Cape Fear

Dean Koontz

WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE
, I had a friend, Harry Recard, who was smart, funny, and a demon card player. Harry was a successful history major, while I passed more time playing pinochle than I spent in class. For the three and a half years that I required to graduate, I heard Harry rave about this writer named John D. MacDonald, “John D” to his most ardent readers. Of the two of us, Harry was the better card player and just generally the cooler one. Consequently, I was protective of my position, as an English major, to be the better judge of literature, don’t you know. I remained reluctant to give John D a look.

Having read mostly science fiction, I found many of my professors’ assigned authors markedly less exciting than Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, but I was determined to read the right thing. For every Flannery O’Connor whose work I could race through with delight, there were three like Virginia Woolf, who made me want to throw their books off a high cliff and leap after them. Nevertheless, I continued to shun Harry’s beloved John D.

Five or six years after college, I was a full-time writer with numerous credits in science fiction, struggling to move into suspense and mainstream work. I was making progress but not fast enough to suit me. By now I knew that John D was widely admired, and I finally sat down with one of his books. In the next thirty days, I read thirty-four of them. The singular voice and style of the man overwhelmed me, and the next novel I wrote was such an embarrassingly slavish imitation of a MacDonald tale that I had to throw away the manuscript.

I apologized to Harry for doubting him. He was so pleased to hear me proclaiming the joys of John D that he only said “I told you so” on, oh, twenty or thirty occasions.

Over the years, I have read every novel by John D at least three times, some of them twice that often. His ability to evoke a time and place—mostly Florida but also the industrial Midwest, Las Vegas, and elsewhere—was wonderful, and he could get inside an occupation to give you the details and the feel of it like few other writers I’ve ever read. His pacing was superb, the flow of his prose irresistible, and his suspense watch-spring tight.

Of all his manifest strengths as a writer, however, I am most in awe of his ability to create characters who are as real as anyone I’ve met in life. John D sometimes paused in the headlong rush of his story to spin out pages of background on a character. At first when this happened, I grumbled about getting on with the story. But I soon discovered that he could make the character so fascinating that when the story began to race forward again, I wanted it to slow down so I could learn more about this person who so intrigued and/or delighted me. There have been many good suspense novelists in recent decades, but in my experience, none has produced characters with as much humanity and truth as those in MacDonald’s work.

Like most who have found this author, I am an admirer of his Travis McGee series, which features a first-person narrator as good as any in the history of suspense fiction and better than most. But I love the standalone novels even more.
Cry Hard, Cry Fast. Where Is Janice Gantry? The Last One Left. A Key to the Suite. The Drowner. The Damned. A Bullet for Cinderella. The Only Girl in the Game. The Crossroads. All These Condemned
. Those are not my only favorites, just a few of them, and many deal with interesting businesses and occupations. Mr. MacDonald’s work gives the reader deep and abiding pleasure for many reasons, not the least of which is that it portrays the contemporary life of his day with as much grace and fidelity as any writer of the period, and thus it also provides compelling social history.

In 1985, when my publisher, Putnam, wanted to send advance proof copies of
Strangers
to Mr. MacDonald among others, I literally grew shaky at the thought of him reading it. I suggested that they shouldn’t send it to him, that as famous and prolific as he was, the proof would be an imposition on him; in truth, I feared that he would find the novel unsatisfying. Putnam sent it to him anyway, and he gave us an enthusiastic endorsement. In addition, he wrote to me separately, in an avuncular tone, kindly advising me how to avoid some of the pitfalls of the publishing business, and he wrote to my publisher asking her to please carefully consider the packaging of the book and not condemn it to the horror genre. She more or less condemned it to the genre anyway, but I took his advice to heart.

In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer’s work accurately reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

Reader, prepare to be enchanted by the books of John D. MacDonald. And Harry, I am not as much of an idiot as I was in years gone by—though I know you won’t let me get away with claiming not to be to any degree an idiot anymore.

SAM BOWDEN LAY ON HIS BACK
under a high Saturday sun, eyes closed, right hand clasping the fading chill of half a can of beer. He was aware of the nearness of Carol. Digestion of the picnic lunch was proceeding comfortably. Jamie and Bucky were thrashing around in the brush on the small hill behind the little beach, and Sam knew it would soon be time for eleven-year-old Jamie to send six-year-old Bucky down to them to ask if it wasn’t time to go back into the water. Other years Nancy would have been racing and whooping with the younger kids.

But this year Nancy was fourteen, and this year she had brought a guest along—a fifteen-year-old boy named Pike Foster. Nancy and Pike lay baking in the sun on the fore-deck of the
Sweet Sioux III
, with a portable radio turned to the odd offerings of a progressive disk jockey. The
Sweet Sioux
was moored a hundred feet down the curve of beach,
her bow ten feet off the sand, and the music was barely audible.

Sam Bowden lay with the sun coming red through his eyelids and tried, almost with desperation, to tell himself that all was right with his particular world. Everything was fine. This was the first expedition of the year to the island. The Bowdens would make three or four trips to it this year, the same as every year since 1950, when they had found it, the year before Bucky was born. It was a ridiculously small island twelve miles out into the lake, northwest of New Essex. It was too small to have a name. It merited a single dot on the charts and a warning of shoal waters. It had a hill and a beach and reasonably deep water just off the beach.

Everything was under control. The marriage was of the very best variety. Everybody was healthy. He had been a partner in the law firm ever since 1948. Their house, just outside the village of Harper, thirteen miles from New Essex, was more house than he should have purchased, but he could console himself with the constantly increasing value of the ten acres of land. They had no savings to speak of, a very few shares of pale blue-chip stocks. But his hefty insurance program gave him a feeling of security.

He raised his head and, without opening his eyes, finished off the can of beer. He told himself that there was absolutely no need to fret. No point in getting hysterical. Think of it as just another problem that could be taken care of neatly, quietly, with dispatch and efficiency.

“Hey!” Carol said.

“Uh?”

“Wake up and look at me, you inert mass.”

He rolled up onto one sharp elbow and squinted at her. “You look just fine,” he said. And she did, indeed. The pale-blue swimsuit set off her dark coloring. Her hair was black and coarse and shiny, a heritage from the remote fraction of Indian blood that had provided the inevitable name for the three boats they had owned. Her eyes were fine and dark and large. Her nose, which she despised, was high-bridged, faintly hooked. He had always liked it. Her thirty-seven years showed in the weather wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and possibly in the veins on the backs of her hands, but not at all in the long, lithe figure, nor in the round and agile legs.

“I was not fishing,” she said firmly. “This is a serious matter. Pay attention.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“It started on Thursday when you came back from the office. You were physically present but spiritually among the missing. And yesterday the same. And today, more of it. Fifteen years of marriage, my remote friend, give a girl extrasensory equipment.”

“That sounds provocative. The equipment looks good on you.”

“Hush! No smart talk, Samuel. No covering up. No fencing, please, sir. I want to know. Just now you were scowling more than the sun requires. I know when something is nibbling at you.”

“In all of New Essex I am known as Subtle Sam. Nobody knows what I’m thinking. They cannot probe my Gioconda smile. I can draw and fill an inside straight without a tremor. But you have an uncanny—”