Dean Koontz, always a prolific author, turned out several thrillers under pseudonyms early in his career. He wrote The Mask, published in 1981, under the name of Owen West. That’s not the very beginning of the author’s career, but the book struck me as rather underbaked Koontz.

Carol Tracy is a psychologist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She gets the job of treating a teenaged girl known only as Jane Doe, who has shown up with total amnesia about her past. Jane is beautiful, well-mannered, and sweet. Somebody must miss her, because she’s a child any parent would cherish – Carol herself, who’s been trying vainly to conceive, begins to cherish her, and soon takes her into her home. But why has Carol begun to to have terrible nightmares? And why is her husband hearing unexplained thumping noises in their house?

There’s also Carol’s friend and mentor Grace, who starts receiving cryptic phone calls from the voice of her own deceased husband, warning her to keep Carol and the girl apart.

The book escalates, in typical Koontz fashion, to a violent, wrenching, and abrupt climax.

I was not greatly impressed by The Mask. It seemed to me a conventional supernatural thriller, lacking the deeper themes the author would later bring to his work.

It was okay, if you’re not too offended by reincarnation.