Tommy Phan comes home to find a creepy handmade ragdoll on his doorstep. Assuming it to be part of a prank, he takes it inside. Later the doll’s white cotton cloth skin rips open to reveal green eyes with the elliptical pupils of a predator and scaly hands with tiny, but wickedly sharp claws. It attacks him with clever tactics, speed, and bloodthirsty shrieks …show more content…
not of anything on earth. Although Tommy isn’t sure what the heck the thing is or where it came from, he’s certain of what it wants: Tommy’s life. There’s no way Tommy can expect the police to help; they would think he’s absolutely insane. If the doll-creature-thing knew how to short-circuit the entire house, it was intelligent enough to hide itself from police and earn him several years in a psychiatric ward. All Tommy can do is run, and that's exactly what he does for much of the story. If I were in Tommy's place, I wouldn't have even picked up the doll. I would have assumed a group of children had been playing outside, sat on my front step, and forgot to pick their toy back up when it was time to go home. If I would have picked up the doll, then I wouldn’t have been able to do any different from Tommy with a possessed doll trying to kill me, although I wouldn’t have been able to think as clearly as a thirty-year-old novelist and would’ve been dead before I had a chance to get out of the house.
Tommy and Del, the mysterious woman who saved him quite a few times from being killed by the doll, outrun the doll as long as they can. Tommy eventually calls his older brother Gi, who deciphers the odd message that was attached to the doll’s hand when Tommy first found it, and without translating the message for him, he sends Tommy to their mother. She jumps in Del’s car and the three of them head to the house of Quy Trang Dai, a Vietnamese-American hairdresser that also dabbles a bit in magic, the woman who created the cursed doll and put in on Tommy’s doorstep. With almost an hour left till dawn, Tommy, Mrs. Phan, Del, and Quy Trang Dai wait at the old hairdresser’s house, the only place that is safe from the demon-snake-doll-thing as it can’t hurt its creator. After dawn, the monster folds back up into the ragdoll, stitches intact, and Quy Tang Dai promises to later destroy it. Now, while reading this story, I expected the supernatural, invincible, highly intelligent creature to be destroyed by some ritual involving dark magic, but as the author surprises his audience several other times in the story, he perplexed me yet again as Quy Tang Dai simply wipes her blood on the other characters’ foreheads to mask their scents and waits out the remaining seconds until dawn. Of course, in a story involving a sand-filled ragdoll that transforms into a highly intelligent monster who is unharmed by fire and merely stunned by powerful shotguns and assault rifles, a woman who was conceived with the help of extra-terrestrial science and has an alien dog that helps her set boats aflame with no fuel or matches, and too many plot twists to count, it only makes sense that the characters would destroy the demonic creature by simply waiting it out rather than a magic ritual or something else that would make any sense.
Poor Tommy, the most important character of the story, endures all of this in less than twenty-four hours. He has endured suffering before though, and is strong-minded because of it. Tommy came to America from Vietnam, land of Seagull and Fox, twenty-two years ago to escape the communists and Thai pirates that were making life unsafe for Vietnamese people. His family, especially his mother, is extremely traditional and strict; His parents expected their children to become doctors or work in the family bakery, marry Vietnamese women and men who were also traditionalist doctors or bakers, and to keep as much of their Vietnamese culture as possible. Tommy, being the youngest, easily embraced his new American culture, changing his name from Tuong to Tommy, forgetting nearly all of his first language, and worst of all, leaving the family business to pursue his dream of being a writer, writing novels about detective Chip Nguyen, whiskey drinking, crime fighting, blonde chasing fictional hero. Tommy refused to even refer to himself as a Vietnamese-American, referring to himself simply as an American and correcting his mother whenever she called him by his birth name. When Tommy bought himself a Corvette, a car that symbolized Americanism to Tommy as a child, his mother didn't like it. "She knew perfectly well what a sports car was, and she knew what a Corvette was […]. She also knew what a Corvette meant to Tommy, what it symbolized; she sensed that, in the Corvette, he was moving still further from his ethnic roots, and she disapproved," (Koontz, 9) as she did with almost everything Tommy did. He often suffers guilt because of this, and because of his poor relationship with his family and criticism from both his mother and eldest brother. Although his independence makes him suffer from constant guilt and nightmares in which everyone his family dies except for him, it allowed him to learn and enjoy the English language, American culture, and also to develop the skills that allowed him to become a novelist. This also helped him develop an open mind and problem-solving skills, which kept him alive.
