Koko

{ Oct 2020 - epub revisions. Verified ebook for complete book description, cover, table of contents, content separation, and epub format error checking. } Paperback, 656 pages Published 1988 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (1989) Bestselling author Peter Straub's Koko is a gripping psychological thriller in which horror and paranoia are indistinguishable from reality. Koko. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They were Vietnam vets-a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a single shattering secret. Now, they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York, hunting someone from the past who has risen from the darkness to kill and kill and kill. In his most gripping, most hallucinogenic thriller to date, the author of Ghost Story and Shadowland takes us on a dizzying spin through those eerie psychic badlands where nightmare and insanity seem to fuse with reality. It's 15 years after the Vietnam War and a string of murders in Southeast Asia convinces four veterans of the same Vietnam platoonone now a doctor, another a writerthat the murderer, whose trademarks are mutilation and a playing card with "Koko" scrawled on it, was also a member of the platoon. They resolve to find him, for purposes of their own, before the police do. Led by the platoon's one-time lieutenant, who has a cold-blooded killing of villagers on his record, they follow Koko's trail to the sleazy bars and sinister dives of Singapore and Bangkok, and finally to New York where one of them becomes his latest victim. A probe into the killer's grim childhood yields his true identity, as well as his genesis as a psychopath, but in a thrilling climax, the now-you-see-me, now-you-don't Koko proves just how wily he is. The characters are realistic and complex, and the story continues to resonate in the mind long after the final page is turned. 250,000 first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC featured alternate. “Brilliantly written.... An inspired thriller.... His finest work.” — The Washington Post “A masterpiece of terror.” — Los Angeles Times “Completely plotted, thickly layered evil.... The ultimate horror.” — The New York Times Book Review “A dead-center hit. . . . A gripping, enthralling, nonstop read.” — San Francisco Chronicle A revenge and murder story with supernatural overtones, concerning a group of men who served with the military in Vietnam. It has as its background various places in South East Asia. Peter Straub is the author of "Ghost Story" and he wrote "Talisman" with Stephen King. At three o'clock in the afternoon of a grey, blowing mid-November day, a baby doctor named Michael Poole looked down through the windows of his second-floor room into the parking lot of the Sheraton Hotel.