Brokeback Mountain - The "Other Jack Twist"

Novelist Dean Koontz keeps a low profile, rarely granting interviews and doing book signings even more rarely. However, Koontz’ bestselling paranoid suspense thrillers have made him the world’s sixth most highly paid writers. When I started re-reading the book Strangers last year, I noticed that one of the major characters was named “Jack Twist,” one of the two main characters in Brokeback Mountain. For a Brokie who’d first read the book years before, it amounted to seeing a good friend show up in a very unexpected setting.

Cover art of Strangers

Strangers is reminiscent of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with the addition of a deranged villain and with a somewhat different, though still benign, role for the interstellar visitors. Jack Twist is similar to many of Koontz’ characters: an essentially decent person whose life has gone seriously awry and whose view of the world has been thrown into chaos as a result.

Jack Twist’s life begins to unravel when he leads a special operation in a fictional Central American country with a group of fellow US Army Rangers. Jack and three other men 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." For a long time they cling to hope 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."

The escape is successful but on returning to the US, Jack discovers that the spin on the failed special operation was that it had actually been “a terrorist act, a mass kidnapping, a provocation meant to spark a war.” He then learns that the Congressional committee appointed to 'investigate' “wasn’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. The back story 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 or an earthquake. 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.

Koontz’ Jack Twist is not much better-looking than Annie Proulx's:

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.

Strangers was published in 1986, 11 years before Brokeback Mountain.