Tag Archives: Dean Koontz

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Forest of Lost Souls,’ by Dean Koontz

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He owns four billion dollars’ worth of abstract expressionist paintings so meaningless and ugly that, displayed in one gallery, they would render connoisseurs of such art suicidal with delight.

Dean Koontz’ colossal success as a novelist, combined with his quirky Catholic faith, have made it possible for him to take risks most writers wouldn’t. The Forest of Lost Souls is clearly experimental in nature. Although I enjoyed it, I’m not entirely sure how successful the experiment is.

Vida, the heroine of the book, is a young woman of rare beauty and even rarer gifts. Orphaned young and raised by a kindly uncle in his mountain cabin in Colorado, she makes her living mining and polishing precious stones for sale. She has a strange gift for finding gems, but that’s only one of her talents. She sees hidden beauty everywhere, and lives in harmony with nature and its animals, who do not fear her.

She recently lost the love of her life, a local schoolteacher and activist who was trying to stop a development plan for a mountain meadow near her home. Supposedly he died in a freak accident, but it was murder. Anyone who gets in the way of the plan will be targeted for similar murder.

Author Koontz performs a very neat maneuver in this story – he enlists all the reader’s sympathies for nature under threat from ruthless capitalists, but then turns that sympathy against the progressive policies that actually drive much of that threat (wind power in this case). He introduces us to close-to-the-soil, spiritually sensitive Native Americans, and then uses them in a way we hadn’t looked for.

And he does not neglect to include a couple of heartwarming love stories.

But I wasn’t sure it all worked in the end. This is a story about Heaven taking a hand in human affairs, providing rescue through supernatural powers. If that’s what it’s gonna take to save us, I’m not sure we’re likely to be so favored.

Also, I found the love stories (both of them) too good to be true (here speaks the bitter old bachelor).

But The Forest of Lost Souls is certainly an enjoyable book. I do recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bad Weather Friend,’ by Dean Koontz

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She was about five feet eight, slim, with ink-black hair cut short and eyes as green as the plastic on certain Memorex high-density diskettes, which were still in use in those days.

One of the delights of being a Dean Koontz fan is the constant surprises. Far from writing the same book over and over (as some authors tend to do), Koontz keeps obsessively changing it up. Some of his books are terrifying. Some are suspenseful, some plaintive and melancholy. And sometimes he just likes to have fun. The Bad Weather Friend is Koontz in sheer fun mode.

When Benny Catspaw loses his job, gets dumped by his girlfriend, and has a bank loan turned down all in one day, it’s not even the worst day of his life so far. Benny has been through a lot, but he faces it all with his customary optimism and good humor. Benny is a nice guy.

Then he gets a message from a great-uncle he never knew he had. The old man says he is sending Benny a shipment, his inheritance. It will be alarming, he says, but Benny should not be afraid.

Benny will be afraid, though, when the shipment turns out to be a muscular giant with superhuman powers and a deep hatred for postmodern interior decoration. His name is Spike, he says, and he’s a “craggle.” Craggles are supernatural beings entrusted with the protection of the world’s nicest people, of whom Benny is one. Along with Harper Harper, a charming young woman training to be a private investigator, Spike listens to the story of Benny’s day, and concludes that there’s a conspiracy to destroy him. These conspirators must be hunted down and stopped (Spike never kills anyone). The three of them set out on the quest. Along the way, Benny will recall the strange course of his unusual life up to now, and will fall in love with Harper.

Dean Koontz is a practicing Roman Catholic, and many of his books shows traces of his faith. I can’t say that element is very apparent in The Bad Weather Friend. This story is all about “niceness,” which has (correctly) been denounced in countless pulpits as inferior to the righteousness God demands. I don’t think any conclusions should be drawn on that score. This is a fun book, not intended to be taken very seriously.

The Bad Weather Friend was a pleasure to read, and I wished it were longer. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘After Death,’ by Dean Koontz

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Duty is based on something more profound than hope, on faith that what is too wrong to endure will be made right, rectified by a system of justice that underlies all of nature, far beneath the subatomic level, a system that may right a wrong in a day or through the passage of time or outside of time. The schedule isn’t ours to protest or endorse. His duty is to act with all the skill and wisdom he possesses, not with hope but with conviction.

Rejoice! We have a new Dean Koontz book. He just keeps rolling them out – always good, sometimes exceptional. After Death is somewhat reminiscent of Koontz’ recent series of novellas about a character called Nameless. But it handles similar concepts in a different way.

