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DEMON SEED by DEAN KOONTZ
“Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.”
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This book did nothing for me, unfortunately.
The premise is sound for a tech-horror novel; a free-thinking AI that can control all the systems in this fancy house has decided to trap a woman and use her to help it realize it's dream...to be born and made physical. The narrative is told from the computer's perspective. This should have been interesting.
It wasn't.
In hindsight I've learned that I actually read the 1997 rewrite, different from the original text. I wonder how different it is from the original vision, but I also read an afterword by Koontz that this is his preferred version. I'm not going to make the effort to find the original version, but I do find it interesting that I found the rewrite pretty boring.
I wanted to like it. The elements are there. But ultimately just feels lacking. It feels like the 'meatier' parts may have originally been there, but got removed for the rewrite.
It also takes far too long for Susan to actually start doing something about her precarious situation, regardless of what headspace she's in. Shame.
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