The Big Dark Sky by Dean Koontz

‎

Published by Thomas & Mercer on July 19, 2022

Dean Koontz returns to horror fiction (or something close to it) in The Big Dark Sky. It is a welcome change from his Jane Hawk thrillers. Koontz gives himself an amusing plug by having one of the characters rave about Jane Hawk (twice), but Koontz is at his best when his goal is to make the reader afraid to turn out the light after closing the book.

Birth defects left Jimmy Alvarez unable to speak until he was possessed by an entity he identifies as the Thing. Jimmy was the secret friend of Joanna “Jojo” Chase when she was young. She thought it was special that Jimmy only spoke to her. He was kind and gentle and seemed to control animals, plenty of which inhabit the woods in Montana where Jimmy and Joanna lived. As an adult, however, Joanna has forgotten that Jimmy ever existed.

The novel begins with exploding houses and other attempts, sometimes successful, to eliminate people on Xanthus Toller’s death list. The government views those deaths as a national security issue — not surprising, given the way they are accomplished.

Ganesh Patel is part of a group tasked with stopping Toller. Ganesh and Artimis Selene know Jimmy’s Thing as the Other. The Other controls electronics as well as animals, although it has a limited range. It has been watching humans and probing their minds for 4,000 years. It was eventually drawn to the dark philosophy of Asher Optime, a disciple of Toller’s Restoration Movement. The Movement advocates restoring the planet to its natural state by wiping out humankind. Optime is writing a manifesto about the benefits of human extinction. The true purpose of the manifesto is to glorify Optime, but the Other agrees with the Restoration Movement’s goal and might have the power to achieve it.

Koontz serves up a collection of characters who each bring something of value to the story. Joanna’s tragic childhood encased her in an “emotional cocoon.” Through dreams and phone calls, Joanna remembers Jimmy and understands that he is asking for her help. Joanna and Jimmy are easily the novel’s most sympathetic characters, the purest of heart.

Ganesh is a powerful government contractor who has the ear of the president. Artimis is his AI, who was programmed with a female personality matrix to avoid the male drive for conquest and power. The novel’s ending suggests that female personalities can be just as dangerous, albeit in a different way. Maybe Koontz will explore that thought in a sequel.

Wyatt Rider is a private detective. A billionaire who has been acquiring land in Montana hires Wyatt to investigate a phenomenon near his isolated Montana home that he perceives as supernatural. Wyatt enlists the help of a computer specialist named Kenny Deetle. Kenny’s new girlfriend, Leigh Ann Bruce, rides to the rescue with Kenny and Ganesh when Wyatt needs help.

Optime captures people and tenderizes them with terror before killing them to advance his Restoration project. Two of his recent captives are a smart kid named Colson Fielding and a resilient woman named Ophelia Poole. Both play an important role when the characters eventually come together in Montana for a confrontation with Optime and the Other. Resourceful children and smartass women are the kind of likeable characters readers expect from Koontz.

As have other writers, Koontz ties Carl Jung’s theory of collective unconsciousness to quantum mechanics and the notion that reality does not arrive at a fixed state until it is observed. While the notion that people manufacture reality is fascinating, Koontz’s attempt to relate the theory to the plot is awkward.

Physics aside, Koontz is a gifted storyteller. His skillful blend of swift action and sympathetic characterization assures that the reader will never lose focus. None of the padding that impaired the Jane Hawk novels burdens The Big Dark Sky. The story does not depend on the supernatural, but it straddles the line between science fiction and horror as Koontz sprinkles in the kind of chilling scenes that defined his reputation as a horror novelist. While the plot elements are overly familiar, Koontz waves them together in a way that almost makes the novel seem fresh.

RECOMMENDED

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

The Crooked Staircase by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on May 8, 2018

The Crooked Staircase is the third novel in a series that pits former FBI agent Jane Hawk against the conspirators who not only caused her husband to commit suicide, but have developed mind-control nanotechnology that lets them kill as many people as they want, which turns out to be a large number. Their goal is to shape the country in their own image by doing away with people whose more tolerant opinions might become influential. This installment, like the first two, has Hawk chasing the bad guys while they are chasing her.

