Midnight by Dean Koontz

I finished another Dean Koontz novel, Midnight, yesterday. This concerns a variation on "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in which the enemy is a human who thinks he's smarter than the rest of us. This person, Shaddack, has devised an incredibly tiny microchip that can be injected into the human bloodstream turning human beings into either soulless and unfeeling creatures who can only feel fear because it is a survival mechanism, or else, they regress into animalistic creatures that live to hunt, feed and rut, without intellect or higher emotions, and without any sense of human morality.

It takes place in a small town, Moonlight Cove, where already quite a few of the townspeople have been "converted" when the story begins. Four people find themselves on the run from those who would turn them into unfeeling cyborgs: Tessa, the sister of a woman who was killed by the "regressives," Chrissie, an eleven year old girl who has seen her parents regress and escapes from a forced conversion, Sam, the FBI agent who has come to investigate too many deaths in a sleepy town and finds himself on the run, and Harry, a disabled veteran who has never lost his will to live and be engaged with life.

As the story progresses we learn that it is not just a few of the converted who regress to an animal state. The potential is in all the converted, as an escape from their emotionless existence. While still outwardly human they can remember and vaguely mourn the depth of feeling they have lost, but the regressive state is attractive to them because once regressed they simply live for pleasure and excitement and do not care. So whenever they are faced with a regressive, the converted are in danger of regressing themselves.

We also see the other side of the conversion to a cyborg state, where the "new people" evolve into a complete fusion with their computers, becoming joined to them by new organs, and incorporating wires and chips and switches inside their formerly flesh and blood bodies. This is a "Frankenstein monster" situation that somewhat accurately mirrors the effect of the internet, which in 1989 when Koontz wrote Midnight was just beginning to be available. Sometimes I feel so plugged into my computer that I might as well be one of these cyborgs, and how much more so is that the case for all the people carting their laptops and blackberries and mobile internet connections around with them?

The basic theme is that we can't afford to lose our finer emotions to either animal pleasures or to the silvery lure of the machine, because when we do we cease to be fully human. We also need to keep our love of life alive, lest losing it impact on our loved ones as well. The last scene, which I won't reveal, was one man and one boy's redemption and a "recall to life."