Once upon a time, Dean Koontz was a good writer.
Gather round, everyone, and let the campfire horror story begin. Many years ago, Dean Koontz wrote some taut and moving novels like The Bad Place, The Voice of the Night and Whispers. His characterization was simplistic, and his obsession with dogs could be cloying, but when he was good, he was memorable. Moreover, since he hadn’t written too many books at that point, he simply didn’t have the chance to repeat himself – although elements from various books did show up in others (the dog, for instance, usually a golden or labrador retriever).
The problems began when the characters began to metamorphose into mouthpieces for the author’s religious views, rather than being people caught up in the grip of believable events. Starting with Sole Survivor’s main character Joe Carpenter and continuing to From the Corner of his Eye’s Grace, Seraphim, Celestina and Angel White, along with Bartholemew and Mary Lampion, the author’s personal ideology began to shoulder its way into the story. Good characters, even if they’re not actually Christian, believe in a warm fuzzy loving god, sort of like a divine golden retriever. The style of the books devolved as well, becoming melodramatic and wordy, and the villains, who were usually completely and irredeemably evil, became more so. Koontz is especially poor at creating believable antagonists; he seems to be aiming for a wet-your-pants reaction from readers, but usually elicits a wet-your-pants-laughing reaction instead. The nadir of this long decline, the crumbling showcase of every failing Koontz has as a writer, is the novel False Memory. Frankly, the most frightening false memory I can imagine is thinking that I paid for this book. Support your local library; they buy bad books so you don’t have to.
On with the story, though. Since the author loves the main characters so much, let’s start with these
It’s an unfailing staple of a Koontz novel that if a husband and wife are the main couple, they will adore each other, and what they do in bed will make the angels sing paeans of jubilation. They will never be working through marital troubles, or anything so disturbingly realistic. And every ten minutes, the action will pause in order for them to exhange cute remarks and witty comebacks, like this :
“I feel like such a schlump.”
“You’re not. The vote is two to one against schlumpdom.”
This assures the reader that although the main couple’s tastes might be stuck in the 1950s – only misguided teenagers like heavy metal, for example – they are really most awesomely cool. The couple in this case are Martie and Dusty Rhodes, a videogame designer and a house painter, respectively. Scientists and doctors in Koontz novels tend to be evil, unless they’re the sweet, avuncular, eccentric type who loves dogs. If you’re a cool, reserved, rational sort of scientist, you are the epitome of malice, and you have never had sex with a consenting adult – or even a consenting body part, for that matter. Seriously. In From the Corner of his Eye, the villain’s own stomach can’t stand him. Since Martie and Dusty are the protagonists, however, they are devoid of faults, their lives are blissfully joyous and they have the golden retriever to prove it.
As flat and predictable as the protagonists, the villain has no redeeming characteristics and no loyalty or love for anyone. As well as killing his parents, he keeps his father’s eyes in a jar. Perhaps he should keep a brain in a jar instead, and get it to edit this novel. At this point, though, Koontz staple #2 is brought into play : the bizarrely refined hobby of the villain. Enoch Cain of From the Corner of his Eye did needlepoint cushions, Edgler Vess of Intensity made anagrams and the antagonist of this book is into haiku. Maybe the next villain will throw Tupperware parties. Now, I’m sure you understand at once that any raping, murdering, haiku-quoting person must be stopped, but unfortunately the main characters have neither the wits nor the guts to do so. Therefore, Koontz handicaps the antagonist by having him give the heroes clues to his nefarious schemes. This is justified by many references to the villain’s smugness and belief in his own superiority, but it only reinforces the cartoonish nature of the characters and narrative, so the novel comes off as the Riddler fighting the Care Bears (if you can imagine the Care Bears having ecstatic sex).
The only weeds in the Thomas Kinkade painting of Dusty’s and Martie’s lives are Martie’s severely agoraphobic friend Susan, and Dusty’s younger brother Skeet. Koontz staple #3 : problematic younger brother of main character. Since he has no self-esteem or abilities other than being “gentle and sweet”, sort of like a moisturizer, Skeet uses illegal drugs and tries to throw himself off a roof. Perhaps he had a foresight of the future Koontz planned for him. Dusty climbs up on to the roof and tries to stop him, but Skeet insists that an angel of death told him to kill himself.
This scene would have been suspenseful if not for the fact that Dusty and Skeet talk for over eleven pages, rambling on and on. At the end of the interminable conversation, I was convinced Skeet would be too arthritic in his old age to totter off the roof. Nevertheless, he jumps, but since we see people hauling out mattresses to break his fall, he lands on one of those. Man, that scene was suspenseful. It almost woke me up. Moreover, the only way for readers to be afraid for a character’s safety is if they care about the character, and I couldn’t see anything even remotely appealing about Skeet.