One of the weaknesses in the first two novels involved the bad guys’ failure to go after Jane’s obvious vulnerability, the son she hid with friends. Given the bad guys’ all-encompassing knowledge of everything, thanks to their control of the NSA and every other federal agency’s spy network, it didn’t seem to me it would be all that hard to find her son. Dean Koontz addresses that problem in this novel.

He also throws in a bunch of collateral characters, the most interesting of whom are two young writers from India who are viewed as a threat by the bad guys (or their threat-tabulating computer) because they are writing humanist literature that might catch on and persuade people treat each other decently, thus impeding the bad guys’ cutthroat notion of a utopian society. A less interesting character, who might play a bigger role in the next novel, is a stereotypical genius whose autism makes him social-phobic.

The biggest problem with this series (assuming that readers are willing to suspend disbelief of its unconvincing premise) is that Koontz has many more than the story really needs. The words are well chosen — there is no question that Koontz is capable of crafting exquisite sentences, and reading his books is always a linguistic pleasure — but this is the kind of novel that depends on pace, and the pace slackens too much for my taste as, for example, we are lectured about the influence of the Greek Furies upon one of the writers. Koontz also tends to use Hawk and other characters to engage in philosophical discussions about the human condition, usually by lamenting the direction in which humanity is headed. That works well in a different kind of novel (it worked very well in Koontz’s The City), but it doesn’t work in a conspiracy thriller that depends on action and pace to sustain the story. I can’t say that wordiness is a big distraction, but there are too many eloquent philosophical passages in the novel that seem to have been included for the sake of showcasing eloquence or philosophy rather than advancing the plot.

And the plot really does need advancing. My understanding is that Koontz intends to tell this story over at least five books. A standard conspiracy thriller doesn’t merit five books. I don’t know what more is to come, but my suspicion is that the story could easily be compacted into a trilogy. Parts of this novel seems like filler, with extended chase scenes and some collateral stories involving characters who are introduced and thrown away. Some of that content could have been excised with no loss of value.

I give Koontz credit for not contriving a happy ending for every character. And I give him credit for working in several peaks of suspense as the story moves along. Koontz occasionally indulges in a bit of pop psychology of the sort that appeals to thriller writers — a sociopath is trying to punish his mother by serially punishing and killing women who look like his mother — and that I expect to encounter in bad novels about profilers. The evil mother who shaped the key villain in this volume is completely over the top. Other characters are more credible, but again, none of the characters match Koontz’ best work.

The ending isn’t exactly a cliffhanger, but it’s close, as one would expect of each novel in a five novel series. I’ll keep reading because Koontz is a gifted wordsmith and the story isn’t dull. So far, however, the story isn’t particularly original or thrilling, and I fear it’s losing steam.

RECOMMENDED

The Whispering Room by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on November 21, 2017

Anything that Dean Koontz writes is entertaining by definition, but the Jane Hawk series is far from his best work. The mind-control conspiracy premise is overdone and not particularly convincing.

The Whispering Room gives shape to the “maniacal conspiracy of utopian totalitarians” that Jane Hawk began to uncover in The Silent Corner. As we learned in that novel, the masters of the universe are using nanotechnology to infiltrate brains and force people to kill themselves for the betterment of society (at least as the totalitarian conspirators see it). In this novel, sweet elderly teachers are committing terrorist acts for the same reason. Why sweet elderly teachers are seen as a threat to world supremacy is explained only by the assurance that they were selected by a computer. Presumably the computer had its reasons. Again, I'm not convinced.

The bad guys are “elitists” with Ivy League educations who belittle individuals with “third tier” college educations, which may give the story some populist appeal. Koontz more than once writes about the “foolishness of the elites,” using the kind of divisive political buzzword that stokes fury in certain societal groups but doesn’t really mean anything. That’s unusual and surprising coming from Koontz, who typically embraces unity.

A new addition to the cast is a local law enforcement officer, Luther Tillman, who investigates the murder of a governor, a crime the feds seem surprisingly unmotivated to investigate. Luther stumbles across some journals that refer to a spider building a web in the killer’s brain, and uncovers evidence pointing him to a conference that the sweet killer attended — a conference that seems to have changed her, and perhaps others who were invited so that their brains could be captured.

