My husband and I are both big fans of popular novelist Dean Koontz and have been re-reading his books this year. Koontz basically writes suspense thrillers that almost always have a spiritual dimension. A month ago, I started reading the book Strangers, and was surprised to find that one of the major characters was named Jack Twist. Strangers was published in 1986, eleven years before Brokeback Mountain was published, and I have no idea if there's any connection or not. I'd never heard anything about Annie Proulx being a Dean Koontz fan but it's an odd coincidence.
Strangers has a plot similar to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with a deranged antagonist who's definitely a more malignant force than the military characters in Close Encounters and with a somewhat different, those essentially positive, role for the interstellar visitors. Jack Twist is, like many of Koontz' main characters, an essentially moral person whose life has gone seriously awry, starting with a special operation in a fictional Central American country that he undertakes as a member of a group of US Army Rangers. Jack and three other men in the party of 20 Rangers are captured and imprisoned for about a year in a concentration camp "that had no official existence. . . . in true Orwellian tradition, because the four-story complex of cells and torture chambers had no name, it did not exist." Jack and the others hold out hope for several months that "they would be freed by commandos or through diplomatic channels before realizing that if they are to escape, they'll have to do it themselves.
After they succeed in getting away and get back to the US, Jack discovers that the special operation "had been misrepresented as a terrorist act, a mass kidnapping, a provocation meant to spark a war. . . . he quickly discovered that they [a Congressional committee appointed to 'investigate'] weren't interested in his viewpoint and that the televised hearing was merely an opportunity for politicians to do some grandstanding in the infamous tradition of Joe McCarthy." Worse, in his absence his wife, Jenny, has been sexually assaulted and savagely beaten and the attack has left her permanently brain-damaged. This backstory reflects a common theme in Koontz' books: that at any time, anyone's life can be blasted away by forces as impersonal as a tornado. In order to get the best medical care for his wife, and to survive in a country that has made him an outlaw, Jack uses his experience and training with martial arts, weapons, explosives and survival techniques to become a master thief.
Jack is described as not much better-looking than Annie Proulx's Jack Twist:
Not one feature or aspect of his face could be called handsome. His forehead was too broad, ears too big. Although he had 20-20 vision, his left eye had a leftward cast, and most people could not talk to him without nervously shifting their attention from one eye to the other, wondering which was looking at them when in fact both were. When he smiled he looked clownish and when he frowned he looked sufficiently threatening to send Jack the Ripper scurrying for home and hearth.
But Jenny had seen something in him. She had wanted, needed and loved him. In spite of her own good looks, she had not cared about appearances.
Not too much similarity to the Jack Twist we know, though with a few modifications (e.g., the gender of the love interest!), the backstory could make a good fanfiction.
I'd read the book before, several years ago, but that was before BBM and this time I did quite a double-take at the name.
