Frizzy Ends

It’s book review time, and Solomon is not happy.

He just finished reading Dean Koontz’s The Good Guy, a work that came recommended as the year’s best by no less an authority than Stephen King.

Understand that Solomon doesn’t read much fiction these days, so when he does, he expects an exciting entertainment. (Solomon did all that “thoughtful” fiction back when he was young and read a lot faster than he does now—and had a higher tolerance for crap.)

So, when he made the commitment to read a fiction work, he had high hopes that THIS time Dean Koontz wouldn’t let him down. Now, let me tell you Koontz is a fine writer, with great verbal skill. He can create character with dialogue like no one else. And he has an ability to create suspense that is second to none.

But he has his tics, and they are super annoying. He is prone to recycle characters; he is too fond of certain uncommon words that call attention to themselves; he wallows in the maudlin, though he tries to appear hard-boiled; he will solve plot dilemmas with the deus ex machina of the supernatural; and he will deliberately try to gross you out, though, to his great credit, without ever resorting to bad language.

It would seem from this list of faults that Solomon doesn’t like Koontz at all, but this is not so. The man is an inventive and driven dynamo of a writer whose complete list of achievements is staggering. He must write faster than most people read! And when he’s on his game, there is simply no one better.

And his beginnings! My God, no one writes a better, more compelling first chapter than Dean Koontz!

But for the last five years, Koontz seems to have put so much into his stories that he quits writing them when they are three quarters over. I believe he has been handing off his denouements to some sketchy Vietnam vet who holds a sign “Will Finish Book for Food.”

Koontz builds incredible skyscrapers and stops building before the roof’s in place. He’s the quarterback of the team who takes them down to the two-yard line and then fumbles. He is the guy who swims across the lake and gives up within sight of the shore. He is the ultimate coitus interruptus.

I’ll tell you exactly where he quit writing The Good Guy—Chapter 57. The first fifty-six are inspired, crackling suspense. But he might as well have said, at the end of Chapter 56, “And he woke up and found out that he’d been having a bad dream.”

If he were a salesman, it would be said of him that he gives the greatest presentation, but he can’t close the deal. His Frankenstein series—great fun, but not even a bad ending—just NO ending. Book after book of his leads us down into the dungeon where the monster is hiding. He takes us up to the door behind which it is lurking. And then…well, then the door swings open and you shoot the monster and he dies, end of story.

When you prepare a reader to stand in front of the monster’s lair, there damn well better be a monster back there that is going to leap out at us chase us and scare us until we can’t take it any longer. Suspense doesn’t end when you open the door—opening the door is the beginning of the REALLY bad stuff!

It’s not as if Koontz isn’t aware of this, for he created what has to be one of the finest, most satisfying endings in all of literature in his masterpiece, Life Expectancy.

So one can only conclude that he has gotten lazy. But damn, he owes us more. And note to Stephen King: The Good Guy is NOT the best book of 2008, and you should know better.