ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ
Relentless • Your Heart Belongs to Me • Odd Hours
The Darkest Evening of the Year • The Good Guy • Brother Odd
The Husband • Forever Odd • Velocity • Life Expectancy
The Taking • Odd Thomas • The Face • By the Light of the Moon
One Door Away From Heaven • From the Corner of His Eye
False Memory • Seize the Night • Fear Nothing • Mr. Murder
Dragon Tears • Hideaway • Cold Fire • The Bad Place • Midnight
Lightning • Watchers • Strangers • Twilight Eyes • Darkfall • Phantoms
Whispers • The Mask • The Vision • The Face of Fear • Night Chills
Shattered • The Voice of the Night • The Servants of Twilight
The House of Thunder • The Key to Midnight
The Eyes of Darkness • Shadowfires • Winter Moon
The Door to December • Dark Rivers of the Heart • Icebound
Strange Highways • Intensity • Sole Survivor
Ticktock • The Funhouse • Demon Seed
DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN
Book One: Prodigal Son
Book Two: City of Night
Book Three: Dead and Alive
To Aesop, twenty-six centuries
late and with apologies
for the length.
And as always and forever
to Gerda
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
—G. K. CHESTERTON
PART ONE
Life and Death
One
A moment before the encounter, a strange expectancy overcame Grady Adams, a sense that he and Merlin were not alone.
In good weather and bad, Grady and the dog walked the woods and the meadows for two hours every day. In the wilderness, he was relieved of the need to think about anything other than the smells and sounds and textures of nature, the play of light and shadow, the way ahead, and the way home.
Generations of deer had made this path through the forest, toward a meadow of grass and fragrant clover.
