Dean Koontz Book Reviews

This book has a disturbing message to it; big cities can be scary because of the violence, but that doesn’t make rural areas safe. This story has a great ‘heebee-geebee’ factor that makes you keep reading-even when you want to put the book down! There is a loyal golden retriever, of course, that will please all of you fans of Koontz’s dogs. The story features a family who moves out of the city into a remote mountain cabin. Picture yourself in the middle of the woods in a house where your closest neighbor is miles away. As if that is not scary enough, add a crazy alien type that wants to destroy and take over the world. Are you intrigued? Read the book, it is a real humdinger.

What a wonderful story! This book manages to have a lot of Koontz’s stereotypical themes (brainwashing, conspiracy, a hero cop, good vs. evil) and is still a very original book. Don’t ask me how he does it, it is not for us mere mortals to understand. But this is one of the great things about Koontz.

This novel has a very good collection of characters that we have seen before in Koontz’s writing; a hero cop who is dedicated to his work and sees each case as special, but finds that his current case is more special than the others, a strong woman, who is a doctor, who had a loveless childhood and now will do anything to make sure that her daughter will not have to go through the same. Then we have the daughter, who has so many levels that she has turned inside of herself to not have to deal with the grim reality of life.

The ‘bad guys’ of the story are truly evil and I felt no sympathy for them whatsoever, but I don’t think that I was supposed to. They make for a very dark –and sometimes hard to read plotline, but in the end this is a very uplifting tale. If you are a Koontz fan than you are already aware of his popular theme of love will triumph and you will not be let down by this book.

This is a very dark, disturbing, and scary story. It covers the total power that the government has and could have over us. The two main characters, Spencer and Valerie, are constantly trying to outrun and outsmart members of a ‘secret government’ who seem to be everywhere and know everything. We meet several great characters on both sides of this government. This is one story where you can hate every aspect of the bad guys and love every aspect of the good guys.

The scariest part of this story is that everything that is put forth seems possible. I’m not going to make claims to where we are technology wise, but a lot of the ideas put out in this book already exist. I’ve always said that Koontz has a way with making the unreal seem real in his novels, but that was not necessary in this book. We do have a ‘shadow government’ in place, we do have satellite tracking, we do have people who can hack into almost any computer system out there –scary, but true.

This is one of Koontz’s best novels and I would recommend it to anyone. For all of you Koontz dog lovers, there is a memorable mutt in this book, so you can get your fix. Some parts of the story are very graphic, but it does lend to the story to make it better as a whole. If you have not read this book yet, go buy it, you won’t be let down.

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