From Publishers Weekly
In this grisly thriller, the first in a new series by bestsellers Koontz and Anderson, Dr. Frankenstein has survived into the 21st century, masquerading as biotech tycoon Victor Helios. Helios wants to replace flawed humanity with his New Race, people born and fermented in pods, their personalities programmed by him, their imperfections removed in the lab. But at least one of his creations has become a serial killer, trying to assemble the perfect woman from parts of many. Like expert plate-spinners, the authors set up a dizzying array of narrative viewpoints and cycle through them effortlessly. These include one of Victor's creations who suffers from autism and is trying to understand it; a cloned priest who serves as a clandestine member of Helios's army; Helios's custom-made wife, unique among his creations in that she's allowed to feel shame; and, tying it all together, a classic buddy-cop set of homicide detectives who slowly come to understand that the butcher they're chasing isn't quite human. The odd juxtaposition of a police procedural with a neo-gothic, mad scientist plot gives the novel a wickedly unusual and intriguing feel. The familiarity of the Frankenstein myth makes much of the story arc predictable, but it's still a compelling read, with an elegant cliffhanger ending. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From AudioFile
What if Mary Shelley got it wrong? What if Dr. Victor Frankenstein was not a victim of his own creation? And what if he was a truly evil genius determined to replace humanity with his own "perfect" progeny? What if Dr. Frankenstein is still alive today, living in New Orleans? That's the premise of Dean Koontz's new four-book saga, co-written with Kevin J. Anderson. John Bedford Lloyd gives an uninspired reading of the first book in the series, which tells of Frankenstein's original monster assisting a pair of New Orleans police officers as they track a serial killer who may be one of Frankenstein's creations. The story is intriguing, but Lloyd sounds uninterested, modulating his voice with false melodrama. S.E.S. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Some 200 years after creating his monster, Victor Frankenstein, alias Helios, is settled in New Orleans. Continuing research and experimentation have allowed him to obviate robbing graveyards to fashion his creatures, and to enhance himself so that he indefinitely remains a vigorous fortysomething. He is seeding the city with his perfect (i.e., perfectly obedient to him) New Race, intending to eventually replace and exterminate "imperfect" humanity. Helios has been identified, however, and photos have been sent to Deucalion, in retreat at a Tibetan monastery, who hastens to see whether he can unmake his maker this time. Deucalion is Frankenstein's original monster, granted virtually indestructible longevity, he thinks, by the lightning that brought him to life. If Frankenstein has become monstrous, the monster has become human in the best sense, also cannier and more powerful. Unfortunately, with New Racers in mufti all over New Orleans, many more need to be gotten. Fortunately (as it happens), one New Racer is rebelling, murderously, and his killings overlap with those of a serial killer, bringing the attentions of homicide cops Carson O'Connor and Michael Maddison. And, known only to the reader, one of Frankenstein's new experiments is going awry, not to mention AWOL. With Anderson's help in this book (and Ed Gorman's in its continuation, coming this spring), Koontz realizes his original concept for a cable TV effort from which he withdrew. It was TV's loss, for, filmed utterly faithfully, Prodigal Son could be the best horror thriller and, hands down, would be the best Frankenstein movie, ever. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"A compelling read.... The odd juxtaposition of a police procedural with a neo-gothic, mad scientist plot gives the novel a wickedly unusual and intriguing feel ... with an elegant cliffhanger ending."
--Publishers Weekly

"This is classic Koontz at his best. The plot zips along, the characters are grotesque and funny. The basic elements of Mary Shelley's novel, though slightly altered, fit right in."



From the Inside Flap
From the celebrated imagination of Dean Koontz comes a powerful reworking of one of the classic stories of all time. If you think you know the story, you know only half the truth. Get ready for the mystery, the myth, the terror, and the magic of…

DEAN KOONTZ’S PRODIGAL SON

Every city has secrets. But none as terrible as this. His name is Deucalion, a tattooed man of mysterious origin, a sleight-of-reality artist who’s traveled the centuries with a secret worse than death. He arrives as a serial killer stalks the streets, a killer who carefully selects his victims for the humanity that is missing in himself. Detective Carson O’Connor is cool, cynical, and every bit as tough as she looks. Her partner Michael Maddison would back her up all the way to Hell itself–and that just may be where this case ends up. For the no-nonsense O’Connor is suddenly talking about an ages-old conspiracy, a near immortal race of beings, and killers that are more–and less–than human. Soon it will be clear that as crazy as she sounds, the truth is even more ominous. For their quarry isn’t merely a homicidal maniac–but his deranged maker.


