When someone types it out from the tapes, then I’ll edit to spare the reader all the you-knows and uhs and dead-end sentences, also to make myself sound smarter than I really am. Anyway, I must talk instead of type, because I have the start of arthritis in my fingers, nothing serious yet, but since I’m a piano man and nothing else, I have to save my knuckles for music.Malcolm says I must be a closet pessimist, the way I so often say, “Nothing serious yet.” If I feel a phantom pain in one leg or the other and Malcolm asks why I keep massaging my calf, I’ll say, “Just this weird thing, nothing serious yet.” He thinks I’m convinced it’s a deep-vein blood clot that’ll break loose and blow out my lungs or brain later in the day, though that never crossed my mind. I just say those three words to reassure my friends, those people I worry about when they have the flu or a dizzy spell or a pain in the calf, because I’d feel relieved if they reassured me by saying, “Nothing serious yet.”The last thing I am is a closet pessimist. I’m an optimist and always have been. Life’s given me no reason to expect the worst. As long as I’ve loved the city, which is as long as I can remember, I have been an optimist.I was already an optimist when all this happened that I’m telling you about. Although I’ll reverse myself now and then to give you some background, this particular story really starts rolling in 1967, when I was ten, the year the woman said she was the city. By June of that year, I had moved with my mom into Grandpa’s house. My mother, whose name was Sylvia, was a singer. Grandpa’s name was Teddy Bledsoe, never just Ted, rarely Theodore. Grandpa Teddy was a piano man, my inspiration.The house was a good place, with four rooms downstairs and four up, one and three-quarter baths. The piano stood in the big front room, and Grandpa played it every day, even though he performed four nights a week at the hotel and did background music three afternoons at the department store, in their fanciest couture department, where a dress might cost as much as he earned in a month at both jobs and a fur coat might be priced as much as a new Chevy. He said he always took pleasure in playing, but when he played at home, it was only for pleasure.“If you’re going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you’ve got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you’ll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won’t sound good to those who know piano—or to yourself.”Outside, behind the house, a concrete patio bordered a small yard, and in the front, a porch overlooked a smaller yard, where this enormous maple tree turned as red as fire in the autumn. And when the leaves fell, they were like enormous glowing embers on the grass. You might say it was a lower-middle-class neighborhood, I guess, although I never thought in such terms back then and still don’t. Grandpa Teddy didn’t believe in categorizing, in labeling, in dividing people with words, and neither do I.The world was changing in 1967, though of course it always does. Once the neighborhood was Jewish, and then it went Polish Catholic. Mr. and Mrs. Stein, who had moved from the house but still owned it, rented to my grandparents in 1963, when I was six, and sold it to them two years later. They were the first black people to live in that neighborhood. He said there were problems at the start, of the kind you might expect, but it never got so bad they wanted to move.Grandpa attributed their staying power to three things. First, they kept to themselves unless invited. Second, he played piano free for some events at Saint Stanislaus Hall, next to the church where many in the neighborhood attended Mass. Third, my grandma, Anita, was secretary to Monsignor McCarthy.Grandpa was modest, but I won’t be modest on his behalf. He and Grandma didn’t have much trouble also because they had about them an air of royalty. She was tall, and he was taller, and they carried themselves with quiet pride. I used to like to watch them, how they walked, how they moved with such grace, how he helped her into her coat and opened doors for her and how she always thanked him. They dressed well, too. Even at home, Grandpa wore suit pants and a white shirt and suspenders, and when he played the piano or sat down for dinner, he always wore a tie. When I was with them, they were as warm and amusing and loving as any grandparents ever, but I was at all times aware, with each of them, that I was in a Presence.In April 1967, my grandma fell dead at work from a cerebral embolism. She was just fifty-two. She was so vibrant, I never imagined that she could die. I don’t think anyone else did, either. When she passed away suddenly, those who knew her were grief-stricken but also shocked. They harbored unexpressed anxiety, as if the sun had risen in the west and set in the east, suggesting a potential apocalypse if anyone dared to make reference to that development, as if the world would go on safely turning only if everyone conspired not to remark upon its revolutionary change.At the time, my mom and I were living in an apartment downtown, a fourth-floor walk-up with two street-facing windows in the living room; in the kitchen and my little bedroom, there were views only of the sooty brick wall of the adjacent building, crowding close. She had a