…all in all, his condition was so pitiable that an extraordinary and inadvisable number of semicolons were required to connect the closely associated clauses describing it.
A Lutheran pastor appears as a villain in Dean Koontz’s latest novel, Going Home In the Dark. I think I can be confident that that pastor is a member of the Very Large Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless, because he’s committed to the extinction of the human race. (I don’t think that’s too big a spoiler. The guy isn’t the main villain.)
Dean Koontz likes to mix it up, style-wise. He can be dark and tragic; he can be deeply creepy and scary. He can even be funny, and he’s often quite good at that. He’s mostly going for funny (in a scary way) in Going Home In the Dark, and it works, I think… by and large.
The friends who call themselves the Four Amigos grew up as nerds and social outcasts in the midwestern town of Maple Grove (not the one just up the road from me, in Minnesota, I’m pretty sure). They all went on to be rich and famous – Rebecca is a movie star; Bobby is a bestselling novelist; Spencer is a renowned painter, and Ernie writes hit Country songs. Only Ernie still lives in town, near his cold and intimidating mother.
When Ernie is hospitalized in a coma, his friends rush to visit him – but are informed by his mother that he has died, just before their arrival.
Nevertheless, they are all convinced – irrationally but with certainty – that Ernie is not really dead. He’s in some kind of suspended animation. So they conspire to sneak his body out of the hospital and hide it so no one can embalm it before they figure out what’s going on.
Because something is going on. All three of them are suddenly recalling – all at the same time – strange events that happened when they were teenagers, memories they have suppressed until now. Why was the Lutheran pastor concealing half-formed, humanoid creatures in the church basement? Who was the monstrous giant they saw eating a man’s head in the park pavilion on Halloween? Also, why is Maple Grove – a town where the streets have names like Cunningham, Cleaver and Capra, so relentlessly friendly and utterly crime-free?
In spite of its horrific subject matter, the story is presented in a comic, self-parodying style. The unnamed narrator is always explaining why he tells us some things and ignores other things, undermining his stylistic effects by pointing them out. I did find it funny, and laughed more than once, though I thought Koontz was working it a little too hard this time.
However, the book’s conclusion did move me, which is the most important thing.
Not Koontz at his best, Going Home In the Dark is nevertheless a very entertaining book.