The Forbidden Door by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on September 11, 2018

The Forbidden Door is the fourth Jane Hawk novel. Each book is a long installment in a very long story, so there’s not much point in reading The Forbidden Door unless you’ve read the first three novels in the series. Despite Dean Koontz’ undeniable talent, I’m not sure it is worth the effort to read an unimaginative mind-control conspiracy story that could have been told in one or two books, or at most a trilogy, but that Koontz expanded to fill five books.

Jane Hawk was an FBI agent until her husband killed himself. Since he wasn’t the kind of guy to end it all, Jane did some research and discovered that suicides were spiking. She is apparently the only person in the world who managed to connect that statistic to a vast conspiracy involving nanotechnology that takes control of the human mind and renders people submissive to the orders of their masters.

The masters are the usual gang of high powered business leaders and politicians who want to shape the world by killing everyone who might make it better (people who, from their perspective, would be making it worse). The grand guru of the scheme devised a computer model to select the victims.

Jane is chasing these guys while hiding her son from them, since they are also chasing her. I’ve long wondered why the bad guys didn’t try harder to find the kid, and in this fourth novel they finally listened to me. The plot of The Forbidden Room involves the conspirators narrowing the search for Jane’s son, who eventually stays with a genius named Cornell Jasperson who is coping with autism, agoraphobia, and a host of other mental disorders and fears, all of which Jane’s son and his two dogs seem on the verge of miraculously curing. Like all of the “good guy” characters in this series, Cornell is a paradigm of niceness.

Two very nice characters who played important supporting roles in earlier novels, a black sheriff named Luther Tillman and an elderly widower named Bernie Riggowitz, return to play similar roles in Jane’s quest to save her son from the clutches of the conspirators. The plot consists of Jane figuring out how to reach her son and get him to safety (again), alternating with scenes of her son and his dogs bonding with Cornell and scenes of the bad guys doing their mind control thing (which turns out to have a flaw, suggested by the novel’s title, that creates a new kind of danger).

Like other novels in the series, this one feels padded. In fact, the entire novel seems like filler. Koontz always does a masterful job of creating likable characters, but in this series characters tend to be created and discarded in a series of mini-stories that are consistent with the larger plot but that could just as easily have been omitted. I suppose that’s an inevitable product of turning a one-novel idea into multiple novels.

Nor does Koontz imbue his characters with the kind of complexity that characterizes his best work. Hawk is such a capable, caring, selfless individual, seemingly lacking even the slightest imperfection, that she also lacks any dimension of depth. Cornell and Bernie are at least quirky, but they come across as stereotypes (Cornell reminded me of Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man and Bernie reminded me of a less crusty version of the grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine). Sadly enough, the novel’s most interesting character is a bad guy who believes he has been cast in a play and is being directed on an illusory stage by an Unknown Playwright.

Koontz at his best is such a good writer that it is disappointing when he isn’t at his best. The entire series seems to have been written on auto-pilot, and The Forbidden Door does so little to advance the plot that it stands as the weakest of the four books. Book five is scheduled for 2019. I hope that Koontz can find his groove after cashing in on this unoriginal premise. I recommended the first three books because they are mindlessly enjoyable, but at this point I would hesitate to recommend the series as a whole, and I view The Forbidden Door as a novel that is only worth reading for the sake of finishing the series.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS