I know, as a writer I should be selecting less well known writers to promote, but occasionally I read a book by someone famous already and it just explodes the thought processes in my head.
Dean Koontz' book, Life Expectancy is such a book.
Throughout the book, there are suggestive details that keep you wondering what the twist will be at the end of the book.
Dean Koontz profiles his characters with the utmost care and definition for the reader, keeping careful control of how much information he gives the reader and yet fully informing them, from the first page of the book what he's going to do with the characters he creates.
When the clown, who appears in the first part of the book, truly reveals his nature, the reality of his "mean streak" breaks loose a stream of facts that takes you down a twisted road of comprehension.
The clown is a freak of nature, but more aptly, his personality is the twisted demented result of association with a sub-level character whose freakish behavior has set out to create a superior race.
The ultimate epic failure is obvious from the beginning of the book, where incestuous results of biological proportion are revealed one tiny bit at a time, until the entire twist of the story becomes evident in the final pages of the book.
The ultimate fundamental facts in the book end up being the dedication of one man to protect his family, no matter what the cost.
His irrefutable dedication to this task reveals no less that complete and utter commitment to loving his family, a trait that is carried out by many characters in the cast of this book in various methods.
In most cases this complete commitment to proclivity of family turned the character into a monster of revelation, setting up the dynamic that ultimately determines the difference between loving dedication to protecting family and the twisted dedication to destruction of the family.
While the characters in the book are a radical extreme, their characterization took on the most dominant characteristics of many family patriarchs in today's modern world.
That's what I liked most about the book, the depiction of reality in the extreme.