Night Chills

Dean Koontz, just 30, has written 50 books under six names at 4000 words per diem. Just imagine. Without skipping. He also tells lickety-split stories (the more appealing After the Last Race, 1974). This one, featuring our behavior-modified-soon-to-be-controlled-society, could have been tightened up and has a little too much computer input/outgo about how two men plan to take over the world via a drug coordinated with mind-managed directives. Dawson wants power. Ogden Salsbury wants sex, sex, sex (his wife left him because he was rotten in bed but he's even more rotten out of it). Their first field-test area is a little lumber town in Maine where Paul Annendale is vacationing with his two youngsters. The town has some form of undiagnosable night chills - fever, sweat, insomnia. Worse, Paul's boy is found frosted in a food freezer. The central idea here has been used before; the sex is overmuch and won't blow anything. Even so, you scan it for its commercially programmed demonstration of what might happen if, and it's keypunched with Koontz' native facility. (Kirkus Reviews)