Your Heart Belongs to Me

A reread for me and another solid thriller from Dean Koontz, though one built on quite a simple idea but told in a more complicated and expert way than many might manage. I like the outcome as much as the one who wants perfect endings may also dislike it. Sometimes the imperfect is perfect. But I also don’t believe in all the sentiments. Sometimes even the best people believe in the wrong people, take things at face value, and ignore warnings. In short, almost anyone can be fooled sometimes in their life, especially when at their most vulnerable. When fooled by a bad person, it’s still the bad person who’s to blame. Alas, like many thrillers, it’s hard to explain without giving the story away. I liked this book, though I show more didn’t love it. Many may consider it to be far-fetched, but Koontz writes books that require the reader to stretch their belief. show less

Sadly, this is probably the first Koontz book that I haven't been really, really crazy about. It just didn't flow the way I've come to expect from Koontz. It took too long to sort out who the actual enemy was, and then, when it was clear, too much of it was unexplained. It seemed like he wanted to write a spiritual book with some spooky, ghost like stuff happening, but then forgot that theme and went with just a plain psycho out for revenge for something he didn't even know about. I wish I hadn't wasted my money on the hard cover! For me, a big disappointment, and I'm usually one of his biggest fans!

Apologies on all of the Dean Koontz reviews today. I am just reading books as I find them in my messy under construction house. This has led me to re-read some Koontz books (really just skim since I have read them before). I forgot how much I disliked "Your Heart Belongs to Me" until my re-read of it. A main character who I didn't care for and a BS ending just made me roll my eyes. Koontz for once didn't have a HEA ending, but the whole book felt seriously out of sync.

A rich man named Ryan Perry has the whole world in his pocket. He has a woman he loves (Samantha) and can do anything he wants. Then he gets sick and gets diagnosed with something that is damaging his heart. If he doesn't get a heart transplant, he is going to die. Then show more Ryan starts to investigate how something could have caused him to get sick and then starts running scared from an unseen enemy. When Ryan meets with a doctor who promises he can get him on the top of a heart transplant list and damn the cost, the book goes sideways from there.

Ryan sucks. I really didn't like him and when we figure out as readers what happens and how Ryan was "saved" I really despised the guy. I can't recall Koontz ever writing a main character this way before. Ryan and Samantha are finished after his heart transplant and you are left wondering what the hell happened. When the book skips a year later we find out what Ryan has been up to and how he wants to reach out to Samantha again. When someone starts stalking Ryan and telling him that his heart belongs to her I maybe laughed a few times. The woman and the fear that Ryan has is not scary at all. I just felt bored and hoped that the woman ended up killing Ryan so something interesting would happen.

Samantha is perfection in literary form. Does Koontz know how to write women any other way these days? She is also a writer so when she and Ryan ends things, he spends a lot of time dissecting her work in order to read about the subtext behind her words. I hope you like the word subtext. I think it appeared like a billion times (sarcasm).

There are secondary characters I can't even recall or care about too much since in the end they don't matter. We have a red herring character who was just freaking odd and terrible. A mysterious nurse whose name I am blanking on.

I think the biggest issue I have with this book is that I don't think Koontz knows what it wanted it to be. We have Ryan who goes from being happy and in love with Samantha to then thinking she is all femme fatale. It doesn't ring true based on what Koontz shows us and we have to wade through a ridiculous amount of red herrings to figure out what is going on. The book was overly descriptive about things I did not give a damn about. At one point I wondered did I wander into a James Patterson novel (I stopped reading that guy years ago because I don't care to read about the thread count of people's fucking bedsheets) and felt really annoyed.

The dialogue was painful as hell to wade through. No one talks like this and stop it!

The flow was awful too. We just skipped a ton of stuff that I think was necessary to even get a gleam of figuring out what could possibly be happening.

As I said the ending was terrible. Koontz should have just went dark with things and been done with it. Also there are dogs and I maybe screamed a bit about that. show less

I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed this book so much. I used to love Koontz but he kinda lost it there for awhile, at least in my opinion. Not sure if I would have enjoyed it as much if I read the book as opposed to listening to it. For me, some books are just better heard then read.

Few bestselling genre writers are willing to stray from their proven formula as much as Koontz, especially now with their publishers facing increasing financial pressure to stamp out novels from a familiar mold. Koontz, however, is a poetic genius trapped in a thriller writer's body, and I respect the tragic tack he takes in Your Heart Belongs to Me.