Meanwhile, Martie coaxes Susan out of her house and persuades her to attend a twice-weekly meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Ahriman. At that point I stopped reading and went to Google, murmuring, “Ahriman… where have I heard that name bef--oh, that’s the devil in Persian mythology.” Say, I wonder if this Ahriman could be the villain? The choice in names isn’t as blatant as Jack Chick’s Lew Siffer, but it destroyed what little mystery there might have been in the novel. Perhaps the bad guy of the next book can be called Natas Evilincarnate, to make it a bit easier for the protagonists to figure things out. If only they or their dog had had access to Google like I did. Anyway, Dr. Ahrimam is brilliant, charming, handsome and well dressed, which means he’s more depraved underneath that we could ever imagine. After the session, Martie and Susan go back home, though Martie starts having brief but disturbing thoughts about harming someone.
Susan confides to Martie that a man enters her house and rapes her in her sleep, so she decides to set up a concealed video camera in her bedroom. Preoccupied with her own fears, Martie returns to her own house, but the visions of herself causing harm and death become more pronounced. She therefore decides to get rid of all the knives in the house.
Now this part started out interesting. I like the scene where Martie empties some knives into a cardboard box, then covers the box with tape as though she’s mummifying it, but can’t cut the tape because she’s scared of the scissors. It’s vivid and engages one’s interest. However, Martie then disposes of forks, salad forks, butter knives, steak knives, a bottle opener, a potato peeler, a lemon-peel shaver, a corkscrew, a meat-tenderizing mallet, a rolling pin, a mortar and pestle, wine bottles, matches, a shovel, hammers, screwdrivers, saws, nails, hedge clippers, etc. etc. Eventually, this has all the suspense of a Sears catalog, and every step Martie makes is rendered in stupefying detail, with frequent reminders to the reader that she’s scared.
Nevertheless, these irrational fears infected her, swarmed in her blood, bred in her bones, crawled in bacterial plenitude through her mind, and she was growing sicker by the second.
Less really would be more at this point. Pages and pages are spent on the robotic listing of every sharp, pointed or heavy item in the average household. Yes, we got it the first time. Dusty arrives and discovers what she’s done, and they decide to make an appointment with Dr. Ahriman. Meanwhile, Ahriman arrives at Susan’s house for the nightly beer-and-rape session; he repeats the lines of a haiku and she does what he tells her to do (brainwashing was also the pivot of the plots in Koontz’s previous novels Night Chills and Strangers). The inaction trickles to a halt for two pages of backstory, where we learn that, when she first became his client, “Ahriman had administered to her a potent brew of drugs: Rohypnol, phencyclidine, Valium, and one marvelous cerebrotropic substance not listed in any published pharmacopoeia.” I’ll bet it was eye of newt… or considering the effect it had on her, eye of Newt Gingrich. “The recipe was his own.” My, so as well as being an expert psychiatrist and a haiku enthusiast, he could teach Potions at Hogwarts.
Since the brainwashing and rape might not have been sufficient to convince everyone that Ahriman wallows in perversity, he tells Susan to pretend he’s her father. We understand that Dean Koontz does not in any way support this kind of thing, despite his writing about in in great and lurid detail, since he takes care to mention that Ahriman “kissed her as no father should ever kiss a daughter”. Well, at least not his own daughter. After he erases Susan’s memory and leaves, however, she wakes up, watches the videotape and leaves a message on Martie’s answering machine, informing her that the rapist was Dr. Ahriman. That’s all she gets to do before a suspicious Ahriman returns and sees the videotape.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
He would have been damned, in fact, if he had not recognized the cause of his suspicion, if he had finally driven home and gone to bed without returning here.
Ohhh… I understand now. If he hadn’t come back, she might have (gasp) shown the tape to someone else. And then he might have been in trouble! The complex workings of this profound and multi-layered design are finally clear to little old me.
Ahriman makes her kill herself. The next day, Martie has a therapy session, and while Dusty is in the waiting room, he starts reading the novel The Manchurian Candidate, which is a clue that Ahriman has given Martie in order to make the game more exciting. While he ponders that, Ahriman puts Martie in a trance state. Dusty comes into the office and Ahriman puts him in a trance state too. I’m sure that if their dog had followed, it would have been conked out as well. Apparently Ahriman slipped Martie his internal Molotov cocktail in the coffee she drank while she was waiting for Susan’s sessions to conclude, and she gave Dusty the same Mickey Finn when she fixed his dessert after dinnertime.