About the Author
Dean Koontz, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Trixie, in southern California. Kevin J. Anderson has written twenty-eight national best sellers and has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Bram Stroker Award, and the SFX Reader's Choice Award. He also holds the Guinness world record for "Largest Single-Author Book Signing."


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1

Deucalion seldom slept, but when he did, he dreamed. Every dream was a nightmare. None frightened him. He was the spawn of nightmares, after all; and he had been toughened by a life of terror.

During the afternoon, napping in his simple cell, he dreamed that a surgeon opened his abdomen to insert a mysterious, squirming mass. Awake but manacled to the surgical table, Deucalion could only endure the procedure.

After he had been sewn shut, he felt something crawling inside his body cavity, as though curious, exploring.
From behind his mask, the surgeon said, “A messenger approaches. Life changes with a letter.”

He woke from the dream and knew that it had been prophetic. He possessed no psychic power of a classic nature, but sometimes omens came in his sleep.

In these mountains of tibet, a fiery sunset conjured a mirage of molten gold from the glaciers and the snowfields. A serrated blade of Himalayan peaks, with Everest at its hilt, cut the sky.

Far from civilization, this vast panorama soothed Deucalion. For several years, he had preferred to avoid people, except for Buddhist monks in this windswept rooftop of the world.

Although he had not killed for a long time, he still harbored the capacity for homicidal fury. Here he strove always to suppress his darker urges, sought calm, and hoped to find true peace.

From an open stone balcony of the whitewashed monastery, as he gazed at the sun-splashed ice pack, he considered, not for the first time, that these two elements, fire and ice, defined his life.

At his side, an elderly monk, Nebo, asked, “Are you looking at the mountains–or beyond them, to what you left behind?”

Although Deucalion had learned to speak several Tibetan dialects during his lengthy sojourn here, he and the old monk often spoke English, for it afforded them privacy.

“I don’t miss much of that world. The sea. The sound of shore birds. A few friends. Cheez-Its.”

“Cheeses? We have cheese here.”

Deucalion smiled and pronounced the word more clearly than he’d done previously. “Cheez-Its are cheddar-flavored crackers. Here in this monastery we seek enlightenment, meaning, purpose . . . God. Yet often the humblest things of daily life, the small pleasures, seem to define existence for me. I’m afraid I’m a shallow student, Nebo.”

Pulling his wool robe closer about himself as wintry breezes bit, Nebo said, “To the contrary. Never have I had one less shallow than you. Just hearing about Cheez-Its, I myself am intrigued.”

A voluminous wool robe covered Deucalion’s scarred patchwork body, though even the harshest cold rarely bothered him.
The mandala-shaped Rombuk monastery–an architectural wonder of brick walls, soaring towers, and graceful roofs–clung precariously to a barren mountainside: imposing, majestic, hidden from the world. Waterfalls of steps spilled down the sides of the square towers, to the base of the main levels, granting access to interior courtyards.

Brilliant yellow, white, red, green, and blue prayer flags, representing the elements, flapped in the breeze. Carefully written sutras adorned the flags, so that each time the fabric waved in the wind, a prayer was symbolically sent in the direction of Heaven.

Despite Deucalion’s size and strange appearance, the monks had accepted him. He absorbed their teaching and filtered it through his singular experience. In time, they had come to him with philosophical questions, seeking his unique perspective.

They didn’t know who he was, but they understood intuitively that he was no normal man.

Deucalion stood for a long time without speaking. Nebo waited beside him. Time had little meaning in the clockless world of the monks, and after two hundred years of life, with perhaps more than that ahead of him, Deucalion often lived with no awareness of time.

Prayer wheels clicked, stirred by breezes. In a call to sunset prayer, one monk stood in the window of a high tower, blowing on a shell trumpet. Deep inside the monastery, chants began to resonate through the cold stone.

