‘ Life Expectancy’ is a deliciously weird tale intertwined with prophecy, mad men, fate, and family. Witty banter, fun and weird characters, a good chase, serendipity, and some obtuse cyclical element that you never expect. It has been a while since I’ve indulged in a Dean Koontz creation, and ‘ Life Expectancy’ reminded me of all the things I love about his writing. Suddenly the old man’s predictions take on a chilling significance.
But then he discovers that Josef also predicted the time of his grandson’s birth to the minute, as well as his exact height and weight, and the fact that Jimmy would be born with syndactyly-the unexplained anomal of fused digits-on his left foot. Rudy is all too ready to discount his father’s last words as a dying man’s delusional rambling. The first is to occur in his twentieth year the second in his twenty-third year the third in his twenty-eighth the fourth in his twenty-ninth the fifth in his thirtieth. What he says before he dies is that there will be five dark days in the life of his grandson-five dates whose terrible events Jimmy will have to prepare himself to face. It’s a strange vigil made all the stranger when, at the very height of the storm’s fury, Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the first and last time since his stroke.
As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers’ waiting room and his dying father’s bedside. Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. Fun and weird characters, murder, humour and a twist I didn’t see coming.
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