On the way home, Dusty starts telling Martie about the novel, and when he says the name of a character, Raymond Shaw, she goes into the trance state, which is when he figures out that she’s been brainwashed. This would be a great deal more engaging and cheerworthy if Ahriman hadn’t given them the novel in the first place. Later, they find Susan’s message on their answering machine, which finally clues them in. Retriever in tow, they visit another doctor who has a beer gut and a dog, so you can tell right away that he’s a good person, and he fills them in on their dark nemesis’s previous reigns of terror. Apparently Ahriman was involved in a child molestation scandal where a little girl killed herself. Have we all got that this man is horrifyingly evil? It would be one thing if these stories gave Dusty and Martie evidence to use in trapping Ahriman, but they don’t. They’re simply filler, droning litanies of Who Killed/Molested Who and How. Oh, and Ahriman sent goons to cut off the doctor’s partner’s ear. Is there no end to his wickedness? Is there no end to this book?
Dusty and Martie realize that Ahriman is running the clinic where Skeet (remember him?) is being held after his suicide attempt. At this point I wouldn’t have been surprised to read that Ahriman was actually behind the wreck of the Hindenburg as well. Skeet is so passive when they arrive that Martie has to tie his shoelaces for him (the nurses allowed him shoelaces? Maybe they liked him as much as I did). I started thinking of him as Sheep instead, while the two saints of the novel became Trusty Dusty and Heartie Martie. Hey, anything to keep myself entertained. Sarah Connor breaking out of the asylum in Terminator II this ain’t, even though Ahriman is visiting the clinic at the same time. Since there can be no moment in Ahriman’s life when he is not performing some malevolent act, he puts another inmate, a famous actor, into a trance state and instructs him to bite off the President’s nose. You know, I’m getting this impression that Ahriman isn’t very nice.
Using the magic technique of instantaneous brainwashing, Dusty reprograms Sheep so that he’ll never take drugs or have low self-esteem again. Man, it’s too bad he couldn’t reprogram himself as a two-dimensional character, or reprogram me as someone who was awestruck and humbled by his glowing halo. Sheep goes off with his paranoia-conspiracy-buff friend Fig Newton. Meanwhile Dusty and Martie begin the process of tracking down Ahriman’s surviving victims in order to emphasize to the reader what terrible things Ahriman has done. Ahriman burns down their house (Koontz staple #5 : arson, which leads the good guys to understand that all they really need is each other). Then he has a therapy session with the most implausible character yet, and that’s saying something. She’s a rich lady with Keanuphobia. Yes, that’s right – a pathological fear of Keanu Reeves. Each time I think this book can’t get any more unbelievable, it proves me wrong.
After more descriptions of child molestation and suicide and witch-hunts and Bad Things which happened to Good People on account of Ahriman, Dusty and Martie are ambushed by Kevin and Zachary, two of Ahriman’s goons. Dusty is bundled into the trunk like the shopping bag he is, but the goons put Martie into the car and explain that there’s rape and murder on the menu that evening. Since Martie has a “customized .45 Colt Commander” (Koontz staple #6 : the good guys have the right to bear arms, though not to take lives with them), she draws it and tries to decide what to do with it. I mean, she has to get out of the car somehow, and since Kevin is in the front seat, his gun is within reach of him but not within reach of her. What a puzzle. I mean, what can she do under these baffling and complicated circumstances?
Nitwit! Just shoot them and get it over with!
Sorry, I had to get that out of my system. Apparently it would be immoral to shoot men who kidnapped you at gunpoint and put your husband in the trunk of their car while planning to rape you, shoot the two of you and dump your bodies in a well. So after dithering for five pages, Martie comes up with a half-baked plan to get the men out of the car without harming them. Naturally, one of them goes for his gun and she finally shoots them, more by accident than design. Then she does a Lady Macbeth.
She was scrubbing her hands with hard-packed snow half turned to prickly ice, scrubbing so ferociously that she would soon begin to bleed.
I’d fear that she was going insane from the horror of having to defend herself and her helpless husband, if I didn’t think she was mad to begin with. Speaking of lunacy, Sheep, Fig and the dog have decided to trail Dr. Ahriman, who’s aware of them in the same way that you’d be aware of a neon-pink elephant lumbering after you. He follows them instead, and shoots them both in the chests. He’s about to shoot the dog too – no! Not the doggie! You bastard! – when he realizes that he’s been followed in turn, by the Keanuphobic lady, who goes running off with Ahriman jogging after her. At this point I was torn between yawning at the melodrama and laughing at the farce. To my relief, this cinderblock of a novel only had about a hundred more pages more to go, though. Dusty and Martie finally confront Ahriman, providing the climax of the novel, and I hoped that here at last there would be some action.
