Frankenstein: Prodigal Son

by Dean Koontz, Kevin J. Anderson

Overview

From the celebrated imagination of Dean Koontz comes a powerful reworking of one of the classic stories of all time. If you think you know the legend, you know only half the truth. Here is the mystery, the myth, the terror, and the magic of . . .

Every city has its secrets. But none as terrible as this. He is Deucalion, a tattooed man of mysterious origin, a sleight-of-reality artist who has traveled the centuries with a secret worse than death. He arrives in New Orleans as a serial killer stalks the streets, a killer who carefully selects his victims for the humanity that is missing in himself. Deucalion’s path will lead him to cool, tough police detective Carson O’Connor and her devoted partner, Michael Maddison, who are tracking the slayer but will soon discover signs of something far more terrifying: an entire race of killers who are much more–and less–than human and, deadliest of all, their deranged, near-immortal maker: Victor Helios–once known as Frankenstein.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780553593327
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/28/2009
Series:	Dean Koontz's Frankenstein Series , #1
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	34,924
Product dimensions:	4.18(w) x 7.56(h) x 1.15(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Dean Koontz, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and the enduring spirit of their golden retriever, Trixie, in southern California.

Hometown:

Newport Beach, California

Date of Birth:

July 9, 1945

Place of Birth:

Everett, Pennsylvania

Education:

B.S. (major in English), Shippensburg University, 1966

Website:

http://www.deankoontz.com

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Deucalion seldom slept, but when he did, he dreamed. Every dream was a nightmare. None frightened him. He was the spawn of nightmares, after all; and he had been toughened by a life of terror.

During the afternoon, napping in his simple cell, he dreamed that a surgeon opened his abdomen to insert a mysterious, squirming mass. Awake but manacled to the surgical table, Deucalion could only endure the procedure.

After he had been sewn shut, he felt something crawling inside his body cavity, as though curious, exploring.
From behind his mask, the surgeon said, “A messenger approaches. Life changes with a letter.”

He woke from the dream and knew that it had been prophetic. He possessed no psychic power of a classic nature, but sometimes omens came in his sleep.

In these mountains of tibet, a fiery sunset conjured a mirage of molten gold from the glaciers and the snowfields. A serrated blade of Himalayan peaks, with Everest at its hilt, cut the sky.

Far from civilization, this vast panorama soothed Deucalion. For several years, he had preferred to avoid people, except for Buddhist monks in this windswept rooftop of the world.

Although he had not killed for a long time, he still harbored the capacity for homicidal fury. Here he strove always to suppress his darker urges, sought calm, and hoped to find true peace.

From an open stone balcony of the whitewashed monastery, as he gazed at the sun-splashed ice pack, he considered, not for the first time, that these two elements, fire and ice, defined his life.

At his side, an elderly monk, Nebo, asked, “Are you looking at the mountains—or beyond them, to what you left behind?”

Although Deucalion had learned to speak several Tibetan dialects during his lengthy sojourn here, he and the old monk often spoke English, for it afforded them privacy.

“I don’t miss much of that world. The sea. The sound of shore birds. A few friends. Cheez-Its.”

“Cheeses? We have cheese here.”

Deucalion smiled and pronounced the word more clearly than he’d done previously. “Cheez-Its are cheddar-flavored crackers. Here in this monastery we seek enlightenment, meaning, purpose . . . God. Yet often the humblest things of daily life, the small pleasures, seem to define existence for me. I’m afraid I’m a shallow student, Nebo.”

Pulling his wool robe closer about himself as wintry breezes bit, Nebo said, “To the contrary. Never have I had one less shallow than you. Just hearing about Cheez-Its, I myself am intrigued.”

A voluminous wool robe covered Deucalion’s scarred patchwork body, though even the harshest cold rarely bothered him.
The mandala-shaped Rombuk monastery—an architectural wonder of brick walls, soaring towers, and graceful roofs—clung precariously to a barren mountainside: imposing, majestic, hidden from the world. Waterfalls of steps spilled down the sides of the square towers, to the base of the main levels, granting access to interior courtyards.

Brilliant yellow, white, red, green, and blue prayer flags, representing the elements, flapped in the breeze. Carefully written sutras adorned the flags, so that each time the fabric waved in the wind, a prayer was symbolically sent in the direction of Heaven.

Despite Deucalion’s size and strange appearance, the monks had accepted him. He absorbed their teaching and filtered it through his singular experience. In time, they had come to him with philosophical questions, seeking his unique perspective.

