I feel the need to say something political on this last evening before the election.
But I can’t think of anything that hasn’t already been said. And since I know for a fact that our readers are a smart, erudite segment of the population, I’m pretty sure you’ve already made up your own minds.
So I’ll do a book review. It must be days since I’ve reviewed a Dean Koontz novel.
Koontz’ latest in paperback is The Darkest Evening of the Year. On a purely technical level I can make a lot of criticisms.
Since the death of his beloved Golden Retriever, Trixie, Koontz seems to be writing out his grief, with occasionally uneven results. The dogs in his books have gotten wiser and more mystical. In this book he cries havoc and lets slip the dogs of transcendence completely, coming close to caninolatry (if there is such a word. Of course there is! I just made it up!). That “Dog is God spelled backwards” palindrome that so impressed Annie Hall is almost (almost) at work here.
You’ve got all the standard elements of Koontz thriller at work—the lonely, slightly damaged couple employing all their courage in an effort to share their deepest and most painful secrets with each other. The abused, innocent child in peril. The sociopathic villains trying to destroy them all, largely for the mere pleasure of destruction (Koontz has some fun tracing much of this evil back to certain popular novelists whose names aren’t hard to guess).
The novelty this time around is the dog, Nickie, a Golden Retriever (what else?) with remarkable secrets and supernatural powers.
In fact, Nickie serves as a deus ex machina at one point, and I can’t think of much defense for the scene as written.
Except that, blast it, it works.
I cried over The Darkest Evening of the Year. It touched me very deeply, and I’ll forgive a lot when an author does that for me.
Particularly wrenching were scenes of cold, sadistic abuse of a child by a parent. Some people may find those scenes over the top and unrealistic. Speaking as someone who’s been there—take it from me, those scenes have the ring of truth.
The book contains some bad language, but the violence is fairly mild and the sex not explicit. I liked it and recommend it, and I don’t care who knows.
I picked this up last week. I was stuck in town on ambulance duty and forgot to pack some books in my overnight bag. I saw this one in the bestseller rack at the grocery store and remembered your recommendation.
My initial reaction is that I’m rather disturbed by the book. I almost set it aside near the beginning when the occultic leanings started to show. But I pressed on to the end where I found the dependence on familiar spirits bringing the story to a close.
I don’t find any precedent in Scripture to suggest that God’s holy angels operate in the way the benevolent spirit worked in this book. Accounts of such things raise my suspicions that, were it a real event, this would have been an angel of darkness pretending to be an angel of light.
That’s a perfectly reasonable concern.