Seize the Night

Depending on how you read it, ”Seize the Night” is either an utterly zany thriller or the first really cool young-adult adventure novel of 1999. As usual, Dean Koontz has cooked up another malignant government conspiracy and for good measure thrown in some botched science, a corrupt police force, and a bunch of supersmart animals. But while the end of the world as we know it is constantly being predicted, the goings-on here feel about as creepy as a Scooby-Doo cartoon. Call this one Koontz lite, or Koontz Jr., or Koontz without tears, sadism, or even much bloodshed.

The sequel to last year’s ”Fear Nothing,” ”Seize the Night” reintroduces us to Chris Snow, a 28-year-old poetry-reading surfer dude with a genetic disorder that makes him intolerant of any but the dimmest light. Since exposure to sunshine can be fatal, he lives exclusively by night, never straying far from the safety of his shuttered house. His real dilemma is how to deal with the bizarro effects of a ”designer strain of retrovirus” — created by his own mother, no less — that’s slip-slided its way out of a top secret military lab. As the virus progressively infects the nearby populace, turning them (at best) into feral psychopaths and (at worst) into mutants straight out of those gloriously cheesy ’50s monster movies, the authorities transform a picture-postcard Southern California community into a mini?police state. Like ”Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” Sunnydale, Moonlight Bay exists in virtual isolation from the outside world; implausible, yes, but hey, it makes for a darn good series premise.

Although the writing, like the story, is deliberately breathless, professionally rat-a-tat-tat, occasional howlers do slip in, but they’re forgivable; they even add to the novel’s boyish charm. (Here’s my favorite: ”This was the creature that Bobby had called Big Head because its head was undeniably big.” Duh.) It’s only when Koontz slows things down and tries to inject a little characterization that his novel veers off track. Chris Snow and friends might be crackerjack adventurers, but their high-five, have-another-brewskie jock dialogue is excruciatingly corny, and the New Age blather filling in the breathers between surfer lingo could easily be recycled into fortune cookies.

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