From archive (archive) Subject: STRANGERS, by Dean R. Koontz From: wmartin@ALMSA-1.ARPA (Will Martin) Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Date: 26 Aug 86 06:35:33 SDT STRANGERS, Dean R. Koontz, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1986, $17.95, ISBN 0-399-13143-4, 526 pages. I thought it might be worth mentioning this book to the list; I just ran across it on the "new book" shelf at the St. Louis Public Library and read it this weekend. It was not classified by them as SF, but as regular fiction; however, I always thought of Koontz as an SF author, and I would define this book as SF. To give details as to why would be a spoiler, though, so you'll have to trust me... It is much like the usual Stephen-King-type of supernatural thriller, and in fact there is a back-cover blurb from King. (Also one from John D. MacDonald, and one from "Mary Higgins Clark" -- who is she? I do not recognize the name.) It does have a fairly gripping quality to it, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to. The ending seemed rather weak, though, and not up to the quality of the rest of the book. A non-spoiling mini-summary: A number of people, in different locations across the US, unknown to each other, begin having unusual psychological episodes, phobias, and obsessions. The book follows a half-dozen of them in detail, over a period of days, tracing the development of these effects, and bringing out the threads of commonality which bind these strangers to one another. They eventually join one another and discover the cause and their true relationship. Speaking of Koontz, the "Also by" page (is there a better or "official" name for this page in a book [the one before the title page where they list other books by the same author]?) lists the following titles: DARKFALL, PHANTOMS, WHISPERS, THE VISION, and NIGHT CHILLS. None of these ring a bell with me, and none sound like SF -- has Koontz moved away from SF to "horror/thrillers" instead? Anyone have anything to say about these other books, or other things by Koontz? Regards, Will From archive (archive) Xref: sssab.se rec.arts.sf-lovers:9966 rec.arts.books:3003 Path: sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!cbnewsj!leeper From: leeper@cbnewsj.ATT.COM (Mark R. Leeper) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers,rec.arts.books Subject: 3 by Koontz Message-ID: <4869@cbnewsj.ATT.COM> Date: 30 Apr 90 13:15:06 GMT Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 113 WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz Berkley, 1988 (1987c), ISBN 0-425-10746-9, $4.95 LIGHTNING by Dean R. Koontz Berkley, 1989 (1988c), ISBN 0-425-11580-1, $4.95. TWILIGHT EYES by Dean R. Koontz Berkley, 1987, ISBN 0-425-10065-0, $4.95. A book review by Mark R. Leeper One of the responsibilities of a reviewer is to not ruin the possible reading enjoyment of a novel by revealing too much of the plot in the review. This puts the reviewer at a particular disadvantage in reviewing novels by Dean R. Koontz. Most books you buy because you know what they are about and want to know more. Koontz's writing and his publisher's packaging are such as not to let on what the book is about. The cover blurbs are intended to be uninformative and, in fact, the big surprise of most Koontz novels is the explanation of what is going on. Hence to tell the reader anything useful about what the plot is actually about is to spoil the surprise. (For this reason plot discussion will be held to the end of this review and will be flagged with a spoiler warning.) Koontz writes science fiction novels with horror conventions and they get packaged as horror. Any real horror he writes apparently he does under a pen name. What are the horror conventions? Well, those are conventions pioneered by Richard Matheson and refined by Stephen King. Like King's and Matheson's, Koontz's stories are not set in a far-flung future but in the present or the recent past. He puts in recognizable details--even brand names--to make the world he writes about one in which the reader feels at home, at least at first. His main characters are ordinary sorts of people who find themselves menaced by something. In the narrow sampling of three of his recent novels I have read and from conversations with other people, the menace is usually something super-scientific that has gotten out of hand. While it is not clear that description precisely fits LIGHTNING it is close and it certainly is true of WATCHERS and TWILIGHT EYES. His writing these days is very formulaic, albeit enjoyable. His novels are much thicker than the have to be for the