sfgale

I find Dean Koontz is best read at-a-pace. I mean that I find parts of his novels tend to slow to a crawl a lot of the time. This didn't happen much, if at all in this novel, however, it did demonstrate one of my pet hates, namely that the all-powerful 'SCIENCE' takes on and not only beats the ancient evil life-form that professes to be none other than the devil himself in his various guises but then simply dismisses it as little more than a very old creature that somehow managed to survive millions of years due to it's abilities to be all but unstoppable. Unstoppable that is until the great god 'SCIENCE' comes along with it's super-powers and defeats it within hours(days at most).

No. This was a bit of a cop-out in my opinion. It was never completely proved that the creature was not actually a demon, but it was stated quite categorically several times and we were clearly meant to think that that was the case. All this does for me is suck all the mystery and potential horror out of the story and relegate it to the realms of the mundane. I like my horror to be a good deal more creepy and unknowable than simply 'SCIENCE has solved the mystery with it's super-powers'.

So this moved at a fair old pace, which was nice, but it seemed to delight in dismissing an ancient evil as nothing more than a creature that was lucky enough to have avoided 'SCIENCE' for the last few million years.

No idea why this is so highly rated amongst his fans. Of the few Dean Koontz I've read so far, this is the one I would have happily skipped over had I met a review like this one first.

I wouldn't bother if I were you, there are much better Dean Koontz novels to be read.