Dean Koontz Book Reviews

I must say that this book is MUCH better the second time around. I really liked it the first time I read it, but I had a hard time keeping the characters separate. If you haven’t read this book, then let me tell you that it has twelve main characters. They are all wonderfully placed, but I (being very bad with names of real people) kept getting them confused with eachother when I first read it. The second time around was great because I actually knew who everyone was and could keep track of them.

You might think that reading this book again will take the mystery out of it, but I did not think so. Let’s face it, the surprise of the story is not THAT hard to figure out! If you find that you did not care for it the first time, pick it up and try it again. I found the story as a whole fun and (as always) uplifting.

This is a story of a boy who can see ‘goblins’ and is on a mission to destroy as many of them as possible. The boy is not necessarily a ‘lovable’ character, but is very easy to relate to. It also delves into the carny life, really, what little kid does not dream of running away and joining a carnival? Koontz tends to be a little long winded in his descriptions for my taste in this book. Some people love this most about Koontz and will love this story. I like short descriptions and like to let my imagination do the rest of the work. Despite the sometimes over-explaining, I love this story. I would love to see a whole series built off of the battle between the carnies versus the goblins. I doubt this will happen, but I can always dream. This book did help me discover that my sixth grade history teacher had to be a goblin, he definitely fed off of our pain and suffering throughout his class!

This is a very exciting story. The book starts out intense and continues to be intense up until the end. It has several story lines going, but the main story is of Bruno Frye; who is psycho, in more ways than one, and thinks that a woman named Katherine (I’ll let you discover the correlation between her and Frye) keeps coming back from the dead to control and destroy him. So what ends up happening is that any time a woman looks similar to Katherine, Frye thinks she (Katherine) has come back from the dead and he tries to kill her (the random unfortunate woman). He has little trouble killing these women until he meets Hillary Thomas.

Hillary is a screenwriter who was unfortunate enough to meet Frye while doing research for a story. Several months later he turns up in her house trying to kill her. But she is strong and puts up a fight, which Frye has never encountered before, and convinces him that Katherine is stronger than ever –which makes him want to kill her more than ever. When she calls the police, they don’t believe her story; Frye is a stand up citizen and they called his house and he answered the phone (How could he have been there harassing her when he is a t home in another city?). Only on cop believes her (mostly because he is smitten with her and does not want to believe she is a liar). The case is pretty much closed, but Frye returns and Hillary kills him. Although, she continues to be taunted by Frye after he is dead. Did she not kill him? Is he haunting her from the dead? She has no clue what is going on but is determined to find out

This story just unfolds into different levels of craziness with each chapter. It really is the perfect suspense novel, one of those you don’t want to put down until you have figured out the mystery to it. And it WILL keep you guessing for awhile!

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