And it started out well. Although they have deprogrammed each other, they pretend to be under his control. He tells them that they have to murder Dusty’s stepfather, Derek Lampton, but before he can explain why, he realizes that they’re faking the trance state. So he draws a gun and tells them to get out.
They went, because they had no other options.
My heroes.
I shouldn’t be too harsh on them, since they’re incapable of actually using the customized .45 Colt Commander; maybe it’s just for shooting clay pigeons. Expecting them to defeat Ahriman would be like sending Jar Jar Binks against Darth Vader. They go to Dusty’s stepfather’s house instead, where they find Sheep and Fig, who are alive thanks to Kevlar vests. Perhaps Ahriman should have shot them in the head, though that wouldn’t have damaged anything vital either. Derek Lampton finally reveals what he has done to unleash Ahriman’s murderous fury. Using fake names and email addresses, he posted over a hundred and fifty poor reviews of Ahriman’s latest book on Amazon.com. Moral of the story : don’t write negative reviews of books, or the author will come after you with a haiku. Martie and Dusty are absolutely horrified – appalled, I tell you! – by this cyberwarfare, and they explain to Lampton that “We’re all dead because of you”. Brain-dead, certainly, but I don’t see how that was Lampton’s fault.
Another of Ahriman’s puppets (the drones to his Borg Queen) arrives at the house to kill everyone. Being only slightly less evil than Ahriman, Lampton doesn’t possess a gun, and neither Dusty nor Martie could use one effectively anyway. Dusty’s fifteen-year-old half-brother shoots the guy with a crossbow, so Dusty calls him a “sick, rotten little shit” and then goes on to expose all his mother’s and stepfather’s dysfunctional, boring secrets. While they’re blathering on, Sheep decides that it’s time he did something proactive, rather than sitting around on the roof, sitting around in the asylum, sitting around in his mother’s house, etc, so he takes a gun and goes off to shoot Ahriman. On the way up in the elevator, he meets the Keanuphobic woman, who’s also arrived with a gun in order to shoot Ahriman. Dusty and Martie hotfoot it after Sheep, though they could only send Ahriman into a diabetic coma, or maybe get their dog to lick him to death. Thinking she’s in the Matrix, the Keanuphobe shoots Skeet and then shoots Ahriman. Guess which one survives.
The book mercifully closes with Koontz staple #7 : the party where all the good surviving characters congregate with their significant others, children and dogs, though I repeat myself. That night, Martie dreams of her father, a deceased demigod who is referred to frequently in the novel. His name was Robert “Smilin’ Bob” Woodhouse, and as well as being the most-decorated firefighter in the state, he had won medals for combat in Vietnam. However, he was very modest and wouldn’t let Martie tell anyone that. In fact, he was so modest that he insisted she tell everyone he was a drug dealer instead. OK, I made that part up, but only because Smilin’ Boob – oops, I mean Bob – was so cloyingly perfect that I rolled my eyes at every mention of him. If any caricature summed up this book, it would be that one.
One of the out-of-print books I own and value is Dean Koontz’s How to write bestselling fiction, though I wonder now if there’s a reason this is out of print. While he made many salient points in that book, he doesn’t seem to have any sense of moderation or proportion in this one, and at times his style verges on the ridiculous. The golden retriever grins when it’s happy, but looks sheepish after it poops, since it’s “as self-conscious as a nun in a topless bar”. Even the weather is described in this anthropomorphic way, much like the sun in Teletubby land. Every possible thing is described; the doctor, for instance, relaxes in “black ninja-style pajamas with a scarlet silk belt”, and the pajamas “rustled with silken sibilance”. I guess they’re evil pajamas. And as if the chunks of detail weren’t enough to bloat the book, there’s the overwriting. When Martie is trying not to hurt the two goons with her gun, we get this priceless bit:
“What kind of video games you design?” Kevin asked, trying to distract her.
No, really? He was trying to distract her? Man, I thought he wanted to buy his grandkids something nice for Christmas and was trying to get recommendations.
The novel, which didn’t have much to recommend it except for the idea of brainwashing people, sags under its own weight and under the battery of Koontz’s stylistic devices, from the Martha Stewart-like descriptions of desserts and decors to a sudden lapse into present tense, all to distract readers from the fact that there’s really nothing happening, because neither the hero nor the heroine is capable of action. I mean, a comic relief character shoots the villain in the back. I’d comment that it didn’t get much lamer than this, but there are many recent Koontz novels which I haven’t read.