The Mask
Dean Koontz

Such a pretty face.
So young, so sweet. She appeared out of nowhere, in the middle of traffic, on a busy day. A teenager with no past, no family - no memories.
Such a lovely child.
So blond and beautiful. Carol and Paul were drawn to her - she was the child they'd never had. A dream come true. And then Carol's nightmares began - the ghastly sounds in the night... the bloody face in the mirror... the razor sharp axe.
Such relentless evil.
So deceptively innocent. Most mothers would die for such a darling little angel. And that's what frightened Carol most of all.

Oddly enough, if you handed this book to me without telling me who the author was, I would not guess it was Dean Koontz. In fact, I would have guessed it was John Saul. The plot just seemed to fit in with his style of writing more than it fit in with a Koontz novel. This isn't a bad thing, John Saul is just as talented as Dean Koontz, it's just something interesting. Koontz's novels do that sometimes. Most of the time it's obviously his, but occasionally it has the feel of another author (in the past one of his novels had the feel of a Clive Barker novel).

The main plot of this book is that a couple (Carol and Paul) want to adopt a child, but it seems that things just don't want them to do so. Then, out of nowhere, "Jane" appears and walks out in front of Carol's car. Feeling responsible for her, and having an instant connection with her, Carol decides to allow her to move in with them when no family comes forward to claim her.

Things begin to become odd, both around their house and around the house of a friend of the family and soon they realize that "Jane" is not what she seems and neither is Carol. Both of them have know each other in many lifetimes, and in many lifetimes one of them dies the day before the girl's sixteenth birthday.

I found the plot riveting and the writing very easy to read. Normally, I would give this book four snails, but I have to take it down one due to the ending. There had been so much build up to the ending and how things would need to be taken care of, and then it ended abruptly with no real closure for the reader. The book needed to go at least another ten pages, if not another chapter. It felt cut off right in the middle of the climax and that made the entire book go from a really good read, to disappointing.

In the end, I would recommend this, with the warning of knowing you will not get a satisfactory closing to the story.

My rating: Three out of five snails (because of the ending, otherwise it would have been four).