Did Dean get the moon wrong in Velocity?

December 9, 2019

Jeff Cann has some criticism of how Dean described moon phases in Velocity. (Who am I to argue?)

This isn’t just a picture-book problem. As my kids grew, we moved into family story-time with chapter books. And moon mistakes remained a common occurrence. So frequent in fact, that whenever the moon was mentioned in a story, my kids fully expect me to stop reading to endorse or correct the description. It’s usually a correction.

I just read Dean Koontz’s Velocity. I don’t know that much about Koontz, I’m just starting to read his books. Based on the few Koontz books that I’ve read, I gather that many of the stories, like Velocity, take place primarily at night. References to the moon seem common.

And there it was. Mid-way through the book, Koontz steps into a great big, glaring, moon-phase error. Repeatedly. During a long night, Koontz uses the progress of the moon to chronicle passing time. The problem is that beginning at 1:00 a.m., he talks about the “thinnest silver shaving of a new moon.” This “fragile crescent” is high in the sky, and it’s pretty much up there all night. He makes two more references to this moon across the course of the chapter, the night.

Read the full article @ The Other Stuff