Sole Survivor

I haven't read a Koontz story in a couple years, and frankly I had gotten pretty sick of his recipe: Take two people.  Make them loners.  Have them fall in love after five minutes.  Add a generous helping of evil.  Stir for three or four hundred pages.  Serve chilled.

So it was a pleasant surprise to read this story.  What I liked was that he has started to work outside of his overly familiar box.  Like all of his work, it is fast paced, highly readable, and hard to put down.  If you like Koontz, you'll like this.  The only weak point - a rushed and hardly satisfying ending.

Dark Rivers of the Heart (©1994)

Picking up a Koontz is easy. Putting one down is more difficult. Even a book like this one is a page turning frenzy. Koontz again relies on his damaged goods premise, and our hero is a strange duck with a strange past. One evening he meets a nice girl at a bar, and the next evening when he can't find her, he decides to go to her house to find her. Oh, and he has a damaged goods dog too.

The woman it turns out is the target of some very bad men. Good thing our hero is a former special forces agent. Along the way the bad men focus their attention on our hero, who ends up being rescued by the girl. As you might expect there are some nutjob characters, and some moralizing by Mister Koontz.

There is a needless subplot that focuses on the asset forfeiture laws in the states. But it's not so much a distraction as to sink the book.

This is not one of his better books, but it delivers solid entertainment value, and if you're just looking for a few hours of check your head reading, Koontz never disappoint.

Reviewed December 15, 2005

Intensity (©1995)

For some reason I still think of Koontz as King lite. No doubt a comparison that drive him absolutely nuts. The guy has sold more than 125 million books, I think he deserves some respect. It's a boggling achievement.

On with the show.

I always enjoy Dean's novels (we're on such close terms I'm allowed to call him Dean) and this one is no different. It reads like a house on fire, and although there are moments when you want to stop because something is so unbelievable, or a character so stupid it defies imagination, you have to keep going because it's so much fun.

Intensity features a very very very bad man who goes by the name Edgler. He likes to kill people and he's pretty good at it. Along the way we meet up with Chyna Shepherd, a woman as stupid as she is brave. This story is about the relationship between our fine Chyna (oh come on, it was there) and the evil Edgler. Over the space of 24 hours there's a lot of blood guts and scrambled eggs (really).

I'm being somewhat silly, but it's a heck of a fun story. Nothing that will win and prizes or set the literary world on it's ear, but good old Dean delivers an exciting and engaging story that is a lot of fun right to it's predicable end.

Reviewed July 2003

Fear Nothing (©1998)

Dean Koontz is one of those authors you either love or love to hate. Many years ago I went through a phase where I digested a small library of Koontz’z formula phase. It didn’t take long for me to start gacking on them. In time I moved on, and so did Dean – since his books started taking on different twists and turns.

I was stuck at work the other day without a book, and having to take a crap in the worst way (yes dear reader, there are worst ways, and there are best ways. Let’s leave it at that) and I rummaged through the communal book shelf and pulled out Fear Nothing. Now a Koontz book is always a fast read, and this one was no exception. Our hero Chris Snow has a rare disease where he cannot be exposed to natural light, or light bulbs. Naturally he seeks the shadows and likes candles. For whatever reason his parents didn’t fit the house with propane or gas lights like you would with a cabin or travel trailer. Suffice to say that young Chris soon discovers some things aren’t staying hidden in the dark.

Oh yeah, Chris also has a pretty smart dog too – think Watchers. The characters are fun, and this isn’t much deeper than the kiddie pool in my back yard, but like said pool, on a hot day it can be a lot of fun. I kept turning pages, and was running out of book wondering how this was going to be summed up in a couple of pages. Turns out it’s part of a series … great. Still, this chapter more or less resolved itself. And although it wasn’t anything special, it was fun. I’ll be looking for the next book.

Reviewed October 18, 2005

Seize the Night (©1999)

Taking the improbability factor of Fear Nothing and multiplying it by a factor of 100, Seize the Night reunites Chris Snow, his wonder dog Orson, his surfing buddy and DJ girlfriend on one side, and a bunch of whacked out psycho murdering freaks, monkeys, and a mysterious sideways wrinkle in time on the other. The results are more fun than watching a wasp in a balloon.

I’m guessing there will be another book at some point wrapping this up and solving the mystery of the army base, why the monkey haven’t learned to play “Daydream Believer” or why all those birds flew into the side of that building.

In all Mister Koontz you write a fun story.

Where's the next one - it's been over five years!

Reviewed October 18, 2005

Odd Thomas (©2003)

The first of the “Odd” books and the only one I have (so far) and for what it was it entertained me for a couple of days on the train. Odd Thomas sees dead people ... and he does something about it. From there we are treated to an interesting story written as a pseudo memoir. This means from the first page you know that he survives whatever it is he’s about to write down.

While this wasn’t a page burner, it did hold my attention pretty well and as usual I like the little bits and pieces Koontz will throw in the make things interesting. Elvis was a fun touch, and I liked how Koontz worked with many of the standard conventions and adding his own flourishes. The dead can’t speak, but to Odd they have substance.

Without resorting to spoilers I have to say I did like the way the story unfolded and how certain bits and pieces were revealed. Not everything was completely obvious which was nice. I also liked how illogical certain behaviour was from Odd, it was frustrating on one hand, but strangely real on the other. Of course what’s a Koontz novel with out Eeeeeeevvvvviiil. Other than some clever supernatural elements and a strange time travel moment, the evil here is eerily human in nature.

The Odd Thomas stories seem to have taken off for Mister Koontz which I suppose is good for him. For me, I’ll probably read more of them if I find them at a rummage sale but I don’t see myself seeking them out as must haves.

It was an entertaining read – it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t excellent either. It was simply another decent offering by a dependable writer.

Reviewed March 2, 2009