Deucalion stared down into the canyons full of purple twilight, east of the monastery. From some of Rombuk’s windows, one might fall more than a thousand feet to the rocks.

Out of that gloaming, a distant figure approached.
“A messenger,” he said. “The surgeon in the dream spoke truth.”
The old monk could not at first see the visitor. His eyes, the color of vinegar, seemed to have been faded by the unfiltered sun of extreme altitude. Then they widened. “We must meet him at the gates.”

Salamanders of torchlight crawled the ironbound beams of the main gate and the surrounding brick walls.
Just inside the gates, standing in the open-air outer ward, the messenger regarded Deucalion with awe. “Yeti,” he whispered, which was the name that the Sherpas had coined for the abominable snowman.

Words escaping him on plumes of frosted breath, Nebo said, “Is it custom now to precede a message with a rude remark?”
Having once been pursued like a beast, having lived two hundred years as the ultimate outsider, Deucalion was inoculated against all meanness. He was incapable of taking offense.

“Were I a yeti,” he said, speaking in the messenger’s language, “I might be as tall as this.” He stood six feet six. “I might be muscled this solidly. But I would be much hairier, don’t you think?”

“I . . . I suppose so.”

“A yeti never shaves.” Leaning close, as if imparting a secret, Deucalion said, “Under all that hair, a yeti has very sensitive skin. Pink, soft . . . quick to take a rash from a razor blade.”

Summoning courage, the messenger asked, “Then what are you?”

“Big Foot,” Deucalion said in English, and Nebo laughed, but the messenger did not understand.
Made nervous by the monk’s laughter, shivering not only because of the icy air, the young man held out a scuffed goatskin packet knotted tightly with a leather thong. “Here. Inside. For you.”

Deucalion curled one powerful finger around the leather thong, snapped it, and unfolded the goatskin wrapping to reveal an envelope inside, a wrinkled and stained letter long in transit.

The return address was in New Orleans. The name was that of an old and trusted friend, Ben Jonas.

Still glancing surreptitiously and nervously at the ravaged half of Deucalion’s face, the messenger evidently decided that the company of a yeti would be preferable to a return trip in darkness through the bitter-cold mountain pass. “May I have shelter for the night?”

“Anyone who comes to these gates,” Nebo assured him, “may have whatever he needs. If we had them, I would even give you Cheez-Its.”

From the outer ward, they ascended the stone ramp through the inner gate. Two young monks with lanterns arrived as if in answer to a telepathic summons to escort the messenger to guest quarters.

In the candlelit reception hall, in an alcove that smelled of sandalwood and incense, Deucalion read the letter. Ben’s handwritten words conveyed a momentous message in neatly penned blue ink.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Dean Koontz's Frankenstein -- the author's first literary series -- is a nightmare-inspiring, modern-day retelling of Mary Shelley's 1818 horror classic. Coauthored with Kevin J. Anderson, the first installment in this four-volume saga pits a reanimated giant and two tenacious police detectives against the demented scientist who created him.

It's no surprise that Deucalion, at almost seven feet tall and with half his face a mangled ruin, spent time as a European carnie sideshow attraction nicknamed the Monster. After enjoying several peaceful years at a monastery in Tibet, the introspective and enigmatic giant receives dire news: The man who created him centuries earlier, Victor Frankenstein, is inexplicably alive and living in New Orleans under the name of Victor Helios, a wealthy business owner and philanthropist. When Deucalion vows to leave his Tibetan sanctuary and destroy the man who created him, he soon realizes the critical magnitude of his mission -- Helios is in the process is secretly creating a new race of posthumans to take over the world!