Michael Mace was dead, and is alive again. It wasn’t a miracle in the religious sense, but it still may change the world. Michael was head of security at Beautification Research, a company that was ostensibly a cosmetics business but actually did top-secret genetic and nanotech research. When an accidental leak kills everyone in the building, Michael dies with all the rest. But then he wakes up. And now he’s changed. He has new powers that give him mental access to all the information on the internet. No firewall can stop him.

The first item on his agenda is to help a single mother named Nina Dozier and her son John. Michael’s best friend and co-worker Shelby was very fond of them, and probably would have courted her if he’d lived. They’re in danger from John’s natural father, a gang lord who’s decided it’s time to claim his son and make him his successor. Nina will have to be taught a lesson too, for dissing him.

But there’s a larger danger than that. It comes from the Internal Security Agency, the corrupt law enforcement body that supports the corrupt bureaucracy now running the country. Their chief agent is a psychopath named Duran Calaphas, an efficient killer but increasingly delusional. He takes Michael’s appearance as a personal sign for him, giving him a worthy foe he must destroy in order to achieve his grandiose personal destiny. Without loyalty to anyone or anything but himself, Calaphas will stop at nothing, destroy anything, to kill Michael Mace. And his companions.

Koontz hits every note precisely, manipulates the reader with the deft hand of a master. It’s beautiful to behold. Especially delightful (for me) was one amazing plot twist unlike anything I’d ever read before (it involves storytelling). A delightful moment.

My only quibble (spoiler alert) was that I thought the ending might have been too good to be true. But that’s no great failing in a book. No failing at all, actually. We’re allowed a happy ending from time to time.

Highly recommended.

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Dean Koontz interview

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Our friend Dave Lull kindly shared this link, where the Lit Hub blog interviews him (about half an hour) about his latest novel, The House At the End of the World. Contrary to the title, he doesn’t actually explain how to sell 500 million books. I would have noticed.

I didn’t like the book as well as I hoped to, but I concur that the very important themes the author talks about here are highlighted in it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The House at the End of the World,’ by Dean Koontz

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“My point is, it’s clear to me that any great artist—musician, painter, sculptor, a fine prose stylist—is on a subconscious level a mathematician and a mason and an engineer…. An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’”

I’ve become a great fan of Dean Koontz’s work, but my enthusiasm is not bestowed equally on all the branches of his work. I’m not a fan of horror, and his latest book, The House at the End of the World, is pretty intense horror.

Katie (I’m pretty sure we’re told her last name at some point, but I can’t find it) is an artist. A few years back, following the horrendous deaths, due to crime, of her two daughters and her husband, she withdrew to the island called Jacob’s Ladder. (One assumes it’s on one of the Great Lakes, but that’s not specified.) Here she paints, but not to her own satisfaction. She knows she has enemies who might decide to dispose of her at any time, so she found herself a solid, fortified house and keeps well armed. She has no social contacts. She promised her husband she’d go on living, so that’s what she’s doing, but without happiness.

Then strange things start happening. Odd sounds in the night; an unidentifiable animal pattering across her roof. There’s unusual activity too at Ringrock, a nearby island that houses a government facility. It’s supposed to be something to do with the EPA, but it’s too hush-hush for that. When a couple armed federal agents show up on her island and arrogantly order her around, she bridles. Then a vicious storm comes up and one of the agents reappears, seemingly insane. Katie begins considering leaving the island, but the agents have disabled her boat.

Then a young girl shows up from another neighboring island. She has a horrific story to tell. Her parents, who worked at Ringrock, are dead, and her nurse has been murdered by a monster. Together they will face the challenge of fighting whatever unearthly creature has taken up residence in Katie’s basement, and then take a dangerous boat trip ashore, after which they’ll have to face both aliens and their own government.

Aside from my distaste for horror stories, I also thought The House at the End of the World started rather slowly. A lot of time is spent with Katie alone, establishing her character and back story without a whole lot happening. Once the girl, Libby, shows up, things move faster. The book is exciting, and if you go for bug-eyed monsters, there’s a pretty spooky one here. Then the government proves to be worse (a sign of the times).

Cautions for language. The author has chosen to use a lot of obscene language in this book, even out of the mouth of the teenaged girl.