They didn’t know who he was, but they understood intuitively that he was no normal man.

Deucalion stood for a long time without speaking. Nebo waited beside him. Time had little meaning in the clockless world of the monks, and after two hundred years of life, with perhaps more than that ahead of him, Deucalion often lived with no awareness of time.

Prayer wheels clicked, stirred by breezes. In a call to sunset prayer, one monk stood in the window of a high tower, blowing on a shell trumpet. Deep inside the monastery, chants began to resonate through the cold stone.

Deucalion stared down into the canyons full of purple twilight, east of the monastery. From some of Rombuk’s windows, one might fall more than a thousand feet to the rocks.

Out of that gloaming, a distant figure approached.
“A messenger,” he said. “The surgeon in the dream spoke truth.”
The old monk could not at first see the visitor. His eyes, the color of vinegar, seemed to have been faded by the unfiltered sun of extreme altitude. Then they widened. “We must meet him at the gates.”

Salamanders of torchlight crawled the ironbound beams of the main gate and the surrounding brick walls.
Just inside the gates, standing in the open-air outer ward, the messenger regarded Deucalion with awe. “Yeti,” he whispered, which was the name that the Sherpas had coined for the abominable snowman.

Words escaping him on plumes of frosted breath, Nebo said, “Is it custom now to precede a message with a rude remark?”

Having once been pursued like a beast, having lived two hundred years as the ultimate outsider, Deucalion was inoculated against all meanness. He was incapable of taking offense.

“Were I a yeti,” he said, speaking in the messenger’s language, “I might be as tall as this.” He stood six feet six. “I might be muscled this solidly. But I would be much hairier, don’t you think?”

“I . . . I suppose so.”

“A yeti never shaves.” Leaning close, as if imparting a secret, Deucalion said, “Under all that hair, a yeti has very sensitive skin. Pink, soft . . . quick to take a rash from a razor blade.”

Summoning courage, the messenger asked, “Then what are you?”

“Big Foot,” Deucalion said in English, and Nebo laughed, but the messenger did not understand.
Made nervous by the monk’s laughter, shivering not only because of the icy air, the young man held out a scuffed goatskin packet knotted tightly with a leather thong. “Here. Inside. For you.”

Deucalion curled one powerful finger around the leather thong, snapped it, and unfolded the goatskin wrapping to reveal an envelope inside, a wrinkled and stained letter long in transit.

The return address was in New Orleans. The name was that of an old and trusted friend, Ben Jonas.

Still glancing surreptitiously and nervously at the ravaged half of Deucalion’s face, the messenger evidently decided that the company of a yeti would be preferable to a return trip in darkness through the bitter-cold mountain pass. “May I have shelter for the night?”

“Anyone who comes to these gates,” Nebo assured him, “may have whatever he needs. If we had them, I would even give you Cheez-Its.”

From the outer ward, they ascended the stone ramp through the inner gate. Two young monks with lanterns arrived as if in answer to a telepathic summons to escort the messenger to guest quarters.

In the candlelit reception hall, in an alcove that smelled of sandalwood and incense, Deucalion read the letter. Ben’s handwritten words conveyed a momentous message in neatly penned blue ink.

Table of Contents

Editorial Reviews

Koontz is a superb plotter and wordsmith. He chronicles the hopes and fears of our time in broad strokes and fine detail, using popular fiction to explore the human condition [and] demonstrating that the real horror of life is found not in monsters, but within the human psyche.”—USA Today

"A compelling read.... The odd juxtaposition of a police procedural with a neo-gothic, mad scientist plot gives the novel a wickedly unusual and intriguing feel ... with an elegant cliffhanger ending."—Publishers Weekly

"This is classic Koontz at his best. The plot zips along, the characters are grotesque and funny. The basic elements of Mary Shelley's novel, though slightly altered, fit right in."—Fangoria

“One of the master storytellers of this or any age.”—Tampa Tribune

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
Dean Koontz's Frankenstein -- the author's first literary series -- is a nightmare-inspiring, modern-day retelling of Mary Shelley's 1818 horror classic. Coauthored with Kevin J. Anderson, the first installment in this four-volume saga pits a reanimated giant and two tenacious police detectives against the demented scientist who created him.

