Chyna passes Vess while traveling through a state park and intentionally crashes her car into a redwood tree.

She feels compelled to follow Vess and help free Ariel, taking a clerk's car. Chyna secretly watches Vess boast to the gas station clerks that he is holding a young girl, Ariel, prisoner in his basement, before he kills them and drives away. When Vess stops at a gas station, she sneaks out of the motor home and looks for a payphone. Before she can escape, Vess drives away.Ĭhyna hides in a back room, planning to escape at the earliest opportunity. Unaware Laura is dead, Chyna sneaks aboard the motor home and finds her friend's corpse. Before she can intervene, Vess kills Laura and takes her to his motor home. Chyna hears Laura screaming and runs upstairs, intending to attack Vess with a knife. After discovering that Laura has been tied up and raped, Chyna leaves, promising to return. This comes to a violent end when serial killer Edgler Vess breaks into the house in the night and methodically kills all of the occupants except Laura and Chyna. Chyna, who was abused and neglected by her mother as a child, finds that the Templeton house provides something she has yearned for: acceptance. Plot summary Ĭhyna Shepherd is a college student visiting the family of her friend, Laura Templeton, for a long weekend. According to Koontz, he wrote the novel with the intention of subverting the commonly-held idea that thrillers must have periods of low action to move the pace along, instead opting to keep the tension high throughout the novel and moving from conflict to conflict without periods of released tension. Intensity is a novel by the best-selling author Dean Koontz, released in 1995.

Intensity by dean koontz