He has an enormous house, surfs whenever he wants to, and is dating a gorgeous young woman. We see Ryan as a rich, healthy, happy young man who lives the American dream. The blurb on the back told me that this was the story of Ryan Perry, an internet social networking billionaire who’s had a heart transplant and starts getting threatening messages from someone telling him, “You’re heart belongs to me.”īut in fact, Koontz takes more than half of the book to set that situation up. That’s certainly true of Your Heart Belongs to Me. But Koontz is an infinitely better writer today than he was when he started, and the best of his recent work reaches (I think) the level of literary fiction. The usual pattern for a popular writer, as far as I’ve observed, is to start out really good, with a book he’s probably labored over for years, and then to become increasingly sloppy, as his publisher’s demands for several books a year force him to churn stuff out and send it away in the rough. Again and again, I paused in my reading just to savor how beautifully the author had expressed himself.

With Your Heart Belongs to Me he has (in my opinion), not only broken new genre ground, but produced his best writing to date. He doesn’t like to do the same thing twice (with the exception of the Odd Thomas and Frankenstein books, which just prove that he refuses to be predictable even in his unpredictability). But if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that Koontz frequently changes genres, and mixes and matches genres within a story. Some people might not care for this book (the Amazon reviews support that contention), because it’s different from Dean Koontz’ other work.

Dean koontz your heart belongs to me