story he is telling, but he has a very lucid writing style that makes his books go very quickly and reading one is not much different from sitting down and watching a horror film. Koontz seems to be very much the popular successor to Stephen King. Horror is read pretty much by two sorts of readers. There are the inner circle who attend horror conventions (much like science fiction conventions) and look at horror as a real literary form. Then there are the light readers, many of whom find horror novels being sold in grocery and drug stores and who read it as a momentary diversion much as they would watch television. There are far more of the latter. For a while both sorts of reader were fans of Stephen King and there was a feeling of unity among horror readers. King is, however, in decline, and the two groups are really separating again. The inner circle are moving on to writers such as Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell. Most of the light readers do not want anything so intense as Barker writes. Koontz is certainly one of, if not THE, most popular writers among the light readers. The horror market has made a sort of second career for Koontz who has been writing for longer than Clive Barker, even longer than Stephen King. Koontz, who was born in 1945, had science fiction novels published back in the 1960s. He was considered sort of a second-rank science fiction novelist, though one of his novel, DEMON SEED, was adapted into a film with Julie Christie. At least one horror writer, less successful, has said on a panel that Koontz deserves his current popularity and came by it "the right way: busting his tail for years." At this point I will go into the plot of the three novels. SPOILERS FOLLOW. WATCHERS: This is Koontz's most popular novel from the straw poll I have taken. And it is mostly for the introduction of his most likable character, a dog of human intelligence, sort of like Lassie and endearing for just the same reasons. Einstein is not the main character but he certainly is the reason for the book's success. Outwardly Einstein looks like any dog, but he is the result of government experiments to increase the intelligence of animals and use them on the battlefield. Unfortunately, one of their other experiments got free at the same time and it hates all humans but even more hates Einstein--why is never clearly explained. Travis Carnell adopts the apparent stray dog and once he wins Einstein's trust, the dog begins communicating with him about the danger he is in, because by adopting Einstein, Travis has made himself the target both of unscrupulous government agents and of a rampaging monster. Every Koontz seems to have a boy-meets-girl (or vice versa) plot but in this one, one has more affection for the boy and girl than in most. Perhaps the reader still feels sappy over the presence of the dog. LIGHTNING: This is really a story about how a woman reacts to having a time-traveling guardian. Laura Shane has been protected from many of life's most unpleasant moments by a sort of guardian who seems to keep showing up in the nick of time to save her. The guardian can see nasty things that are going to happen to her and prevent them before they happen. There are also time travelers with less benevolent plans for her. This would have been a fairly pat story, but is much improved as a result of the nature of the society these time travelers are coming from. I was fully expecting a nice plot twist at the end, much of the groundwork for which had already been set, and was disappointed when it did not arrive. Still, a pleasant novel with more adventure than horror. TWILIGHT EYES: We start out in the mind of a killer who is the only one who can see that some of the people around him are not people at all but what he calls "goblins" in human disguise. Nobody else is privileged to have the perception to see goblins but our killer knows them on sight, he claims. Well, as is not a very big surprise, the goblins are real and they are shape-changers. They are not, however, supernatural, but the invention of a pre-human civilization who used them as a sort of weapon. They have their own mission that they are carrying out. Our main character joins a carnival to hide from the police who for some reason think the goblins he has killed are real humans. The story is about his war with the goblins and his attack on a goblin stronghold. These are all nice light readable entertainment, not bad choices for upcoming beach reading. Mark R. Leeper att!mtgzx!leeper leeper@mtgzx.att.com Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper From