Life Expectancy

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Life Expectancy
		Life Expectancy

基本信息·出版社：Bantam Books
·页码：476 页
·出版日期：2005年10月
·ISBN：0553588249
·条形码：9780553588248
·版本：2005-10-01
·装帧：简装
·开本：32开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：平均余命

内容简介 Book Description
In his latest "New York Times" bestseller, Koontz tells an emotional tale of five days in the life of an ordinary man born to an extraordinary legacy--a story that challenges the way readers perceive good and evil, life and death, and everything in between.

Amazon.co.uk
Life Expectancy confirms that one of the pleasures of reading Dean Koontz is that he is never especially likely to do the same thing twice in a row. Here he gives us a suspense novel with a supernatural element--Jimmy's dying grandfather prophesies at his birth that he will have five really bad days in his twenties and we watch these with real concern that he may not survive them. Even on the day of Jimmy's birth things go badly--a mad clown loses his wife in childbirth and massacres hospital staff; a bizarre feud between clowns and aerialists is a significant part of what follows. One of the strengths of Koontz's writing is that he works out in finely-blocked detail precisely how his average characters get themselves out of desperate situations by ingenuity and pluck, and without suddenly becoming super-powerful; even at his most wildly inventive, he remembers to be plausible. And this is one of his best books for a while simply because he has fewer axes to grind--this is pure story-telling of the smoothest kind.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Roz Kaveney.

From Publishers Weekly
Of all bestselling authors, Koontz may be the most underestimated by the literary establishment. Book after book, year after year, this author climbs to the top of the charts. Why? His readers know: because he is a master storyteller and a daring writer, and because, in his novels, he gives readers bright hope in a dark world. His new book is an examplar of his extraordinary work. Suspense is difficult to sustain; suspense that's buoyed steadily by humor, even as it deals with the most desperate of circumstances, is nearly impossible—yet Koontz manages it here. As in last year's brilliant Odd Thomas, Koontz writes again in the first person, employing a cleaner, more instantly accessible line than in some of his other work (e.g., this year's The Taking). His narrator is Jimmy Tock, a pastry chef in a Colorado resort town. On the day he was born, Jimmy's dying grandfather predicted five future dates that would be terrible for Jimmy; he might have mentioned, but didn't, the birth day itself, which sees a mass slaying by a bitter, deranged circus clown in the hospital where Jimmy is born. The bulk of the narrative concerns the first terrible day, about 20 years later, when the vengeful son of that clown takes Jimmy and a lovely young woman, Lorrie Hicks, hostage in the local library, with an eye toward destroying the town; Jimmy and the woman live to marry, but will they and their family survive the four subsequent terrible days? Like most of Koontz's novels, this one pits good versus evil and carries a persuasive spiritual message, about the power of love and family and the miracle of existence. As such it deals with serious, perennial themes, yet with its steady drizzle of jokes and witty repartee, it does so with a lightness of touch that few other authors can match. Koontz is a true original and this novel, one of his most unusual yet, will leave readers aglow and be a major bestseller. If the literary establishment would only catch on to him, it might be an award-winner too.

From Booklist
On the night of August 9, 1974, Jimmy Tock's grandpa rouses from a coma to predict the exact time of Jimmy's birth and five dire dates in his future--and, oh yes, watch out for the clown. Minutes later, Jimmy is secreted away by a maternity nurse while another newborn's dad goes on a murderous rampage after his wife dies in childbirth. The enraged man is, of course, a professional circus clown. Koontz's third astonishing novel in 13 months (the others: Odd Thomas [BKL D 15 03] and The Taking [BKL My 1 04]) again shows him making a moral fable out of dark fantasy materials, for its story of a man dogged from birth by a family of evil madmen is an object lesson in the unfashionable virtues of fortitude, prudence, and a faith far firmer than with-it moderns generally tolerate. Simultaneously loaded with dialogue the likes of which haven't been rampant since the 1930s heyday of screwball comedy, Life Expectancy is also an exuberant, prickly, ambivalent parody of literary and cinematic pop-fiction conventions. Narrator-hero Jimmy sounds like a cross between Kurt Vonnegut and Liberace as he recounts a life of suffocating sweetness (he and generations of male forebears are world-class pastry chefs; he habitually overdoes Christmas; and he's hypersentimental about wife and family) punctuated by stupefying, traumatic violence, from which survivors emerge bright eyed and bushy tailed despite steel-reinforced repaired limbs and the loss of vital organs. That neither Jimmy nor any of the other characters could possibly be real doesn't prevent them from being richly sympathetic, and as with many a movie masterpiece, the story's fundamental ridiculousness doesn't prevent it from being emotionally powerful and thought-provoking.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Ray Olson

Book Dimension
length: (cm)17.7 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)10.6
作者简介 Dean Koontz, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.


From the Hardcover edition.
编辑推荐 "A master storyteller and a daring writer... he gives readers bright hope in a dark world.... Life Expectancy pits good versus evil and carries a persuasive message, about the power of love and family and the miracle of existence... Koontz is a true original and this novel, one of his most unusual yet, will leave readers aglow."—Publishers Weekly, starred review.

查看更多 下一篇