TW: sexual assault; mind control; sexualization of minors; child murder. Dean Koontz drew awareness to Colombian Devil's Breath: a plant-based substance that impairs the formation of new memories and renders the person highly susceptible to suggestion; and is slipped often into people's drinks. Only Koontz wrote about it in 1986 and insisted it was a government-created chemical with a made-up name. No, but the CIA did use Colombian Devil's Breath as a truth serum in the 1920s, so maybe Koontz didn't predict anything. The symptoms of the night chills even match several of those of Colombian Devil's Breath ingestion. Anyway, he wrote a book about a supply of this being poured into a small town's water supply and some people involved. It was really fucking boring while increasingly bizarre. Two men want to use the substance for military-related mind control, and try to convince a third to let them. He is one of the most boring, one-dimensional villains to ever be spattered on a page. He's nothing but a wind-up rape machine who hates all women, fears all men, and is disgusted with himself. He holds the substance patent and says no to the military contractors, then runs off to sexually assault multiple women for a dozen pages at a time each. Apparently readers are supposed to pardon him because he was sexually abused for a period of years as a child, which Koontz also painstakingly describes.

Even when the wind-up rape machine masquerading as a human ordered a child murdered in a gory way, I was not afraid. I was annoyed. The book places sex, death, and children side-by-side throughout, and I think Koontz was trying for something thematically but failed. Paul compares love interest Jenny to his twelve-year-old daughter Rya in uncomfortable ways. Koontz cannot convincingly write children, and in this book either infantilizes or sexualizes them. He was probably trying to be disturbing and evoke terror. Instead, it was so stylistically strange and poorly done that I was disgusted and further bored. The subplot with the squirrel was outrageously stupid. They have not been kept as pets since the 1700s, and will not eat chocolate out of your hand, let alone after six days of playing with him. They would likely destroy your house, claw you up, and give you rabies rather than obediently go into a cage in your car. The action scenes in this book had all the emotional impact of filler. I don't plan to read more of his books and won't recommend them. ( )

I wasn't supposed to read Night Chills (since I already have a lot of other books planned to read), but my eyes found it in a pile of books at home and I just felt the need for a Koontz and I'm happy I followed my instinct since it was a really good novel.

Black River is a sleepy little town in Maine (Stephen King vibes) where the population starts getting night chills and suddenly all hell breaks loose. In the middle of the chaos stands a family that doesn't get the night chills and they now have to fight for their lives.

I found that the worst thing with this book is that the night chills isn't something spooky going on, something paranormal, instead, it's an experiment conducted by three men and I have always found that the horror of the things humans do to each other is far worse than monsters under the bed or aliens in space.

Night Chills was a well written, fast-paced book that I devoured quickly. ( )

I have forty of Mr. Koontz's books in my library, but I've only managed to read thirteen so far. I figured it's time to get to the rest. I picked up Night Chills and found it very scary and somewhat upsetting. In it, Mr. Koontz has done a fine job combining horror and science fiction to bring to life a chilling question of "what if?". The story is about subliminal messaging, which is nothing short of mind-control. When I was a kid, I remember hearing it was used briefly in advertising but was quickly outlawed. This story outlines what could happen if the wrong people fully developed this form of manipulation. Full of shocking plot twists and complex characters, I couldn't put this book down. I highly recommend it, but don't read it at night! Or alone! ( )

A re-read for me. Well plotted suspense though the technology parts slow the novel a little. To be fair, those parts interested me more first time around and that and some other story content is naturally dated now including the sexual violence. When Paul Annandale takes a trip with his son and daughter little does he know he’s about to suffer overwhelming heartache…and if I have a negative, that’s probably where it lies: I would have liked to experienced this man’s emotions more, but that’s not always laid out so much in a suspense novel, yet it’s the one painful spark of the book that remains long after the book’s finished. The subject is more worrying today than when the book was written when one considers so much more is possible with each passing decade. ( )

Drugs and hypnosis that cause whole towns to be programmable murderers? The science is awful, and I found this book easier to get through only after watching a few episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, where the science is just about as bad. Since the whole story in this novel depends on the science, this was a pretty shaky book. If you read it fast and skim the boring parts, it might be ok. The way Koontz introduces backstory, writing in the perspective of the character while the character sappily reminisces about stuff, really bugged me after a while- it feels fake, 'telling' rather than 'showing', and a lot of the details are not really useful or relevant to the story. ( )