Another new addition is a kid named Harley who knows that all the adults in his town have taken the Stepford treatment. Luther is a good character but Harley is a bit corny, the kind of brave and adorable kid that has become a stock Hollywood character. I expect more than that from Koontz. I appreciate, however, the minor characters who commit random acts of decency, the sort of people Koontz often scatters through novels to suggest that the human race is not universally awful.

Meanwhile, Jane roars through the novel like a force of nature, moving forward in her investigation from bad guy to bad guy while staying a step ahead of all the bad guys who want to kill her. And since this is a mind-control conspiracy, pretty much everyone wants to kill her. That gives the novel energy and motivates the reader to continue turning pages. And there’s a bizarre fight scene near the end involving nonhuman foes that I enjoyed simply because it is outside the norm of thriller fare. Not entirely believable, but fun.

That is, in fact, my reaction to both novels. I’m just not buying much of what happens, but I’ve enjoyed reading both books. Despite characters who aren’t as meaty as Koontz’s best, an unoriginal premise, and too many unconvincing scenes, Koontz’s ability to hold a reader’s attention makes the novels an easy read. Just don’t expect the books to go where no author has gone before.

The story does not end in The Whispering Room (I'm not sure how many novels in this series Koontz intends to write) but the ending is not a cliffhanger, which I appreciate. The first two novels have enough merit that I'll read the next one without being manipulated by a cliffhanger, but they don't have enough merit to earn wild praise.

RECOMMENDED

The Silent Corner by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on June 20, 2017

The first thing to know about The Silent Corner is that Dean Koontz doesn’t finish the story he begins. Fortunately, the story does not end with a cliffhanger, but the plot is not resolved. More Jane Hawk novels are on the horizon.

The second thing to know is that The Silent Corner, unlike many Koontz novels, has no supernatural element. It’s less a horror novel than a “vast evil conspiracy” novel of the sort that Ludlum used to write. Still, The Silent Corner feels like a Koontz thriller, not an imitation of a Ludlum thriller.

Jane Hawk is the recent widow of a Marine officer who killed himself. The suicide rate, like the murder rate, has been increasing, but without an apparent pattern. On leave from the FBI and off the grid, Jane is searching for a thread that connects the suicides. Jane is off the grid because she’s being chased by an unknown but well-financed enemy. Her life is complicated by the knowledge that she’s hidden her only son with a friend and cannot see him often, because the conspiratorial forces that want her to cease her inquiries have threatened them both.

The note that Hawk’s husband left implies that he felt a compulsion to die. Notes left by other unlikely suiciders suggest that they heard voices or suddenly envisioned a path to a better life despite having no religious beliefs. Hawk suspects that some outside force is compelling thousands of people to commit suicide.

Hawk enlists help in her search for the truth, including a famous actor and an aging veteran who runs a soup kitchen. She tangles with the ultra-rich who indulge their nefarious and demented fantasies. As a reader would expect of Koontz, all of those characters seem real.

Several parts of The Silent Corner don’t pass credibility scrutiny. Why is an FBI agent (as opposed to, for instance, the CDC) the lone person who seems to have noticed that people are committing suicide for no reason? Why do the conspirators think anyone will listen to her? Why is an exclusive and extremely illegal club for rich deviants designed in a way that all but ignores security? How does a conspiracy involving a stunning technological breakthrough have such an extensive reach while still remaining hidden? And why are such resourceful conspirators unable to find Jane’s kid, given the obvious place she picked to hide him? Suspension of disbelief is the key to enjoying a conspiracy thriller, but Koontz challenged my ability to do that.

The background of The Silent Corner pictures a nation that has grown increasingly angry, a nation in which assholes feel an entitlement to engage in rude behavior. Sounds depressingly like the real world, doesn't it? Yet Koontz always manages to portray the decency of those who have been dealt a losing hand. Characters who are poor, homeless, disabled, or victimized are kinder and more respectful of others than the humorless and self-impressed people who wield power, although a couple of wealthy characters are also good people.

The story moves quickly and the plot, while fanciful, never becomes convoluted. The Silent Corner doesn’t have the depth of Dean Koontz’ best work, but it left me looking forward to the next in the series, which is enough to make me recommend it.

RECOMMENDED