Essays

August 1, 2009

Santa’s Number 1 Gift for Christmas

Here are 20 reasons why Santa Claus rates YOUR HEART BELONGS TO ME as #1 gift choice for this Christmas.

1. It is not printed on paper saturated with deadly toxins, as are most of the other novels published this season.

2. Not one cent of the author’s royalties is used to fund terrorist training camps in third-world hell holes.

3. The author has NOT embedded in the text subliminal messages that will transform you into his zombie love slave.

4. A hardcover book has a lot smaller carbon footprint than that wood-fired Hummer you wanted.

5. Thus far, the author has assaulted with blunt instruments only people who were NOT his readers. Buy the book, save your face.

6. Anna Koontz, dog, needs kibble and treats. Look how cute she is. Can you sleep at night knowing you failed to buy the book and allowed this dog to starve?

7. The PARIS HILTON BOOK OF PHOTO-ILLUSTRATED BIBLE SCENES is neither as spiritual nor as sexy as its publisher claims.

8. These days, nobody wants a freakin’ partridge in a pear tree.

9. If the national food-distribution chain collapses, book-binding glue and paper are edible, and the nutritional value of this book might be the difference between life and death for you and your children. Buy it for the children.

10. Santa’s token psychotic elf, Blister, is a fanatical Koontz fan, so if you don’t buy the book–he knows where you live and he’ll want blood.

11. Videogame companies have conspired to conceal the fact that malfunctioning joy-sticks kill 400,000 people a year.

12. If you ever require a heart transplant or wish to perform one, this book contains just enough information on the subject to get you started.

13. A case of beer and two bottles of whiskey are gone in an evening, but a book lasts forever.

14. When a giant asteroid collides with Earth and you are swept to your death in thousand-foot tides of sea water and pulverized rock, you will wish you’d taken more time for pleasure reading.

15. Books provide mental exercise, which we all desperately need, considering that these days the average citizen’s brain resembles his sagging butt.

16. Once you have read the book, another member of your family can enjoy it, whereas if you made a gift of the regurgitated Christmas cookies you ate, no one would find it appealing.

17. Shelves full of handsome hardcover books lend style and class to a home in a way that your collection of Hulk Hogan memorabilia never can.

18. What if you die and at the Gates of Heaven St. Peter informs you that one of the criteria to enter Paradise is having read a certain number of Koontz books, and it turns out you’re one book short of the required number, so you burn in Hell forever while leeches feed on your eyes and cockroaches ceaselessly crawl the surface of your brain? Huh? What then?

19. We’re just going to keep hitting you with reasons until we exhaust you and finally you buy the stupid book, so why put yourself through this?

20. So you go into a bank to deposit a check, and suddenly three brutal thugs with guns, wearing Aflack-the-duck masks, take over the place, and something goes wrong–like maybe an old lady with an umbrella takes a swing at one of the robbers, a nasty piece of work named Bruno, startling him, or a desperately poor little girl selling matches to buy food for her grossly obese grandmother tugs on Bruno’s coat sleeve, startling him–and when the dust settles, everyone in the bank has been shot dead, including the thieves, and only you are left alive because you happened to be carrying this book, and it stopped three bullets that otherwise would have torn the crap out of your heart. It’s been known to happen. Except that the match girl was a little drummer boy.

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