The House at the End of the World isn’t a bad novel, but it didn’t suit me as a lot of Dean Koontz books do.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Big Dark Sky,’ by Dean Koontz

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For as long as Ophelia had been wise enough to see the world as it really was, she’d been aware that it was shifting away from truth and light, sliding farther every year. But she would never give up and slide with it. Truth mattered, always striving for the light. As long as there were people like Colson, there was light in the world, a chance that the slide could be halted, even reversed.

It did not take me long to buy, read, and finish Dean Koontz’s latest novel, The Big Dark Sky, just released. I wouldn’t say it’s one of my Koontz favorites, and the title’s weak, but even an average Koontz is more delightful than most books I read.

Joanna Chase is a successful novelist living in Santa Fe. She has fond memories of her childhood on a ranch called Rustling Willows in Montana, though her time there ended in tragedy.

But now she’s started to get mysterious messages, through her TV and her phone and other devices. A voice calling for help, saying they’re in a dark place. As she finds herself compelled to return to Montana in response, she begins to remember things she’d forgotten. For instance, she’s entirely forgotten her best friend – a mentally disabled boy. How did that happen?

Meanwhile, the new owner of Rustling Willows, a multibillionaire, has hired a private investigator to take a close look at the place. Strange things have been going on there. He doesn’t feel safe bringing his family until they stop.

And nearby, a megalomaniac kidnaps a young woman, as an early step in his grand plan to exterminate the entire human race, which in his view has proven itself unworthy of the planet.

What I liked best about The Big Dark Sky was that, although things got very dark (and Koontz can write dark with the best of them), it’s mainly a book about hope. Exactly the kind of book we need in 2022. Though the last line contains an intriguing grim joke.

As far as religion goes, Koontz’s Catholicism is not very evident here. The Gandalf figure of the story, Ganesh, can be presumed to be Hindu. But the scientific/mystical themes are suitable for most anybody.

Cautions for language and a sex scene.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Quicksilver,’ by Dean Koontz

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To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right. It’s as if a wrestler forsook the ring in favor of getting his own head in an armlock and slamming himself into walls for a few hours every day.

Dean Koontz’s umpteenth novel is Quicksilver. I wouldn’t put it on the highest tier of his works, but it’s quality, patented Koontz all the way through, and all the expected pleasures are present.

Quinn Quicksilver is a young man living in Phoenix. He is an orphan, found abandoned as a baby in a basket on a highway median and raised by loving nuns in an orphanage. Now he works as a writer for a small magazine, and is entirely unremarkable – except for a “strange magnetism” that sometimes draws him to locations where he finds valuable things.

So when, one day, he finds a couple of tough guys from a covert government agency sitting on either side of him in a diner, about to abduct him, he manages to escape out the back and successfully get away by car. Following his strange magnetism, he drives to an abandoned farm, where he’s just in time to rescue a kidnapped old man and his granddaughter – the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. They’re grateful but not surprised by his arrival. They’ve been expecting him, they say. On top of that, they inform him that he’s going to marry the granddaughter. If they survive.

But first, they have a mission to complete. There’s a secret compound in the desert where a reclusive billionaire is running a sex cult. Joined by one further team member and a dog, they set their course to find the billionaire and rescue his victims.

Beautiful prose. Goofy humor. Action with a supernatural element. And the occasional moment of transcendence. That’s what we buy Koontz books for, and it’s all there in Quicksilver.

Also a lesson on theodicy and free will, at no extra charge.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nameless, Season 2,’ by Dean Koontz

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“For a lot of people, the definition seems to change to fit the times and the culture of the moment. My definition doesn’t change. It isn’t about judges, who can be biased. It’s not about courts and laws that can be corrupted. To me, justice is nothing more or less than truth. Justice requires that the truth of Dr. Siphuncle’s actions must be revealed, and that he must suffer the consequences of that truth.”

Dean Koontz, who likes nothing better than changing things up, has given us a second “season” of novellas about his character known only as “Nameless.” But there are differences. In the first series, released back in 2019, we followed Nameless on his strange “assignments.” He is a man with no memory of the past (he suspects this was by his own choice). When he arrives in a town he finds a car waiting, and he has hotel reservations, a weapon, and support resources. He is given instructions about his assignment, which generally involves either exposing or killing some genuinely evil person who thinks himself untouchable. At the end of the first series, Nameless (and the reader) learned his true identity, along with the shattering causes that led him to this mission.