The core mystery/thriller elements are here, as Koontz hands a dotcom millionaire Ryan Perry a medical death sentence and keeps us wondering whether he's the victim of a conspiracy or his own paranoia. But unlike the heroes in some of his more traditional thrillers like The Good Guy and The Husband, Ryan faces a threat that arises as much from his own tragic flaw as from an show more independently-motivated villain. Laced with allusions to The Raven and other works by Poe, there's a suspenseful creepiness to this tale that goes well beyond what most medical mysteries can achieve. There's also a compelling love story between these covers, with an arc tracing Ryan's dark journey of self-discovery. And as Ryan discovers the evil wrought by his own tragic moral shortcomings, the stakes seem higher than life or death, as if his very soul hangs in the balance.

Despite this novel's many strengths, I found Ryan less developed and believable than most Koontz heroes, making some of his decisions toward the end of the story hard to fathom. I also felt that the supernatural element of the book detracted from its power (a rarity for a Koontz novel, to be sure), as this mystery could have been just as creepy, but more compelling, without resorting to the ghost device. Graded on a Koontz curve, I give this four stars, bearing in mind that it would probably merit five stars from most any other writer. show less

Until the last 40 pages or so, this felt like the Koontz book that might finally convince me to stop reading his new books. Then it was vaguely redeemed in the final pages. I do mean vaguely, though. The explanation of things is actually not very impressive, we find out that significant information was left out of the earlier story so that the reader can't too easily guess what was happening, and the wrap up is too tidy. The only reason I found it vaguely redeeming was the way it changed the story's overall portrayal of the main character. It took away some of my earlier annoyance.

I suspect my compulsion to keep reading Koontz's new books will continue, though we'll see. The Odd books are the only ones that seem even somewhat inspired show more anymore. Perhaps not surprising when the books are coming out like clockwork, one every six months, with a writing style that seems to mimic R.L. Stine more all the time (it's noticeable, for instance, when a paragraph is longer than five lines or a chapter longer than six pages.)

Why can't I break my addiction? Why can't Koontz go back to writing the somewhat less preachy and much more compelling, not so by-the-numbers books of his past? And yet, they're still just compelling enough for me to continue reading them. (Or maybe it's just the vague sense of accomplishment I get from pounding them out in a day or two, since they read so fast and easy.)

Anyway, even if you're a fan of Koontz, if you don't have to read all his books, I'd recommend giving this one a pass. It's pretty mediocre and the overwriting borders on ridiculous at times, even for Koontz. And you'll very possibly find yourself wanting to strangle the main character throughout most of it. Don't bother. show less

Several years ago I would never have thought it possible that I would not want to read a Dean Koontz novel. However, after reading Seize the Night, I was disappointed in his work and I stopped reading. Until now. The front cover blurb on Your Heart Belongs to Me was so intriguing that I picked it up at the library. It says, " At thirty-four, Internet entrepreneur Ryan Perry seemed to have the world in his pocket - until the first troubling symptoms appeared out of nowhere. Within days, he's diagnosed with incurable cardiomyopathy and finds himself on the waiting list for a heart transplant; its his only hope, and it's dwindling fast. Ryan is about to lose it all . . . His health, his girlfriend Samantha, and his life.

One year later, show more Ryan never felt better. Business is good and he hopes to renew his relationship with Samantha. Then the unmarked gifts begin to appear - a box of Valentine candy hearts, a heart pendant. Most disturbing of all, a graphic heart surgery video and the chilling message: Your heart belongs to me."

What caught my attention as I was reading was the similar experience that I had with the protagonist, Ryan Perry, after suffering a catastrophic injury 25 years ago. Koontz writes of experiences that only someone who has been critically ill would know about. The thought pattern is not something you talk about because it is too strange for others to understand. It seems to me that Koontz had to be severely ill or injured at some point in his life.

These paragraphs on page 264 sum it up: "He knew now a disquiet that was different in character from any he had known before. This journey had taken him from dead-center in the realm of reason, where he had lived his entire life,to the outer precincts, where the air was thinner and the light less revealing. He stood on the borderline between everything he had been and a new way of being that he dared not contemplate."

Koontz has won me back. I am excited about reading his next novel. show less