There are no rules in the dark, no place to feel safe, no escape from the shadows. But to save the day, you must... Seize the Night . At no time does Moonlight Bay look more beautiful than at night. Yet it is precisely then that the secluded little town reveals its menace. Now children are disappearing. From their homes. From the streets. And there's nothing their families can do about it. Because in Moonlight Bay, the police work their hardest to conceal crimes and silence victims. No matter what happens in the night, their job is to ensure that nothing disturbs the peace and quiet of Moonlight Bay.... Christopher Snow isn't afraid of the dark. Forced to live in the shadows because of a rare genetic disorder, he knows the night world better than anyone. He believes the lost children are still alive and that their disappearance is connected to the town's most carefully kept, most ominous secret—a secret only he can uncover, a secret that will force him to confront an adversary at one with the most dangerous darkness of all. The darkness inside the human heart. From the Paperback edition. Chris Snow, the light-phobic, oddball hero of Dean Koontz's Fear Nothing , is once again caught in the middle of something ugly. The children (and pets) of Moonlight Bay, California, are disappearing. The first to go is Jimmy Wing, the son of Snow's former girlfriend, Lilly. Then Snow's own hyper-intelligent dog goes missing. Snow decides that he will find them, but what he uncovers is more than just a simple kidnapping; before he can turn back, he's up against an age-old vendetta, an active time machine, and a genetic experiment gone awry. Seize the Night offers up the same eclectic mix of characters that appeared in Fear Nothing : boardhead Bobby, disc jockey Sasha, Snow, and all of their friends band together to find the missing kids and figure out why the people of Moonlight Bay are morphing into demonic versions of their former selves. They outsmart corrupt cops, outrun genetically enhanced monkeys, and outlive a time warp with a vengeance--all between nightfall and sunrise, the only time that Snow can be outside. Though the premise is a little bit hard to believe, and the surf lingo occasionally irritating, Seize the Night is ultimately fun to read. Koontz successfully draws you in and keeps you entertained through an unexpected climax and an enlightening resolution. --Mara Friedman Christopher Snow is back. Fans of Koontz's last offering, Fear Nothing (LJ 2/1/98), will remember Chris as the young victim of XP (xeroderma pigmentosum), a rare and deadly genetic condition that forces him to avoid light. Here, the horrifying tale of Chris's hometown, Moonlight Bay, continues to unfold. Chris and his tight band of friends take up the search for four missing children in this town, where experiments with a genetically engineered retrovirus have begun to turn several local residents into creatures that are less than human. Koontz successfully blends his special brand of suspense from generous measures of mystery, horror, sf, and the techno-thriller genre. But his greatest triumph in this series is the creation of Christopher Snow, a thought-provoking narrator with a facility for surfer-lingo and dark humor who, despite his extreme situation, is an undeniably believable character. -?Nancy McNicol, Hagaman Memorial Lib., East Haven, CT Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. This tour de force, though less intense than Intensity (1996), has Koontz, the nimble master of the macabre, inventing a hugely empty California army base once used for secret experiments and now, in its vast, moonlit state, called Dead Town. Poet ry freak Christopher Snow, also the hero of Fear Nothing, suffers from a rare genetic disorder, xeroderma pigmentosum: his skin can't bear light of any sort. Thus he dresses only in black, wears dark shades, inhabits a house lit by bulbs in red lantern gl ass, sleeps by day, goes out only after sunset, and so on. Chris lives next to Wyvern Army Base, in Moonlight Bay, whose leading citizens know that terrible experiments at Wyvern produced genetically enhanced, intelligent monkeys, birds, snakes, coyotes, and humans, all richly menacing and still infesting the base. Many of the experimental humans were afflicted by a rogue retrovirus causing them to fall into beastly rages signaled by nocturnal eyeshine. That said, Koontz takes on a triple, or perhaps quad ruple, oh, hell, quintuple plot, featuring serial murderers; an incredible Egg Room located three floors underground where, apparently, the experimental subjects were enhanced; and an invasion of the present by swift alien worms coming from sidetime and l ikely to take over the planet. Will murder-minded experimental folk now waltz around every continent? They're an unpleasant bunch. When an old girlfriend's boy is kidnaped and whisked off to the base, Chris follows with his enhanced dog Orson (as in Welle s), a genius on a par with intelli