Stranger

I was reading, reading, reading. I couldn't stop myself. Dean Koontz's (Strangers) "Schwarzer Mond" kept me awake. The novel had such a vivid effect on me that every word stayed with me. I received the impression that I was a character in this book. I was completely absorbed by the book and its language.

When I started reading, I was about to put the book down since the story was so uninteresting. But something prevented me from doing so. I'm not sure what it was, maybe it was the way Dean Koontz wrote the words, maybe it was the way he put the words together, I don’t know but I kept reading.

The author first gives individualized portraits of a number of characters. A writer, who never hit the top stories became suddenly famous, and now he moves around while sleeping and awakens in a closet or concealed in the garage. When a doctor, who wants to become a surgeon sees black gloves, she becomes anxious and is passing out. The proprietor of a restaurant hates the dark. A priest develops doubts. A thief suddenly stops finding enjoyment in his job.

Everyone has a connection to the moon and no one knows of one of the others, but these individuals and more of them have been struggling with this issue for a year and a half.

As their memories of the event starting to return, some of them begin to exhibit concerning behaviours and skills, and they gradually rejoin, but without recalling any key details of what occurred.

They all feel terrible and unsafe, but the investigation into the cause gets them all to a motel in the centre of Nevada, where they must have experienced something ominous in the past. They encounter both anonymous supporters and adversaries who attempt to obstruct their progress while they are doing this.

Only at the end do the memory walls fall, and they find themselves in immense distress.

The ending appears to be simply predictable... yet one is misled - and as soon as everything appears to be revealed, the story takes a fresh turn.

Overall, a really thrilling book, easy to read, and despite the intimidating nearly 800 pages, there are never any down points.

The reader has almost little knowledge ahead of the main protagonists, and he experiences the search for a dark period in their past alongside them in parallel tales.

The novel is quite exciting. And terrifying. An awful terror hovers in the air, with neither the reader nor the protagonist knowing what it is about. The author pulls out every register of the psychological thriller here, and you devour chapter after chapter.

The book's writing style makes you feel as though you are being specifically watched by the CIA, NSA, BND, KGB, or another secret service. One could be afraid reading the novel because it so closely resembles or mirrors reality. The narrative is so vivid and surreal that it looks more real than just fake.

Today, everyone is aware of the functions and duties of the secret services. Every day, we read about it in the newspapers. Secret agents shoot, kidnap, and poison unwanted bystanders in public places without anybody noticing. Although we only have a limited understanding of their "work," this book is remarkably accurate. All of us could experience this today, tomorrow, in a month, or in a year. We don't know what can happen to all of us, and that's the impression this book leaves on you. For these folks, we are nothing more than a piece of meat.

When the book was published in 1989, the cold war was nearing its end. The wall that divided east and west Germany fell, and it appeared that world politics would shift. Similarly to how the major characters in the book transformed, the opposite occurred. The changes came slowly and deliberately, and anytime something became startlingly evident in front of me, I was reminded of the book "Schwarzer Mond."

Of course, there have always been books that were so imaginative that they came very close to reality, but I have read so many books and have always made comparisons between the content of the books and reality, and in doing so, I discovered that Dean Koontz's book influenced me more, made me more sensitive to what was going on around me

All of my friends who read this book were enthralled by the unusual reality, and I am still excited by the novel's relevance 34 years later. From the first to the last page, this is a fantastic book that I believe is more important today than ever before. Even though it is a fictional scenario, the heart of the issue has now become reality.