The Pain and Misery

        Strangers - Dean Koontz  

      So in the eighties there was a race to see who the greatest horror writer was and there were only two names that I can think of right of the top of my head. Sure, there may have been others, but King and Koontz were the ones who had the biggest followings. King was more of a horror guy and Koontz for the most part was all sorts of different things. I was team King and always found Koontz a bit dry and boring but I do remember devouring Twilight Eyes. That was the only book of his I can remember reading and not being bored out of my skull. As an adult I occasionally revisit his stuff just to see if maybe the problem wasn't Koontz at all and just a result of my teenage brain not being equipped to deal with Koontz's writing style. The guy loves detail and aliens and conspiricies. His novels really seem to be all about the same shadowy figures lurking just out of our view. Nope, the problem wasn't me at all, it was all him. He's just boring. Why then did I pick up Strangers? It's an earlier novel, and it looked pretty interesting. Maybe this time I'll find a Koontz novel that doesn't suck. 

       The plot itself seems pretty simple. People are suddenly exhibiting bizarre behavior but can't figure out the cause. One guy has somnibulism, a priest without warning loses his faith, a man is suddenly afraid of the dark  and a doctor finds herself suddenly freaking out and running in fear of random things like black gloves, and a drain of all things. These people are linked somehow and of course the question is why? It's clear that they're all linked by something and Koontz takes a long time showing us. The novel itself is over seven hundred pages long and deals a lot with these fears which is cool because as bland as thse characters are, it's nice to see the links between them all. What happened to these people? What's the connection?

        The probem witht the novel is that it's far too long for such a simple story. All of this could have been concluded in a way that doesn't take close to seven hundred pages adnd a lot of those are wasted on characters that we don't really care about at all. It's as if Koontz was trying to out epic Stephen King but he doesn't have the skill or talent to do it.Strangers could have been good but by the time I got to the ending I no longer cared due to the exhaustion I felt while reading it. We all know that reading Koontz you either love him or hate him. There's no middle ground and there are people who love this guy but I'm still not sure why. At best, Strangers is a novel by a guy trying to find his own place in literary history. The novel has moments of hope, but as it wears on, it just becomes tedious and not all that fun to read. 

       I wanted to like Strangers but the ending just fell flat for me and the majority of the time I just wanted the damn thing to end. People do love this book but sadly I'm not one of them. I just expected more than what I was given and at times, it simply felt as if Koontz was simply making shit up as he went along just to pad pages. A proper editor would have sat him down and it told him the book would be a lot better shorter. With the falling memory blocks and the addition of the army there should be a sense of excitement. What happened in Elko was tragic but reading this book was even more tragic. 

One star and that's being generous.