gig singing three nights a week in a blues club and worked the lunch counter at Woolworth’s five days, waiting for her big break. I was almost ten and not without some street smarts, but I must admit that for a time, I thought that she would be equally happy if things broke either way—a gig singing in bigger and better joints or a job as a waitress in a high-end steakhouse, whichever came first.We went to stay with Grandpa for the funeral and a few days after, so he wouldn’t be alone. Until then, I’d never seen him cry. He took off work for a week, and he kept mostly to his bedroom. But I sometimes found him sitting in the window seat at the end of the second-floor hallway, just staring out at the street, or in his armchair in the living room, an unread newspaper folded on the lamp table beside him.When I tried to talk to him, he would lift me into his lap and say, “Let’s just be quiet now, Jonah. We’ll have years to talk over everything.”I was small for my age and thin, and he was a big man, but I felt greatly gentled in those moments. The quiet was different from other silences, deep and sweet and peaceful even if sad. A few times, with my head resting against his broad chest, listening to his heart, I fell asleep, though I was past the age for regular naps.He wept that week only when he played the piano in the front room. He didn’t make any sounds in his weeping; I guess he was too dignified for sobbing, but the tears started with the first notes and kept coming as long as he played, whether ten minutes or an hour.While I’m still giving you background here, I should tell you about his musicianship. He played with good taste and distinction, and he had a tremendous left hand, the best I’ve ever heard. In the hotel where he worked, there were two dining rooms. One was French and formal and featured a harpist, and the décor either made you feel elegant or made you ill. The second was an Art Deco jewel in shades of blue and silver with lots of glossy-black granite and black lacquer, more of a supper club, where the food was solidly American. Grandpa played the Deco room, providing background piano between seven and nine o’clock, mostly American-standard ballads and some friskier Cole Porter numbers; between nine and midnight, three sidemen joined him, and the combo pumped it up to dance music from the 1930s and ’40s. Grandpa Teddy sure could swing the keyboard.Those days right after his Anita died, he played music I’d never heard before, and to this day I don’t know the names of any of those numbers. They made me cry, and I went to other rooms and tried not to listen, but you couldn’t stop listening because those melodies were so mesmerizing, melancholy but irresistible.After a week, Grandpa returned to work, and my mom and I went home to the downtown walk-up. Two months later, in June, when my mom’s life blew up, we went to live with Grandpa Teddy full-time.3Sylvia Kirk, my mother, was twenty-nine when her life blew up, and it wasn’t the first time. Back then, I could see that she was pretty, but I didn’t realize how young she was. Only ten myself, I felt anyone over twenty must be ancient, I guess, or I just didn’t think about it at all. To have your life blow up four times before you’re thirty would take something out of anyone, and I think it drained from my mom just enough hope that she never quite built her confidence back to what it once had been.When it happened, school had been out for weeks. Sunday was the only day that the community center didn’t have summer programs for kids, and I was staying with Mrs. Lorenzo that late afternoon and evening. Mrs. Lorenzo, once thin, was now a merry tub of a woman and a fabulous cook. She lived on the second floor and accepted a little money to look after me when there were no other options, primarily when my mom sang at Slinky’s, the blues joint, three nights a week. Sunday wasn’t one of those three, but Mom had gone to a big-money neighborhood for a celebration dinner, where she was going to sign a contract to sing five nights a week at what she described as “a major venue,” a swanky nightclub that no one would ever have called a joint. The club owner, William Murkett, had contacts in the recording industry, too, and there was talk about putting together a three-girl backup group to work with her on some numbers at the club and to cut a demo or two at a studio. It looked like the big break wouldn’t be a steakhouse waitress job.We expected her to come for me after eleven o’clock, but it was only seven when she rang Mrs. Lorenzo’s bell. I could tell right off that something must be wrong, and Mrs. Lorenzo could, too. But my mom always said she didn’t wash her laundry in public, and she was dead serious about that. When I was little, I didn’t understand what she meant, because she did, too, wash her laundry in the communal laundry room in the basement, which had to be as public as you could wash it, except maybe right out in the street. That night, she said a migraine had just about knocked her flat, though I’d never heard of her having one before. She said that she hadn’t been able to stay for the dinner with her new boss. While she paid Mrs. Lorenzo, her lips were pressed tight, and there was an intensity, a power, in her eyes, so that I thought she might set anything ablaze just by staring at it too long.
