Elsewhere by Dean Koontz

[Deb]

Well I have to admit this has been an extremely stressful year for me, with no end in sight. And in stressful years (I tend to concentrate problems into a particular year and then afterwards have several easy years once I've gotten than out of the way), I turn to fiction reads for distraction.

I've said I've been on the fence with Dean Koontz's writing, but got into him again with his Odd Thomas series. Definitely worth my time. My next audio book was The Institute by Stephen King, a highly read and rated book which is a twist on missing children. Another worthy read. As with Koontz, kind of overdone at times, but the overall story was interesting and held my attention.

Well my latest read has been Koontz's Elsewhere. It's about multiverse, and due to Seth's teaching about probable realities and probable selves, I was immediately sucked in. The book is about an instrument created by a $67 billion budget to create what became to be known as The Key to Everything. The owner of the Key could jump from reality to reality—the multiverses.

Main characters are a father and daughter (11 years old) who are unwittingly entrusted with the device, as the creator, who has gone underground, realizes he's been found out and needs to disappear. Mother is missing, having walked out when daughter was 4, saying she just didn't feel like she belonged in the life she was living. She left, and was never heard from again.

What I found most interesting about the book is that it offered a view of probable lives, which words were never used in the book. The life we know was called Earth 1.0 on the Key, or known as Earth Prime by father and daughter. Father could dial to an unlimited number of Earths, 1.1, 1.17, 1.280, whatever. Every Earth was in the same (simultaneous) time, but the conditions were all different. In one Earth, genetically engineered creatures (the one in particular, half chimp and half human) were created to be slaves of sorts and people were in a controlled dystopian reality. In another, AI had taken over and killed off humanity. An unlimited variety of realities.

What was interesting for me were Earths where the mother had not abandoned her family. For instance, the one that was prominent was one where the mother experienced the death of her husband and daughter due to a auto-pedestrian accident, which happened at the same time as she left the family in Prime 1. An alternate inventor of the Key brought the surviving family all together in a perfect ending.

Right now I'm finishing up with a free extra: A prologue of sorts called The Parlor Trick. The story has ended, it's the accounting of people that were not a part of the story and narrated by a variety of people. The after/backstory. Well done. I have a new appreciation for Dean Koontz. And a great book for anyone who wants a view of what multiverses and probably lives can be.

And one gem I grabbed onto, he mentioned the nature of reality towards the end of the book. Is he a Seth reader? I don't know, I have to do some research on that.