House of fear

The 1982 published Dean Koontz -novel House of Fear (original: The House of Thunder ) was originally published under the pseudonym Leigh Nichols.

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In the House of Fear , Koontz deliberately leads the reader on the wrong track through misleading clues. What initially begins as a classic horror story with the resurrected dead and inexplicable haunted effects turns out to be an East-West agent thriller.

The physicist Susan Thorton wakes up in a remote rural hospital from a coma after a car accident. She suffers from almost total memory loss and has extremely realistic hallucinations . People who have long since died appear and seek her life. Doctors and nurses who take care of her affectionately assure her again and again that everything could only be imagination. One day, a curtained bed is pushed into her hospital room. According to the nursing staff, there lies an ancient, completely paralyzed and mute woman dying. An unbearable horror soon emanates from this bed, and it increases day by day. After Susan lost trust in the hospital staff, she flees. Shortly afterwards, full of horror, she realizes that she is not, as believed, in a small American town, but in the Soviet Union . With the help of a doctor, she finally manages to escape home.

Explanation: Susan Thorton worked as a physicist on a top-secret armaments project in her past life. The US military implemented a "fear block" in their brain with drugs and hypnosis to prevent the conscious or unconscious disclosure of secrets. The KGB dragged them off to the Soviet Union, but failed to break the fear block. A scenario was then set up in a training center for secret agents, in which the fear block was to be overcome by creating extreme horror situations.