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113 of 118 people found the following review helpful. Kindness, courage, and soul By TChris All great cities have a soul. At the age of eight, Jonah Kirk meets a woman who tells him she is the soul of the city made flesh. Jonah calls her Pearl. He introduces the reader to Pearl when, at 57, he starts dictating the book we are reading. Jonah attributes the appearance of a new piano in the community center (and thus the beginning of his career in music) to Pearl, whose connection to the supernatural is immediately apparent to the reader, if not to young Jonah.Despite the supernatural elements that you would expect in a Dean Koontz novel, The City is not the kind of story that Koontz typically tells (a fact that may disappoint Koontz fans). The City is a tale of crime and conspiracy, but I liked it less for its moderately engaging plot than for its cast of fully developed characters. Among other topics, the early chapters of The City recount Jonah's love of his mother and grandparents and his difficult relationship with his (mostly) absentee father. The occasional appearances of Jonah's father build a sense of dread, as do the dreams that sometimes trouble Jonah's sleep. One is about a dead girl named Fiona Cassidy. Another is about Lucas Drackman, who murdered his parents. Not unexpectedly, both figures make threatening appearances in Jonah's life. Perhaps the dreams are prophetic, but prophecies are easily misinterpreted. Still, this is a novel that builds characters more than it builds suspense.Courage and heroism are among the novel's driving themes. The City reminds us that those qualities are exhibited by ordinary people every day. "And one form of heroism," Koontz writes, "is having the courage to live without bitterness when bitterness seems justified, having the strength to persevere when perseverance seems unlikely to be rewarded, having the resolution to find profound meaning in life when it seems the most meaningless." Courage is, in part, the ability to overcome adversity and fear, but it is also the ability to overcome anger and guilt -- a wise lesson the novel teaches repeatedly.To an even larger extent, The City is about the power of friendship. When Jonah needs help understanding the evil that has entered his life, he turns to the Japanese-American tailor in his building who has become his friend. The tailor enlists the help of his own friends, who seek help from their friends, and so on, each acting solely from the desire to help a friend. Another key character is Malcolm Pomerantz, a child prodigy with the saxophone who becomes Jonah's lifelong friend at the age of ten. Malcolm is a misfit but his beautiful older sister is the personification of grace and sweetness. She is white, Jonah is black, but (like Malcolm and the tailor and Jonah's grandfather) she does not view race as a barrier to friendship.A related theme of The City is the power of kindness. Many of Koontz' characters (from neighbors to cab drivers to victims of Japanese internment camps) are exceptionally (perhaps unbelievably) kind. It is a way of life for them to do good and unselfish deeds for others, friends and strangers alike. Kindness, Koontz seems to be saying, is the antidote to evil, even if it cannot shield us from evil acts or tragic events. And if the goodness and generosity of the characters makes them difficult to believe, I think Koontz intended them as archetypes, as models of the people we should all aspire to be.Koontz establishes the time (mid-1960s) and place with great clarity. The focus, of course, is on historical events that increase the novel's atmosphere of dread: race riots, serial murders, bombings, and other violent episodes contribute to the reader's sense of unease. Balanced against that chaotic environment is chaos of a different sort, expressed by Jonah's love of music, from the jazz standards that his mother and grandparents extoll to the Beatles, Dylan, Motown, and the explosion of artists and musical forms that characterize the time. The City might not appeal to readers searching for a strong, plot-driven narrative, but even if The City told no story at all, it would be a joy to read for its evocation of a tumultuous and musical decade. It is made all the better by the moving moments in the story it tells and by its memorable characters.
59 of 63 people found the following review helpful. Adjusting Expectations For Koontz' Style By TMStyles Reading the reviews on this book reminds me of the dichotomy that now exists among Koontz' loyal readers. I have come to the conclusion, as have many others, that sometime about a decade ago, perhaps around the time that his beloved golden, Trixie, died that a new Dean Koontz arrived. This Neo-Koontz relies much less on the supernatural and with far fewer of the chills and thrills that used to grab the reader in a "can't-turn-the-pages-fast-enough" choke hold. His novels have evolved heavily into faith based efforts that would be comfortable sitting on Christian literature shelves.In "The City", a young black youth, Jonah Kirk, is soon to discover his God given talents as a musical prodigy despite the absence of his wayward feckless father. His near poverty driven life is counterbalanced by his wonderful loving mother, grandparents, and an inscrutable Japanese tailor named Mr. Yoshioka. Jonah's life seems to change when he meets a mysterious woman who claims to be "The City" itself, personified in her person. Almost simultaneously, Jonah meets and is soon terrorized by a woman who lives on the floor above his apartment; all of which leads to his discovery of a dangerous cabal of anarchists who threaten his very existence.The rest of the book centers around his efforts along with Mr. Yoshioka, to ascertain what this evil group is up to and how to hopefully stop them. The problem is that not much really happens for huge chunks of the book (it could have been shortened by 100 pages with no loss of coherence). Koontz' skill as a wordsmith coupled with his tremendous ability to describe people, places, and emotions are still very much in evidence, perhaps too much so, as his multi-paragraph descriptions can get tedious.But it is with his faith-based confrontations between good and evil have devolved from the thrill ride suspenseful page turners like "Watchers', " Phantoms", and "Strangers" into an era where faith, religion, commitment to goodness will always win out, usually with the aid of a helping spirit invested in a loyal dog, a precocious child, or in this case, a woman who claims to be The City. According to the Neo-Koontz, believe hard enough and live a good enough life and good people with be drawn to you and you will survive the darkness.I have no judgment for this change of styling by a wonderful author I grew up reading voraciously. I merely attempt to explain my perception of his changed writing style in context of so many formerly loyal readers who are confused, angry, or disappointed by these changes--fans who continue buying his books expecting a rebirth of the Koontz of old. I now read his novels with modified expectations and with less of a mindless urge to purchase each new book regardless of plot lines. Koontz is still a fine author--just a different one from the one I grew up with.
