I once found myself with some time to kill, so I picked up a Koontz book at random and kinda leafed through a chapter. I found it uninteresting and workmanlike to the point where it was unmemorable. I can’t tell you which book I read or who any of the characters were because none of that stuck out in my head.
Robin
That was Midnight.
Funny, that’s exactly how I feel about King.
Yes, Koontz’s plots are formulaic, but I’ve never found his characters to be cardboard cut-outs. A guy who’s friends with dead Elvis? A woman who’s pet is a potted plant named Fred? A man who talks (well, sort of) to cats? An ex-nun who may or may not have slept with the Devil? One-dimensional? Really?
My own thoughts precisely. After reading Taken recently I’ve sworn a solemn oath never to read him again. It was unbelievably bad.
I started to write this post about Koontz (it was a great one I tell ya) but then realized that I was actually thinking of John Saul. I guess that really says something about the impression that those two have left with me. Decent light reading but hardly memorable.
I like a few of Koontz’s books: Watchers, Strangers, Twilight Eyes, Cold Fire and especially Phantoms, which is still one of my favorite horror novels.
But he’s hit and miss and gets very, very repetitive with his plots. Plus, a lot of his latest stuff just sucks.
I’m listening to ‘Midnight’ on my commute, and it’s entertaining. Certainly nothing groundbreaking or complex, but I’m not looking for that on my commute. Plus, I need things pretty straightforward and simple; my mind tends to wander in the car, and if what I’m listening to is too complicated then I get toally lost.
There are two reasons Koontz sucks. First, (much like King has recently), Koontz is transparently sorting through his own psychological issues in his writing. Great literature should explore important themes and human experiences. However, when a novel becomes more therapy for the writer than entertainment/thought-provoker for the reader, it gets bad.
This leads to the second bad thing: there are only a few stories, and he keeps retelling them.
Generally, there are two main characters of opposite sexes, both of whom have suffered much trauma in childhood, usually at the hands of morally bankrupt monstrous adults. They are damaged people, wondering about the lack of goodness in the world. They are also invariably independently wealthy, or have jobs that allow them virtually unlimited free time, or both. Can’t gallivant across the country fighting pseudoscientific monsters and sociopathic killers when you have to clock in on Monday morning. There’s a precocious kid or dog. They triumph over the evil, sometimes accessing some benevolent supernatural power, and their psychological scars are healed. All stories are set in California, and bougainvillea must be mentioned a minimum of twice per chapter.
That isn’t so bad when you read the first novel by Koontz. I agree with the majority, *Watchers * is a good book. But when you’ve read the same elements cut & pasted a dozen times, it gets old. I do like some others, especially the Chris Snow books (Fear Nothing, Seize the Night), perhaps largely because I listened to the fabulous audio version by Keith Szarabajka (that’s Holtz to you *Angel * fans). But the repetition gets boring.
Add to that the decline in his writing quality (I’m going by False Memory, By the Light of the Moon, and The Taking here), and his increasingly blatant diatribes against atheism and related philosophies (yep, I’m an atheist), and you get a lot of justification for hating Koontz’s work.
Upon re-reading my post, let me clarify. I don’t mean to say *Watchers * is the first book Koontz wrote. Just that when one first reads Koontz, he tends to be entertaining (because you don’t know about the repetition yet). *Watchers * is one of his early books, it is of comparatively high quality, and seems to be one of the first Koontz reads for many people.
I remember trying *The Bad Place * and Midnight years ago. With *Midnight, * I just didn’t enjoy the writing at all, and the plot didn’t grab me. *Bad Place * grabbed me at first, but, again, the writing was a tough slog and I finally abandoned it. (I have meant to give him one more try, though. He’s one of those writers that, I just have a feeling if I find the right one, I could really dig it.)
You forgot the megalomaniacal psychopath who slowly and mercilessly tracks them until the most surprising moment.
That said, I enjoyed Watchers, and Lightning, which has a fantastic premise that’s executed well. Phantoms is a great eerie tale, and Demon Seed is a cool example of the unreliable narrator.
But I’ve stopped reading Koontz. Too many mediocre rehashes of the same stuff.
Koontz wrote a few good books in the '80s before the idea well ran dry:
Lightning: Time traveling “guardian angel” from the past
Midnight: Town taken over by nanotech monsters
Watchers: Man, woman, and super-intelligent dog chased across country by genetically engineered monster
Phantoms: Town taken over by mysterious blob-like creature
His later books are rehashes, and his style has become very dry and uninteresting. He seems to have turned into a curmudgeonly old man overnight, and his occasional right-wing rants against video games, youth culture, or the federal government tend to rub me the wrong way.
Can someone tell me if Phantoms by Dean Koontz is any good? I’ve always been kind of curious about it, ever since I heard that the creators of Silent Hill listed it as an influence for the first game. I’m too embarrassed to rent it from the library though, 'cause I’m stupid like that. But, I would swallow my pride if it’s worth it.
There are a few recent books that nobody’s mentioned yet: Odd Thomas and Life Expectancy were both good books, and humourous to the point of making me laugh out loud. I haven’t read the sequel to Odd Thomas yet. Strange Highways, his book of short stories, was very good, but I prefer short stories to novels. Another gripping novel of his that’s yet to be mentioned is Twilight Eyes, though it does follow his basic “young male loner misfit meets girl, fights undefeatable supernatural evil” plotline, it’s probably his best version of it.
The first Koontz book I read was Fear Nothing, another one of his better books.
I really didn’t like Life Expectancy that much. Strange Highways was very good. ‘We Three’ kept me up nights for about a week.
If I remember right, Twilight Eyes didn’t have any supernatural evil.
The so-called goblins were genetically engineered soldiers.
I think it’s funny that he kept writing about the same protagonist with different names - middle-aged loner who’s tougher and smarter than he first appears, probably some kind of military or law enfourcement experience, has lots of trauma related to losses in the past but he usually overcomes this with the help of a good woman during the course of the story - he wrote a novel where he seems to be trying to make the opposite of his stereotypical hero - “Odd Thomas”, which stars a very sociable teenager with lots of friends who’s spent his whole life in one town, who already has a girlfriend that he has a good relationship with and very little angst. And despite this, he still “felt” just like your stereotypical Koontz hero.
I stopped reading Koontz because I felt ripped off. After he got famous, he dredged up a bag of books he had written under another name, before he learned how to write, probably when he was thirteen years old. I read a couple of those, and they were crap. I might go back to him someday, if I can be sure he has run out of his practice books.
I suggest retroactively spoiler boxing the descriptions of those two. They both keep you in the dark about what’s going on for significant portions of the novel, and as this thread doesn’t have a general spoiler warning, and people may end up reading these as examples of his better work, it seems appropriate to spoiler box those revealing descriptions.
IMHO it’s one of his best, and a very good horror novel with a very cool premise.
I don’t mean to hijack the thread or pick a fight, but…what genre, exactly do you mean? It may have been valid to paint King with this brush, say, 20 years ago, but since then he has become an author of remarkable range.
And to the OP, I’ll echo one of the prevailing sentiments here: Koontz is capable of writing very entertaining, compelling stories. Watchers is the obvious best, to me at least. *Dark Rivers of the Heart * was genuinely horrifying to me. I’ve read probably 20 of his books. He just writes way too damned many, and you can really tell when he’s mailing it in. Twilight Eyes, for example, was embarrassingly dumb.