As is par for the course in many fiction sagas, readers should be prepared for a cliff-hanger of monumental proportions at the conclusion of Prodigal Son. Koontz and Anderson, however, masterfully set the table for a virtual feast of hideous twists and turns, nightmarish monstrosities, and nonstop action in upcoming installments. Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, in which a man transforms himself into a monster and a monster learns what it's like to be human, is an absolutely brilliant rendition of the Shelley classic -- a horror tour de force. Paul Goat Allen

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A brilliant re-imagining and updating of the classic Frankenstein story that only Dean Koontz could conceive, PRODIGAL SON is the first volume in a four-book series that opens with the "monster"--Deucalion--coming to modern-day New Orleans, where he will join forces with a street-smart police detective and her partner on the trail of a macabre serial killer...a serial killer spawned, Deucalion will discover, by his own creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, now Victor Helios. Deucalion has survived for two centuries, given near immortality by the furious lightning storm that brought him to life. But he is no monster--not anymore. While he carries a quiet mystery about him, Deucalion is literate, intelligent, and very much in control of himself, almost as if he has an inner peace. For two hundred years Deucalion has thought himself alone among men, an aberrant creation of an evil mind. Now he will find that his fellows are legion...that they live among us at every strata of society...and that his nemesis, Victor Frankenstein, has survived the centuries as well...and dreams of seeding the earth with his creations. Loosely based on Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, the national network television series scheduled to begin airing on USA at Halloween, and co-authored with Kevin Anderson, subsequent volumes in the series will continue Deucalion's pursuit of Victor Helios and his unnatural army, in partership with two tough, bemused New Orleans cops, and will move back and forth in time as well, unspooling Deucalion's story from the time the original story closed. Rich, suspenseful, heartbreaking and terrifying, Dean Koontz's Frankenstein will explore as only "the master of the psychological drama"*can, the heights to which we might aspire, the depths to which some may fall, and what, in the end, it means to be truly human.
*Larry King, USA Today

SYNOPSIS

From the celebrated imagination of Dean Koontz comes a powerful reworking of one of the classic stories of all time. If you think you know the story, you know only half the truth. Get ready for the mystery, the myth, the terror, and the magic of…

DEAN KOONTZ’S PRODIGAL SON

Every city has secrets. But none as terrible as this. His name is Deucalion, a tattooed man of mysterious origin, a sleight-of-reality artist who’s traveled the centuries with a secret worse than death. He arrives as a serial killer stalks the streets, a killer who carefully selects his victims for the humanity that is missing in himself. Detective Carson O’Connor is cool, cynical, and every bit as tough as she looks. Her partner Michael Maddison would back her up all the way to Hell itself–and that just may be where this case ends up. For the no-nonsense O’Connor is suddenly talking about an ages-old conspiracy, a near immortal race of beings, and killers that are more–and less–than human. Soon it will be clear that as crazy as she sounds, the truth is even more ominous. For their quarry isn’t merely a homicidal maniac–but his deranged maker.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In this grisly thriller, the first in a new series by bestsellers Koontz and Anderson, Dr. Frankenstein has survived into the 21st century, masquerading as biotech tycoon Victor Helios. Helios wants to replace flawed humanity with his New Race, people born and fermented in pods, their personalities programmed by him, their imperfections removed in the lab. But at least one of his creations has become a serial killer, trying to assemble the perfect woman from parts of many. Like expert plate-spinners, the authors set up a dizzying array of narrative viewpoints and cycle through them effortlessly. These include one of Victor's creations who suffers from autism and is trying to understand it; a cloned priest who serves as a clandestine member of Helios's army; Helios's custom-made wife, unique among his creations in that she's allowed to feel shame; and, tying it all together, a classic buddy-cop set of homicide detectives who slowly come to understand that the butcher they're chasing isn't quite human. The odd juxtaposition of a police procedural with a neo-gothic, mad scientist plot gives the novel a wickedly unusual and intriguing feel. The familiarity of the Frankenstein myth makes much of the story arc predictable, but it's still a compelling read, with an elegant cliffhanger ending. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In Koontz's (Hideaway) latest series, Deucalion lives in a Tibetan monastery, where he hides from his mysterious origin and the man who created him. Meanwhile, two detectives in New Orleans are hunting down a serial killer who makes off with various body parts of his victims. Their worlds collide with the hidden madness of Victor Helios, a scientist bent on creating a new race of beings subservient to him. Victor is hundreds of years old, and to keep his work secret, he has changed his last name from Frankenstein. Imagine that the Mary Shelley story actually happened, and the participants are still alive today. This first book in a multipart saga features fascinating characters and an intriguing premise. The only disappointment is the suspense-filled ending. The next title is more than six months away, so a wrap-up won't be coming anytime soon. For all library collections.-Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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