Cover Characteristic - Keys

The Cover Characteristic meme is hosted at  Sugar and Snark.   Here are the guidelines:

Each week we will post a characteristic and choose 5 of our favorite covers with that characteristic. If you want to join in and share your 5 favorite covers with the weeks particular characteristic, then just make a post, grab the meme picture (or make your own) and leave your URL in Linky (so we can visit).
You don’t even need to participate, just stopping by and saying hi would be great! Don’t forget to stop by the other participants!


So I had all my books picked, and then I lost the piece of paper I'd written them down on!  I went back through all my books I've already read on Goodreads, and could only find 4, until I tried one more time and finally found the last one!  So without further ado, here are my 5 covers with keys.

5.

4.

3.

2.

This one was almost my favorite, as I love how the key makes the NYC skyline.

1.  But this, this one is my favorite.  The key isn't huge, but it is like all the other things that you look and find throughout the beautiful cover, all things that relate to bits of the story.

So, what do you think of my cover choices? 

77 Shadow Street by Dean Koontz

My first "adult" book of the year! I told myself that this year I need to try to read at least one adult book a year, as I mostly read Teen/YA.  And this book was good, but I know now why I read so many more YA these days.  I realized just how wordy Dean Koontz can be.  Some sections just went on and on, and I was ready to get to the point.  In fact, I'm sure I skipped a bunch of paragraphs, and sometimes had to go back, because I was skimming trying to get on to some actual action.  It makes me think about how I'm teaching my students about figurative language in my Communication Arts class right now. Figurative language is great!  Helps you feel like you're right there in the story sometimes!  But too much can be a bad thing.  Whole paragraphs or pages even.  Okay, I did enjoy the book, it was a pretty good story, so let me talk about that now.

I figured there would be more to do with short story The Moonlit Mind that I read last year, and that made me very excited to read this book.  There wasn't, and maybe I need to re-read the short story, but I don't quite see the connections.  I'll have to read it again.  Anyway, as many Dean Koontz books do, we followed several different characters.  All of which live in a huge mansion turned into condos, called The Pendleton.  Every 38 years strange and terrible things happen.  Murders, people disappear.  And this is the 38th year coming up.  Strange things start happening.  People see ghosts from the past, the years that people disappeared.  There are strange shapes swimming in the pool.  When they look outside, during the thunderstorm, sometimes the lightning lights up showing there is no city out where there should be.  All of the people we meet begin experiencing things.  Some have worse things happen.  And some are able to figure it out better.  We of course have one evil character, a murderer, who all of them are locked in with.  We have two children with single moms. We have a former military man, two elderly women, a woman who lost both her parents to lightning strikes.  A woman who was a country singer, a man who grew up in Viet Nam during the war, and a scientist?  There is also one guy researching the history of the Pendleton.  Eventually the curse or time warp or whatever goes all the way through.  In this other dimension, or the future as we learn, there is The One, who is like a god in a way, controls everything.  There are no humans, other than one named Witness, although he is not technically human.  One of the characters recognizes him, and we find out exactly what has happened.

One other issue I had is that while I feel there was a ton of build up and all, that we get to the end we're barely let in on what the actual deal is, and then we're back in the present and it's kind of over.  I liked the way it ended, again, don't get me wrong, just was a bit anti-climactic.  Not a bad Dean Koontz book, just hard to read that kind of book again with what I've been reading lately.  And hey,  some of those YA books are big too, think of Divergent!!

Darkness Under the Sun & The Moonlit Mind by Dean Koontz

Last post of 2011! Wow, so glad this year is over, the beginning pretty much sucked, the end has been better, and hoping that 2012 turns out really good, especially if it is the last year we have according to all those people who say the end of the world is coming. :-)

So, recently I was trying to figure out exactly what was the last Dean Koontz book I read. A couple years ago I just didn't have the money to keep buying his books when they came out in hardcover, and I can't quite remember when I stopped. So I got online and looked up a list of his boks in the order they were published. Well, I think I found my answer, but I also found 2 books that have only been available as e-books, and they were kind of companion novels to the last book, What the Night Knows, and the newest one that came out this week, 77 Shadow Street. Since they were both short, I'll include them both in one blog post.

First, Darkness Under the Sun, was written I think after the book it goes with, What the Night Knows. The main character in this is a boy named Howie. He is disfigured because his father tried to burn him over a custody dispute. Howie goes to the top of a building to watch the town around him without having to be a part of it. The day we read about at the start of this novella he is not alone when he gets up there. There is a man, a very tall, also pretty messed up looking man. This man is Alton Turner Blackwood, the killer from the book this goes with. Howie and this man become friends, so much that Howie invites him to come live in the room above their garage. The man says he has to think about it, but asks Howie to bring him pictures of the house, as well as his mother and sister. Howie brings the pictures and then leaves. When he comes back, the man is gone, the pictures have been torn, and Howie suddenly knows what he's done. He runs home to find the killer getting ready to attack his family. And he is able to scare him off. But it turns out he's now given the killer an idea of how he can kill and earn the fame he wants. Later on he sends a letter to Howie telling him this. Good story, not sure if it really leads me into wanting to read the book. In fact, it has the first chapter or so at the end, and now I'm not sure if I've read the whole book, or if I just read these two chapters at the back of whatever book came before it. It was a very Dean Koontz story, exactly what you'd expect.

The 2nd story, The Moonlit Mind, was available before the book it goes with was released this past Tuesday. And let me say, I REALLY enjoyed this one. It reminded me of some of the earlier works of Koontz that I really enjoyed. Like Twilight Eyes, Strangers, Watchers (all by Koontz), as well as Anouther Faust by Daniel Nayeri. Just something about it really was the type of book I liked. And now I'm really eager to read 77 Shadow Street. This novella is also with a young main character, a 12 year old boy named Crispin who has lived on the streets since he was 9. He ran away from his mother and step-father's house after his younger sister and brother disappeared. The way they disappeared was very mysterious. It seems as if there is a cult or satanic rituals going on in this house. And very strangely there is a miniature replica of the mansion that Crispin is really intrigued by. And it turns out that replica has a connection to all that is going on. Crispin has also made friends with the "Phantom of Broderick's" or as she calls herself, Amity. Amity works and lives at Broderick's department store. And Crispin, and his dog Harley, named after his younger brother, stay there nights as well. But Crispin can't stay in any one place too long, for soon the people from his past will come looking for him, and have caught up to him in the past. Amity also has a scary past. And together they will try to overcome them. This is a great lead in to the book, although the first few chapters of the book at the end of this novella, don't quite match the tone of the novella, but hopefully it will get back to what I liked about this.