Deliverance Payne, or Del, immediately intrigues Tommy. She's a "slender blue-eyed blonde with a pert nose and a rosey complexion" (Koontz, 24), the kind of girl Tommy's detective would chase and the kind of girl that would break his mother's heart if they ever dated. Del saves Tommy's life the second time they meet, driving him away from his totaled car after the bloodthirsty doll pops out of the crushed hood. She keeps Tommy alive when his panic and lack of supernatural knowledge gets in the way of his decision making skills. Del always manages to surprise Tommy, first by her driving skill, then by her open-mindedness and empathy in such an odd situation, then by her courage, multiple talents ranging from shooting powerful guns, throwing knives, hotwiring cars, painting, and her ability to evade direct answers to questions. She’s mysterious, spontaneous, evasive, extremely wealthy and attractive, and probably has a few loose screws. Although she seems a bit crazy, she’s the person to be credited for Tommy’s survival, and is the person he marries by the end of the book, finally earning him some approval from his mother when she says their marriage is the best marriage she’s ever seen.
Mrs. Phan, Tommy's mother, is extremely traditional, and strict. She speaks mostly Vietnamese, proven by her thick accent and poor English grammar. She, as well as her husband, expects all of her children to either work in the family business or become doctors, marry successful Vietnamese people, and to spend so much time with the family that they basically live with her. Other than the extreme expectations of her children, she seems like an ordinary mother, strict but caring, and deep down very sweet and loving, but she's definitely not a character one can judge by first impression. According to Tommy, when she wore her ao dais, she looked "diminutive, like a little girl in her mother's clothes, but there was nothing vulnerable about her. Strong-minded, iron-willed, she could be a tyrant when she wished, and she knew how to make a look of disapproval sting worse than the lash of a whip" (Koontz, 19). She definitely isn't in any way vulnerable or shy. She's great at debating, especially when badgering Tommy about his life choices, and can turn the conversation around to her favor whenever she wants. Mrs. Phan is definitely smarter and much more clever than she seems at first glance, and as stubborn and judgemental as she seems, she is quite proud of her son.
Dean Koontz is very descriptive as he describes settings, emotions, sensations, and actions in the story.
Koontz uses imagery to vividly describe different situations in several scenes, doing so well enough that I can imagine scenes as if I'm in the book. For example, shortly after his argument with his mother, Tommy starts hearing strange noises from the car radio. At first the noise is described as "a soft surration- not ordinary static, but like distant water tumbling in considerable volume over a sloping palisade of rocks" (Koontz, 14). After Tommy presses a button, the sound is compared to water, "gushing and tumbling, growling yet whispery" (Koontz, 14). The next description is eerily lucid, chill inducing: "Hundreds or even thousands of [voices]. Men, women, the fragile voices of children. He thought he could hear despairing wails, pleas for help, panicked cries, anguished groans- a monumental yet hushed sound, as though it was echoing across a vast gulf or rising out of a black abyss" (Koontz, 15) The above descriptions made me feel as if I was in the car with Tommy; I felt like I could hear the voices, even feel them. Koontz uses another literary technique to enhance the story. He uses hyperbole in a few different situations, but the one that stuck out to me is during the scene in which Tommy, Del, and his mother are in a car chase with the doll, and Del and Tommy's mother are arguing. Upon Tommy's mother calling her bad news, Del replies with "I am the weather." To explain she says the weather is neither good nor bad; it's just there. Comparing herself to weather rather than something else that is rather neutral, like, say, an animal, seems like a bit of an exaggeration, not that such a statement shouldn't be expected from
Del.