Dean Koontz's canon consists of novels much like False Memory, story after story of the world turned upside down, of deceptive appearances, of conspiracies and plots that make ordinary citizens fear they have entered a realm of madness from which there is no escape. Such paranoid fantasies have become the stuff of modern fiction.

John Sanford's The Devil's Code (2000) is typical of the tradition in which Koontz works. It features a vast electronic conspiracy that involves both a large technological corporation and a cadre of U.S. government bureaucrats who use technology and their vast resources to cover up murders and to blackmail prominent citizens, but who are ultimately defeated by a renegade band of hackers and telephone wizards.

At the same time, Koontz also writes in the Stephen King tradition of frightening psychological horrors, though with Koontz these horrors ultimately have a solid grounding in...