Dragon tears

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Drachentränen (English: 'Dragon Tears') is a novel by the US author Dean Koontz from 1993. The translation of the work into German by Ellen Schlootz was published in 1995 by Heyne Verlag.

action

The psychopathic, barely twenty-year-old Bryan has a supernatural gift: he can stop time through sheer will and thereby manipulate people and his environment. The policeman Harry Lyon accidentally gets in the way of the madman when he forcibly removes the curious onlookers from a crime scene. Bryan then predicts that he will kill him within the next 24 hours. Until then, he's slowly driving Harry insane. In the end, Harry and his partner manage to kill Bryan with a headshot before he can use his gift again.

Remarks

Bryan is the master of time - but the reader only learns that very late and does not understand what is happening with Harry and his partner Connie. When investigating a crime scene, for example, Harry suddenly finds himself sitting on a kitchen chair again and again, his service weapon pointed at himself. Only later does it become clear: Bryan stopped time, dragged Harry into the kitchen and staged it like a doll before he fled himself and started the time again.

The game of cat and mouse reaches its climax when Bryan finally stops time, but Harry and Connie are excluded, so that they find themselves with the madman in a completely stalled world in which Bryan is hunting them. At one point the two come to the scene of a crime, where a thief is about to steal his victim's wallet at gunpoint. Harry and Connie rearrange the duo and put the weapon in the victim's hand - you can imagine how the whole thing will continue when time finally starts again. In another scene, Bryan tears an arm out of a youth who is dancing in the disco. Of course, she doesn't feel anything and remains in her ecstatic pose - but what if the time starts again?

Parallels

Koontz primarily deals with the phenomenon of time in his novel Guardian Angel and the short story Strange Highways .

expenditure