It's no surprise that Deucalion, at almost seven feet tall and with half his face a mangled ruin, spent time as a European carnie sideshow attraction nicknamed the Monster. After enjoying several peaceful years at a monastery in Tibet, the introspective and enigmatic giant receives dire news: The man who created him centuries earlier, Victor Frankenstein, is inexplicably alive and living in New Orleans under the name of Victor Helios, a wealthy business owner and philanthropist. When Deucalion vows to leave his Tibetan sanctuary and destroy the man who created him, he soon realizes the critical magnitude of his mission -- Helios is in the process is secretly creating a new race of posthumans to take over the world!

As is par for the course in many fiction sagas, readers should be prepared for a cliff-hanger of monumental proportions at the conclusion of Prodigal Son. Koontz and Anderson, however, masterfully set the table for a virtual feast of hideous twists and turns, nightmarish monstrosities, and nonstop action in upcoming installments. Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, in which a man transforms himself into a monster and a monster learns what it's like to be human, is an absolutely brilliant rendition of the Shelley classic -- a horror tour de force. Paul Goat Allen

bn.com

Originally published as a novel in 2004, Dean Koontz's Prodigal Son became the launch volume of a trilogy that continue to win readers with its astonishing retake on the archetypal Frankenstein story. This fully authorized graphic novel renders Koontz's story in all its violence and nail-biting suspense. Nobody apparently could be happier with the results than the novelist himself: "I had approval of script and art," he told an interviewer, "but everything sent to me was done with such thoughtfulness and such a high design sense that I had to give very little feedback at all." Riveting visuals.

Based directly on the bestselling novel by Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson, this exuberantly gruesome comic adaptation draws some themes from Mary Shelly's 1818 original but also many images from horror movies, including contemporary slasher flicks. Deucalion, the first "Frankenstein's monster," is summoned from meditation in a Tibetan monastery by news that Victor Frankenstein, aka "Helios," is alive and thriving in New Orleans. Although Victor poses as a philanthropist, he actually is creating hoards of genetic slaves in an abandoned hospital. His control over his creations is slipping, however, and one has become a bloody serial killer, convinced that he can find what it takes to be human if he looks inside enough people. As this installment concludes, a tough female police detective is beginning to believe Deucalion's story, while the violence increases. Booth's vigorous layout and pencils do an admirable job of keeping characters and action clear. Dixon's adaptation also effectively uses Koontz's greatest skill, his breakneck thriller plotting, so that the story races from one ghastly shock to the next. (Feb.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

More than 200 years after the creation of his first monster, Victor Frankenstein, a.k.a. Victor Helios, is in New Orleans, manufacturing an army of creatures intended to take over the world. No longer bumbling giants cobbled together from cadavers, the new, improved race is biologically developed, intellectually programmed to follow orders, and externally indistinguishable from humans. A priest seeks a soul, a policeman finds he can murder, an autistic teen looks for happiness, and Victor's wife discovers she can lie. In the midst of this chaos, the original monster, 200-year-old Deucalion, bent on revenge against his creator, arrives in New Orleans to put an end to the experiments. Koontz and Anderson create well-rounded characters, then add plenty of suspense and action in a fast-paced plot. Scott Brick reads with his usual excellence; recommended for all fiction collections that include dark fantasy.-Janet Martin, FirstHealth of the Carolinas, Pinehurst, NC Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Gr 10 Up—Detective O'Connor manages to look seductive and tragic while snacking in parking lots and blindly following the trail of New Orleans's most gruesome murderer. She and her partner, the slightly lackluster Michael Maddison, have discovered corpse after corpse throughout the city, each missing limbs or organs. Meanwhile, life seems easy for Victor Helios, scientist and technology mogul who lives in the lap of Southern luxury with an army of servants and a spouse to rival the most astonishing of Stepford wives. Strangely though, his company, Helios Biovision, housed in the crumbling Hands of Mercy Hospital, features bricked windows, security cameras, steel doors, and a staff that never sees the light of day. Based on the novel by Kevin J. Anderson and Dean Koontz, this graphic novel is one of the more compelling in the recent trend of "classic" adaptations. The story, though familiar, is packed with a satisfying blend of sinister twists and modern supporting characters. Booth's art has enough intensity and detailed creepiness to make any reader squirm. The eyes of the characters convey a sense of doom and inhumanness that adeptly mirror the philosophical darkness of the plotline. Blending questions of the human condition, justice, and revenge with a healthy smattering of gore, this first volume is sure to be snatched up by teens.—Shannon Peterson, Kitsap Regional Library, WA

School Library Journal

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