Night Chills by Dean R Koontz

Koontz opens his book with two strange dangerous looking men emptying some kind of chemical into a reservoir in the isolated logging town of Black River, they return to their motel, one drives off, one stays in the motel, both receive odd phone calls about locks and keys.  One drives himself into a wall at 100 mph, the other opens his femoral and ulnar arteries with a razor and bleeds out in the motel bath.  All over Black River people experience night terrors, and then to the town comes the sinister Ogden Salsbury, a pathological misogynist genius with a terrible hold over the people of the town.  Widowed Paul Annendale comes to the town to camp with his two children Rya and Mark and is connected, too coincidentally, with the only two people not to suffer night terrors, his girlfriend Jenny and her father Sam, the only person who can decipher the events unfolding in Black River.  A cracking start to a good story by Koontz, but it does creak a bit in places and the bad guys are too simply drawn.