56 of 62 people found the following review helpful. Extremely slow start, but leads to a gripping conclusion By Aurania Thank you to Netgalley and Bantam for providing me with an advanced review copy of this title.This was an odd book for me. For a couple decades, I religiously purchased and devoured every title he published. I fell off the reading wagon some time after I finished the third Odd Thomas book, so it has been a long time since I read Koontz.The first third of this book did not feel at all Koontzian. It was terribly slow and was almost like an historical novel about music. I almost abandoned it several times. Thankfully, it picked up with when I was about to give up for good.The story opens with the narrator, whom we learn is Jonah Kirk, having a brief conversation with his friend, Malcolm, who urges Jonah to tell the story of his life - specifically, the dark time in his life. From that point forward, the story is told in first person perspective as Jonah relates events occurring in his life from the time he was 9 to about 11. What I found a little odd is that none of the dialogue sounded like that of a child, but in retrospect it makes sense since the story is literally a late-50s Jonah verbally telling his story to someone recording it.Jonah is a musical prodigy who comes from a family of musically inclined people. His mother is a gifted singer, and his grandfather a gifted pianist. Unfortunately, the book spends the first third giving a long-winded history of their life before "The Event." (My characterization, not Koontz's). This led to some horribly slow pacing, and while I appreciated that Koontz wanted to move away from his typical formula, it caught me off guard because I went into this thinking I was reading a Koontz book.Unfair, right? That he should be penalized for being formulaic, but penalized when he tries to do something different? In this book he gets much more philosophical, touching on mysticism and religion, even, but never becoming preachy in the process.In any event, we get this long background on all these bad things that happened to his mother - all her lows, from her father leaving to her inability to find suitable work as a singer - and it was just...dry. I felt like the book was about musical history, and Jonah's quest to become a professional musician. It bored me.There wasn't a hint of anything supernatural apart from these vague moments Jonah had with a woman who claimed to be the physical (human?) embodiment of the city itself. Those moments were too few and far between during the first third, however, that they were quickly forgotten in those chapters. This woman gave Jonah hints of things to come, prophetic dreams, even, but no hint as to where the story was going.So there I was, meandering along, debating whether or not to abandon the book that seemed to just be a coming-of-age tale about this fledgling musician when things finally picked up with the introduction of Fiona Cassidy, who becomes a central character in "The Event." That's when the book really started to hold my interest. Fiona was such a nasty woman, such a piece of work, that it kept me interested enough to learn more about her. Then I met Mr. Yoshioma, who was yet more interesting. Then various events started to fall into place and the plot really picked up, making the book feel decidedly more Koontzian.I will not spoil, but I will just say that Jonah and his friends became entangled in plots Fiona, among others, had planned for the city (Chicago), and only then did it become clear what role the City (in its physical embodiment) played in the story (note: it was pretty minor and this is probably the least supernatural I've ever seen Koontz be).Minor gripes with minor spoilers: I disliked that we never learned what Dreckman's "cause" was. He and all the players in his plotting believed in "The Cause," yet we never heard anything about it. I'd have liked to know about their motivations. Also, some people might not like that there's such an (unlikely) happy ending, particularly as concerns the City's role in that ending.The writing, as always, was excellent (I would hope so after some 30-odd years of writing!). I took no issue with it at all, save for the previous mention of the dialogue involving children, which felt a little too adult (but made sense if you consider an adult is telling a story about events occurring when he's a child).The characters themselves, I loved. Jonah's mother was absolutely wonderful - she's the epitome of the single mother who's been kicked when she's down, but gets up stronger each time and devotes every moment of her life to making the life of her child better. It's rare to see such a devoted mother in literature. Mr. Yoshioma was equally fascinating, as a Japanese man who experienced internment following WWII, and became an unlikely friend to a curious Jonah. Jonah's grandfather is such a protective alpha bear, though you'd never know it by his gentle nature. Even Malcolm had his moments.In any event, while the story starts out horribly slow, if you like mysteries and thrillers, it's worth pushing through the slow parts to get to the actual meat of the story. The background underlying it all could have been shaved substantially to keep the pacing up throughout, but once it picks up, it stays up. This would have been a 4 star for me if not for the first third of the book.
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