by Jim Bessey

Created on: January 13, 2009

"Your Heart Belongs to Me," released late in 2008, adds yet another supernatural tale to Dean Koontz's impressive bookshelf. "Heart" makes it FIFTY bestsellers for this popular, prolific author. Long-term fans know that Koontz varies his stories from terrifying to inspirational. This one falls somewhere between the extremes. The expected elements of the unexplained are balanced this time by a protagonist grounded firmly in reality and our modern times.

We're drawn into the privileged life of 34-year-old Internet whiz Ryan Perry. He's made millions by developing a wildly successful social networking website. Could this tale be much more topical? Perry is young, living the life of the newly affluent, and deeply in love with a down-to-earth (and beautiful, of course) would-be author, Samantha Reach. So far she has deflected Perry's proposal of marriage. She toils tirelessly on her debut novel in a rented apartment above a garage.

Evil lurks in our lovable millionaire's heart - literally. He's healthy, fit, and an avid surfer; yet his own heart begins to fail him. Scenes describing the onset of Ryan's heart failure unfold in vivid physical and emotional detail, so real that the reader may find himself checking his pulse for irregularities. As the internet tycoon's heart betrays him, we follow along as he descends into an irrational paranoia - one Perry can afford to indulge with clandestine investigations into Samantha's relatives. Perry senses evil and conspiracy all around him, all the while questioning his own motivations and sanity.

Eventually our hero must fall under the cardiologist's skillful knife to receive a replacement heart. This is where the spooky part of the story begins to unfold. "Heart" jumps forward several months after Perry's transplant to pick up the narrative aftermath. As readers, we wonder why Samantha still won't let Ryan get closer. In fact, they've all but ended their earlier relationship. Perry's nearly unlimited resources, it seems, aren't enough to win the heart of the woman he loves - nor to protect him from the grim dangers of the new heart now beating in his chest. A mysterious and deadly woman intrudes in Ryan's life of luxury with one simple message:

"Your heart belongs to me." She vows to take it back.

One of the keys to great fiction, especially the kind of supernatural tales of terror at which Koontz excels, is 'willing suspension of disbelief.' Koontz makes you believe. He always has. We feel the protagonist's pain, real and imagined,

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