Now he’s back for Season 2, with his amnesia restored, carrying out missions following the same pattern. But things have changed a little. His missions seem less well-planned now. He encounters surprises – sometimes dangerous ones – that weren’t bargained for. And for some reason, arrangements of roses greet him in every hotel room he stays in. But strangest of all, he’s having disturbing premonitions, of a dystopian near-future in which a great popular movement of hatred and authoritarianism transforms America into a ruthless killing ground.

The stories have sufficient continuity that they could have been published as a single novel, albeit an episodic one. But the author and publisher have chosen to release them as novellas, and they work fine in that form. I enjoyed them very much, though be prepared for a few tears at the end.

The novellas are, in order of presentation:

1. The Lost Soul of the City;

2. Gentle Is the Angel of Death;

3. Kaleidoscope;

4. Light Has Weight, But Darkness Has None;

5. Corkscrew;

6. Zero In.

A great summer read, with some food for thought. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Other Emily,’ by Dean Koontz

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She was in that highest rank of beauties that inspired stupid men to commit foolish acts and made wiser men despair for their inadequacies.

One storytelling element I like very much is the book that opens with an impossibility. Dean Koontz’s latest novel, The Other Emily, is such a book. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with all of it, but it led me a merry chase up to the end.

David Thorne is a bestselling author, and very wealthy. But he lives a distanced life, ever since the loss of his girlfriend Emily. She disappeared on a California highway one rainy night ten years ago, when her car broke down. She is assumed to be one of the victims of a serial killer active at the time. David actually pays the man to visit him periodically in prison, in the hope of gleaning a clue to Emily’s fate. He’s grieving, of course, but also racked with guilt, because he should have been with her that night.

Then one evening, in a bar in Newport Beach, he spies a woman who looks exactly like Emily. Not similar to her, but precisely like her in every detail. She even talks like Emily, and seems to know things only she would know. Except that she’s the age Emily was when she disappeared, not the age she’d be today.

David plunges into a passionate affair with this mysterious woman, meanwhile embarking on an obsessive investigation to discover who she really is, where she comes from, and what she’s here for. The secret, when he learns it, will be almost unbelievable and very likely deadly.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the conclusion of The Other Emily. I thought it contrived and implausible, even on science fiction/horror terms. However, the process of reading the book provided a persistent sense of dread all along its length, and I found that very stimulating.

Cautions for language and disturbing subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

The Taking: When the Rain Compounds Your Fear

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His gaze tracked across the ceiling. “It’s not falling toward us anymore.” His voice quieted to a whisper. “It’s moving eastward . . . west to east . . . as big as two mountains, three . . . so huge,” whispered Neil. He made the sign of the cross–forehead to breast, left shoulder to right–which she had not seen him do in years.

Suddenly she felt more than heard a great, deep, slow throbbing masked by the tremulous roar of the rain.

“. . . sift you as wheat . . .”

I picked a good time to read Dean Koontz’s 2004 novel of apocalyptic horror, The Taking. We had a full day of heavy rain when I started reading, which was perfect atmosphere for blurring reality with imagination, if one were into that sort of thing. I don’t read horror novels, so I worried this one might work me over, but I’m fine. Don’t worry. Really, I’m fine.

The story begins with a sudden gullywasher of luminescent rain that scares coyotes onto the heroine’s porch. No thunder or build up. Just a heavy downpour with a slick glow in the water.

Molly Sloan is disturbed by her impression of watchful evil and the nasty feel and smell of the rain. She’s scared when her husband, Neil, cries out in his sleep. Later they turn on the news to discover the oceans have been sucked into the sky and poured out on the entire world. Chaos has broken out in many cities. The world appears to be under attack by aliens with unseen ships. At least, that’s the best theory they have so far.

Neil and Molly leave their house to try to team up with neighbors and find one of them dead in his bathroom. There’s evidence he tried to fight something off, but no evidence that his shotgun harmed anyone but himself. In another minute, this dead man would be in the shadows behind them, saying, “I think we are in rats’ alley.”

That’s a line from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

Eliot gets a lot of attention in The Taking, filling the role of one of Molly’s favorite authors. His words are quoted by a number of characters, which forms one thread of mystery that caused me to wonder if this apocalypse was all in Molly’s head. The most bizarre and disturbing events tie to her personal fears and tastes. I began to wonder if she was having a miscarriage or revisiting the trauma of abortion in the real world while the living dead, animated fungi, and dismembered townsfolk occurred in her mind. That would have made for a lousy book. The resolution Koontz offers is more of a spiritual take on alien invasion. More importantly, it works.