rec.arts.sf-lovers Wed Jan 9 13:06:52 1991 Xref: herkules.sssab.se rec.arts.books:7795 rec.arts.sf-lovers:21359 Path: herkules.sssab.se!isy!liuida!sunic!mcsun!uunet!olivea!apple!tahoe!malc From: malc@tahoe.unr.edu (Malcolm L. Carlock) Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,rec.arts.sf-lovers Subject: Terribly Brief Reviews: The Bad Place Message-ID: <5228@tahoe.unr.edu> Date: 9 Jan 91 02:27:32 GMT Reply-To: malc@tahoe.unr.edu (Malcolm L. Carlock) Organization: Mr Clevvers Roaling Place Lines: 19 Recently read Koontz' "The Bad Place" on the recommendation of someone who shall remain nameless. Impressions: (spoilers) "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" meets "All You Zombies", minus time travel and The Bird. Plus a character who can teleport, but only when he's threatened, a la Bester (or was that Pohl??) Could have been written by Stephen King on a bad day, and as such still managed, for the most part, to be entertaining and hold my interest. The spunky/perky husband-wife detective team is just TOO blatantly lifted from TUPOJH, though, IMHO. Great reading for folks who keep up with all those grocery-store books but are unlikely to read any "real" SF ("Heh heh, they'll never catch on...") Liked the cover art, though. From uucp Tue May 2 03:36 SST 1989 >From matoh Tue May 2 03:36:26 1989 remote from majestix.ida.liu.se Received: by sssab.se (smail2.5) id AA05920; 2 May 89 03:36:26 SST (Tue) Received: from majestix.ida.liu.se by sunic.sunet.se (5.61+IDA/KTH/LTH/1.44) id AAsunic26995; Mon, 1 May 89 03:55:16 +0200 Received: by majestix.ida.liu.se; Mon, 1 May 89 03:54:07 +0200 Date: Mon, 1 May 89 03:54:07 +0200 From: Mats Ohrman Message-Id: <8905010154.AA22796@majestix.ida.liu.se> To: matoh@sssab.se Status: RO Path: liuida!sunic!kth!mcvax!uunet!husc6!rutgers!att!mtuxo!mtgzx!leeper From: leeper@mtgzx.att.com (Mark R. Leeper) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers,rec.arts.books Subject: WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz Message-ID: <5009@mtgzx.att.com> Date: 28 Apr 89 00:59:58 GMT Organization: AT&T, Middletown NJ Lines: 44 Xref: liuida rec.arts.sf-lovers:20541 rec.arts.books:1139 WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz Berkley, 1988, ISBN 0-425-10746-9, $4.95. A book review by Mark R. Leeper To make a long story short, Dean R. Koontz is one of the new breed of horror writers that specializes in making short stories long. He will take a story that a Richard Matheson might have told us in forty pages and turn it into a 500-page novel. He does this by expanding on the characters, without really improving the readers' knowledge of them. As in the television soap operas, a character will get sick and we will spend forty or so pages getting him well, meeting his doctor, and seeing how he behaves when he is sick; then the plot will course as if nothing had happened. Then there are the repetitions. WATCHERS has a psychopathic killer who gets an energy charge when he kills that is described with an electrical zap. Now Koontz could have been blatant and told you that right off. He didn't, so I missed that point on the first killing and caught it on the second killing. I need not have been so clever. I could have waited and gotten it on the third or fifth or even the seventh gratuitous killing. I think Koontz was waiting until nobody could miss the pattern that there was always an electrical zap at the moment of killing. Given that one complaint, I have to say I rather enjoyed WATCHERS. The story deals with two escapees from a nasty military-industrial complex research company doing vile experiments in genetic engineering. One is a dog with human intelligence but all the virtues of a dog: loyalty, courage, strength. The other is called "The Outsider" for not very satisfying reasons. Also not very satisfying are the reasons the Outsider feels a need to kill in general and to kill the dog in particular. Einstein, as the dog is called, befriends human Travis Cornell and only slowly lets him knows which of the two is smarter. Einstein brings together Travis and a mousy woman named Nora who blooms in her relationship with Travis. Now how can anyone not like a story of a likable woman coming out of her shell and a loyal and friendly and super- smart dog? Koontz, who is becoming known as a best-selling writer, can tell a good story and interest the reader in his characters. I don't think many people will feel cheated after having read WATCHERS, but how many will remember the story a week later is another matter. Mark R. Leeper att!mtgzz!leeper leeper@mtgzz.att.com Copyright 1989 Mark R. Leeper