Dean Koontz, I just can’t quit you

This was not a great book. It wasn’t even very good. But it’s Dean Koontz, and you could definitely do worse for a few hours of reading.

“He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.”

Detective John Calvino’s entire family was murdered (along with several others) when he was a child. He ended the serial killer’s streak by killing him. Decades later, someone seems to be repeating the same pattern. Since it’s a Dean Koontz book, it’s obviously a malevolent spirit and only Calvino stop it — before it kills his beautiful and talented wife, and his amazingly precocious children.

It’s classic Dean Koontz — overwrought descriptions, amazingly bright children, murderers with truly awful pasts. There’s even a golden retriever (although it’s dead…) I try not to read Koontz too often anymore — his newer stuff always seems like a pale imitation of the great horror I read in middle school, and I’m not sure how much of that change is due to him or to me — but this was a decent read at least.