sfgale

This only just got 4 stars due to Dean Koontz's seemingly uncanny ability to mess up a fantastic story right at the very end. He did this with Phantoms by wimping out and invoking the great god, Science, and now he's gone and done the same thing again here.

It was a truly great ride right up to the last 100 pages(approx.) when he decided to introduce what he clearly thought was a really cool and unexpected twist by letting us know that the house was in fact built on a tear in space-time which caused future creatures which from what I could make out are future humans that have been adjusted by some sort of nano-machines that use the human as a host upon orders of some sort of intelligence called the One. This is all very well and good, and is hinted at throughout the novel with various messages being heard by the various characters, but I really do wish Mr Koontz would have the guts to not make it about how great and all powerful science is. Just for once I'd like it to be about how powerful nature, or demons, or some sort of weird and wonderful creature is. Not something enhanced with nano-tech or something being beaten and dispatched because, of course, science is so much more powerful than mere nature.

This novel isn't nearly as bad as I'm making out, but it is very annoying when I'm 90% through the novel wondering what this demonic creature is and where it comes from and why it's here and getting really excited to know whether it turns out to be an ancient god, or a demonic power previously unknown, or some other force of nature that got screwed up somewhere in the dim and distant past, only to find out that it comes down to Koontz's great god Science, ...yet again!

Read this for the first 90%, then stop and make up your own ending. You'll be happier, and it'll be a better novel for it.