Koontz is a topflight suspense writer, but this error only the fans will love.
Koontz shoots for a seriocomic horror novel and takes a dive.
Following the failure of The Taking (2004), which began so brilliantly, then faded into Dullsville with an alien invasion, Koontz strives for high entertainment with a ton of witty dialogue, which fans may find passable but others will deem tiresome. The problem is that the story opens with murders in a maternity ward and a crazed clown raving about the excremental existence of the world-famed Vivacemente aerialists. From this emerges a forecast that Jimmy Tock, a lummox born at the same moment his grandfather dies in the same blood-strewn hospital, will have to face five ghastly days in his future. When the first ghastly day arrives, the adult Jimmy is in his small-town library. Punchinello Beezo, the same hospital maniac who appeared at his birth, shoots a librarian and holds Jimmy and Lorrie Lynn Hicks hostage while Beezo and two grisly buddies plant explosives in secret tunnels linking the library to the courthouse and two other buildings. At this point Koontz starts whipping out the witty exchanges between Jimmy and Lorrie as they seemingly face death. It’s a dire authorial misstep: the second act of a Grand Guignol bloodfest is no place for Nick-and-Nora–style repartee from The Thin Man. True, a genius could get away with it, and Koontz has genius—but not for humor. Doubtless he amused himself, but his lines are forced blooms. Since logic dictates that Jimmy must survive at least the first four ghastly days (three of which turn out to be humdrum melodrama), the suspense is minimal despite all the guns and dread. The climax turns on incest, but we’ll say no more. Readers will need all the suspense possible to keep them wading through the comedy lines.
Koontz is a topflight suspense writer, but this error only the fans will love.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-553-80414-6
Page Count: 401
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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