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Exalted Permission
Title: Cold Fire
Series:
----------
Author: Dean Koontz
Rating: 1
of 5 Stars
Genre: Thriller
Pages:
495
Words: 134K
From Wikipedia
Recently
retired teacher Jim Ironheart (aptly named) risks his life to save
lives. In Portland he saves a young boy from an oblivious drunk
driver in a van. In Boston he rescues a child from an underground
explosion. In Houston he disarms a man who was trying to shoot his
own wife – and he is not just lucky enough to be in the right place
at the right time. He gets “inspirations” and knows he must hurry
to wherever prompted. He rushes off to hail a cab or catch a plane,
dropping whatever he’s doing at the moment, much to the surprise of
those around him. He has no idea where these visions come from or
why, but he believes that he must be some sort of God-sent guardian
angel with a heavenly gift.
Reporter
Holly Thorne was in Portland to write a less than exciting piece on a
school teacher who has recently published a book of poetry full of
poems which Holly finds are pure transcendental garbage – but such
is Holly’s lot in life. She is a fine writer but is failing at her
job because she is filled with too much integrity and compassion to
be a good reporter. As she is leaving she witnesses Jim rescuing the
child from the drunk driver and felt there was something fishy in
Jim’s explanations of how he started running for the child before
seeing or hearing the van coming. She discovers there have been 12
last-minute rescues reported over the last three months in other
newspapers by a mysterious Good Samaritan named Jim with blue eyes.
Holly
is intrigued by Jim and his intense but cold blue eyes – eyes which
burn with a passionate, cold fire, hence the novel’s title.
Holly
decides to follow this humble yet elusive savior on his next
“mission.” Unbeknownst to Jim, she rapidly follows him to the
airport and boards a United Airlines DC-10 plane bound for Chicago.
She decides to confront him and learns about Jim’s strange but
extraordinary powers. Jim tells her that he has been sent by God to
save a mother and a child on the plane – he does not know why God
has chosen these two in particular, but he does know that they must
change seats or they will die in the horrific plane crash about which
he has been sent a vision. Holly is struck by Jim’s belief that he
has some magical power, sent by God no less.
Holly
takes a more cynical view on things and decidedly argues how
ridiculous such thoughts are. She questions why “God” would
choose to let these two people live, and allow 151 other passengers
to die, as Jim has foreseen. Surely there are much more worthy people
aboard, and why would God even have the plane crash at all? Holly
presses Jim to do much more than just tell the couple to move, but
that he should warn the pilot and maybe save everyone aboard. Jim
initially refuses, and decidedly refuses to question his visions. He
tells Holly simply that God sends him, and he only follows the
instructions – to do anything beyond that would be to somehow go
outside God’s will. Who else, he asks, could be sending him visions
to save lives precisely at the right time? Holly reasons with him,
and convinces him that there is no good reason for Jim (or God) to
let anyone die needlessly. The plane, however, is damaged beyond
saving and still crashes, but the number of fatalities reduces from
151 to 47.
After
the crash, Holly manages to gain Jim’s confidence. They are
attracted to each other, but Holly cannot help but be curious about
Jim’s mysterious visions. She decides to discover exactly how, why,
and who, just as any reporter would naturally want to know. Yet the
more she pries, the stranger things get. Nearly all Jim’s childhood
memories are completely missing, except that he knows his parents
died when he was 9 at his grandparents’ ranch. He only knows very
vague details about everything from his childhood, and gets angry
when Holly questions him. She begins to see that his strange
abilities are linked to his childhood and lack of memories from then.
She hears him whisper in his sleep continuously for several nights,
“There is an Enemy. It is coming. It’ll kill us all. It is
relentless.” She and Jim start to have identical terrifying
nightmares surrounding the old mill from his grandparents’ ranch,
and during one of these “nightmares” they are both completely
conscious and experience violence while fighting some eerie force
coming at them from the walls and ceiling – needless to say, they
are convinced the force behind it all is definitely not God, nor is
it benign.
Holly
unquestionably decides they must go back to the ranch to find the
source of everything, though she is fearful of what they will find.
Jim is at first reluctant, but as they near the ranch, he becomes
more and more convinced that the being is something wholly great and
powerful – something not of this world.
Once
inside the windmill’s creepy tower room, the alien reveals itself
from the adjacent pond, at first through sounds analogous to church
bells and then an entrancing display of dancing colors and exploding
lights. The being then starts to magically use a pen and paper to
make words appear, and later manifests as a voice. It calls itself
THE FRIEND who has come to them from ANOTHER WORLD. When asked why,
it says, “TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND.” Holly asks why,
then, it attacked them the previous night, to which THE FRIEND
replies that that was the work of its other half: THE ENEMY. When
asked about the bells and lights, it says that it does that “FOR
DRAMA?” Holly asks why the certain individuals are chosen over
others, and THE FRIEND gives replies that one will cure all cancers,
one will become a great president, one will become a great spiritual
leader, et cetera. While Jim is wholly enthusiastic and pleased,
Holly cannot believe the answers, for it does not make any logical
sense and the answers seem trite, fantastical and childish to her.
Holly
questions THE FRIEND far and deep about Jim while he is out of the
room. All the answers continue to be too predictable to believe, and
it finally answers her nagging with threats and then, most
shockingly, with the words “I,” “MY,” and, “ME.” At that
moment, it is discovered that Jim is actually himself the source of
both THE FRIEND and THE ENEMY, that it is he who is causing the
nightmares and not God or some alien force. After Jim’s parents
died, the 9 year old became obsessed with a book about an alien in a
pond next to a windmill – he became so obsessed that the child
never grew up until one day an adult-in-body Jim ran away and started
a presumably normal life. Holly helps Jim deal with his past and the
two begin a new life together.
If Koontz had stuck to this being his typical thriller, I'd probably
have given it 3.5 stars and seriously thought about upping it to 4.
However. There was this quote and several in the same vein:
“If there's a God, why does He allow suffering?”
Alarmed, Father Geary said, “Are you feeling worse?”
“No, no. Better. I don't mean my suffering. Just… why does He
allow suffering in general?”
“To test us,” the priest said.
“Why do we have to be tested?”
“To determine if we're worthy.”
“Worthy of what?”
“Worthy of heaven, of course. Salvation. Eternal life.”
“Why didn't God make us worthy?”
“Yes, he made us perfect, without sin. But then we sinned, and fell
from grace.”
“How could we sin if we were perfect?”
“Because we have free will.”
“I don't understand.”
Father Geary frowned. “I'm not a nimble theologian. Just an
ordinary priest. All I can tell you is that it's part of the divine
mystery. We fell from grace, and now heaven must be earned.”
The bolding is mine. Besides this blatant heresy, Koontz makes sure
that his readers know that the main character not only studied a
variety of religions, but WAS an “X” and believed in them all. A
Super Ecumenist as it were.
It has never been clearer that Koontz is not a Christian even while
using Christian terminology when it suits him. You don't get to try
to take the benefits of using Christian terminology while denying the
strictures. You do not play games with Christ. As such, I'm done
with Koontz now.
★☆☆☆☆
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