I had stopped reading Koontz many years ago, like the mid 90’s. I liked his plots but I’d always found his characters to be one dimensional and unbelievable. That changed when I read From the Corner of his Eye, which my Mom recommended. I liked the story and characters much better than his previous novels, thought the ending was a travesty.
Just recently I picked up By the Light of the Moon. I really liked the story and the characters (even if the premise was more than a little far fetched). But his story telling seems to have involved greatly vs. say Strangers or Watchers.
So it’s it just me? Or has he gotten better of late? Any recommendations?
I was just a kid when I read “Watchers” and “Strangers”, and loved them both. On going back for a second read, I was shocked to discover how thin his stories actually were. “Watchers” at least had the interesting duality of the monster and the dog, as well as the assassin and the protagonist. Each pairing of characters had a unique relationship. I read “By the Light of the Moon” in two or three sittings (on a city bus) and while there were fewer characters, I didn’t feel that they were developed any more carefully. I think he’s still writing schlock. Just my two cents, though.
I haven’t read much of his more recent stuff, but what I’ve seen looks like a downhill slide, in my opinion.
I thought “Corner of His Eye” was just awful. Koontz expects us to swallow characters who remain insanely happy in the face of ruin, torment, agony, and doom.
These people are happier when their friends are dying and their children are going blind, then I am on 90 percent of my days… and I’m a pretty cheerful guy!
The only parts of the book that were any good, to me, were the parts with the psycho. This isn’t unusual, as Koontz has always been better writing psychos than he has writing normal people. Think back on his old stories… what characters stand out clearest in your memory?
Anyway, with “Corner of His Eye” he’s clearly trying to do a “life-affirming” story, but he’s trying WAY too hard!
Sam Booker’s change of attitude in “Midnight” (based largely on meeting a woman and almost getting killed) was far more believable than the utterly inhuman levels of faith, hope, and optimism in “Corner”. I could relate to Booker, or Travis from “Watchers”, but the characters in “Corner” were utterly alien to me.
heh Koontz’s dad was a psycho so it’s no mystery why he knows how to write them so well.
Anyway Koontz simply revisits the same situation and characters over and over until he feels he has them down. So if you pick up one of his books in a ‘new’ cycle it comes off as thin. You pick one up near the end of the cycle it seems more fleshed out.
My favorite cycle has to be the Watchers one. Every male the books at that time were cops/ex miliatary. Where all the women were artists that were surpressed by their parents. Psychic dogs and childern were often there as well.
I recently discovered him…I mean I’ve heard of him before. Anyway, I read “One Door Away From Heaven” and really liked it. His narrative and dialogue are very clever. I recently read “Odd Thomas” and enjoyed that too. It was kind of predictable, though.
I have recently re-discovered him. I read Watchers years ago and enjoyed it. In December I picked up a few of his books to read while I sat with my father who was passing, and I enjoyed them enough to keep buying. I confess I consider it mind candy, but that isn’t always bad.
Darkhold, you nailed it with the cycles. In any Dean Koontz, one or more of the following is bound to be present:
[ul]
[li]A psychic dog (a golden retriever or black lab – never a toy poodle, pug, or the like)[/li][li]A precocious child[/li][li]A methodical psycho[/li][li]One or more of the characters will suffer a fugue state[/li][li]A reference to Bougainvillea[/li][/ul]
I know I’m forgetting something. Stephen King is just as bad, by the way. You will see the words “Castle Rock” and “Ayuh” with far too great a frequency.
Somebody should make Bingo cards for Dean Koontz and Stephen King (DEANO™ and KINGO™) to fill out when reading their books.
You forgot the handsome guy in his mid-30s, who is either insanely and independantly wealthly and doesn’t have to work or has some fasincating and exciting job that pays really, really well (and usually lost his wife in a tragic accident), and the lovely woman-in-peril that he meets 25 pages in. She’s the one who suffers the fugue states. They will eventually meet up with the psychic dog and precocious child on page 50 and page 75, respectively. References to bougainvillea will be on every 15th page.
See that’s just it. Pyscho Pirate nailed down exactly why I stopped reading Koontz in the first place. All his books started seeming much too similar. However I thought Corner was something of a departure from that formula. Light also has no dogs. On the whole, yes his writing still a kind of mind candy (his plots seem to be written with 5th graders view of science) but so is most fiction. It just seem’s he’s gotten away from the cookie cutter books he’d written previously.
Koontz writes entertaining books for the most part. They are horror fluff but they are skillfully executed for the most part.
“Odd Thomas” is a bit different from others and a good read. It is clear that while Dean goes over a lot of the same material in each book he really enjoys and knows the material and that he can squeeze some decent writing out of that material.
King is similar. His short stories are better than his novels in my opinion, probably because he is willing to tighten them up more than his longer works.
THANK YOU! sheesh I can’t count the number of people I’ve tried to convince of this that just looked at me funny. When I first discovered Koontz I read like 5 of his books in a very short time frame. By number 3 I was wondering if he shouldn’t just leave everyone’s name the same and have them be like the people in the Mystery Van in Scooby-Doo.
When I heard that he was an utter perfectionist that rewrote pages up to 10 times I realized that’s what he was doing in book form.
That’s what bugged me about the main character from Fear Nothing. Not only did Chris Snow have an insane about of life insurance money and inheritance from his dead parents, but he was also an insanely successful author and poet that could retire off the royalties from his books at 26.
But I’m still eagerly awaiting the third book in the series.
Oh and I almost forgot that the main character’s best friend Bobby single handedly runs a Surfing Weather Analysis website, which requires only two hours of work a day, that generates a yearly salary in the millions.
Yep, there is definitely a formula. In addition to the suspiciously wealthy people who never ever have a 9-5 job and so forth, the monster/villain is usually the result of some DNA Mad Scientist or government brainwashing experiments.
Still, my husband and I like the Chris Snow novels, perhaps because we didn’t read them - we listened to them on tape on road trips. The reader is Keith Sarabajka (who played Holtz in Angel), and he’s brilliant. I do bet he got tired of saying “bougainvillea” though.
