Intoxication

Sunday, 24 July 2011

Intoxication

Don't normally review novella and this is a first for me. So here it goes - Intoxication by Tim Kizer.

Here is the summary for the book:

For the fans of Stephen King and Dean Koontz...How do you force a confession out of a coworker trying to poison you? Do you kill those who dismiss your fears and believe you are paranoid? What do you do if you start questioning your own suspicions--and sanity--as you take the law into your hands? In this disturbing tale of derangement, a young psychopathic woman is slipping into madness as she fights an enemy that may exist only in her imagination. She has to resort to desperate measures when she realizes that a gun, security cameras in her apartment, and constant vigilance will not be enough to survive.

Paranoia or delirium can make you do a lot of things. Things which you would regret later in life. And if it is a life threatening close call then you are bound to be paranoid. Now I don't claim to be a book critic and as I have already stated above I'm reviewing a novella for the first time. So i'll try to straighten out my thoughts.

Leslie who works for an accounting company just had a near death miss. Someone from her work place had tried to poison her but luckily it was a friend who got in the way and had a fainting spell due to it. This incident triggers Leslie's senses and she goes investigating for the truth but ends in getting more than she bargained for.

Novellas by description are short novels, i.e., by estimation up to 10,000 words at maximum (may vary). The thing is like in novels where every thing is fully described with long sentences and long paragraphs (again depends) the fact does not work in novella where you have to be short and to the point. And Intoxication has every such quality. It is an easy read.

Apart from Intoxication it also has two more bonus stories - Hitchhiker and The Bike. The three stories in his collection are thriller and expect two-or-three twists is essentially the same. At first the story seemed a bit flat but as we read further the good stuffs come into play. The general plot of this book is intriguing and there are plenty of twists and turns until the surprise ending. Although Intoxication could have been much better as a full fledged novel since the material involved is pretty heavy and a lot of places it felt the plot needed to elaborate more like not enough evidence is shown that Leslie actually had gone made or the fact that she resumed right away that there was poison in the coffee after Rick's fainting fancy.

But overall it was very enjoyable and I commend Kizer for the amount of work he put in it.