Rating: 
Summary: A little slower-paced than most of his books, but still a..
Review: GREAT READ! Koontz knows how to write a captivating novel and a page-turner! This is a little easier to read than some of his most recent work, but is still a sure-fire best-seller!! Koontz continues to keep the JETS going at FULL-BLAST and keeps it entertaining and very interesting! This book is layered with several plots going at the same time and keeps the doses of shocks and thrills coming!! This writer deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award for his work and I hope he gets it while he is still actively writing!
Rating: 
Summary: Tears of boredom in the corners of my eyes.......
Review: I have read many Koontz books over the years, and this is by far his worst. Read all of the bad reviews here and you'll get the message. It's amazing that from the author of a great book like Watchers comes this dribble. If you insist on reading this book, skip every third paragraph, the entire middle, and the end...you won't miss a thing !!
Rating: 
Summary: This is Horror
Review: I am not really a horror lover so I was quite disgusted by the villain character, Junior Cain! It becomes clear early in the book that this guy is highly disturbed, and Dean Koontz really put some effort in to show you in great detail the passages of Junior's mind. It was quite awful, I mean just for one instance he was into hideous art, such as paintings of cancer growing. That is a mild example of his character, actually. He was a murderer many times over and still had this idea that all women wanted him, and also that he was a man of great character! I waded through all of the stuff with Junior with grimaces on my face only because I wanted to see the outcome of the other plot, about a little boy named Bartholomew. He lost his eyes at a young age, but had a very unusual, special talent. This kept my interest. I wish the book had been more about him, but it was more about Junior. I give the book 2 stars for effort and the Bartholomew parts, but Junior kept me giving it 3 stars. He is just too gross for me!
Rating:
Summary: From the Corner of His Eye and False Memory
Review: After the dismal disappointment of Albino Surfin' Dude Mac Daddy, I finally ventured back to Koontz and got "From the Corner of His Eye" and "False Memory." Both books are typically overwritten; Koontz draws heroes and villains a bit cartoonishly, sometimes to the point of silliness. His basic message in both books is that if you are self centered, vain, and selfish, you are bad, and can do any evil thing without a trace of human conscience, and if you are generous, think of others, and kind, then you are good and will go to heaven or be rewarded somehow. Bad people may win in the short term, but in the end, gentle, kind, self sacrificing people win because they live with love and self righteousness. Simple, no complications, good vs evil in broad strokes. But you know what? I don't have a problem with that. I actually got all teary at the end of Eye, and that doesn't happen often in reading. It may not be a "great" book, in the sense that I just want to reach into the text and slap some literary sense into the author, particularly when he writes some jarringly bad sentence that looks like a twelve year old girl grabbed his keyboard, but it's entertaining, absorbing, and a really good read. Less so is "False Memory," but again, I stayed up all night when I should have been sleeping because the book was just so damn compelling. After I finished it, the biggest question in my mind had to do with "Eye," which was: where's the dog? Koontz always puts a Golden Retriever in his books, imbues them with human qualities, sometimes to the point of speech ("Watchers") and it's always the same dog, from book to book. That's one quibble (I almost wrote kibble) I have with this author. His characters are the same. The good guys talk the same way, the bad guys talk the same way, and NONE of them talk the way real people do. In fact, there's a little joke in False Memory about the word "heretofore," where one of the protagonists says, "No one talks like that, using heretofore in a sentence." And she is so right. But if he knows that, why doesn't he ever speak his dialogue out loud when he writes it to hear how overly literary everyone sounds? I have to admit, Koontz baffles me. He spins me along on a ride, and I have a very good time, until he throws in some over the top sentence like the "olive leaves dripping green tears" or when the villain in "False Memory" learns, in all seriousness, that someone who crossed the other villains was "torn to pieces and fed to a pit of hungry crocodiles." I laughed out loud, scaring my own speechless dogs in the middle of the night, when I read that. See, that's what I mean by jarring the reader out of a state of pleasurable disbelief. You have to pause to consider how silly that sounds. Do they keep a pit of hungry crocodiles somewhere in Evil Villain land? Who tends them? There's a guy whose job description in itself would inspire novels. This interferes with the flow of narrative and gives the reader a much needed bathroom break. Koontz baffles me when he writes a really awful book and then turns around and writes a really good book. He's so talented; can't he see that less is more in language? His characters are so appealing; can't he see that varying their language, making them less idealized, would make them MORE appealing? In "Watchers" he had a brilliant ploy when he gave the monster a teddy bear and made it pathetic in the end instead of pure evil. So it's not like he can't do it. I just wish he'd grow as a writer instead of keep on keeping on. I guess it's made him rich, and the formula works. I'll keep buying his books because at this point, and I whisper with guilt when I say it, I prefer Koontz to that true master of language and character, Steven King. I've had to put the last four King novels down. With Koontz's last two, this is not an option.
Rating:
Summary: One of the weakest efforts from a usually strong Koontz...
Review: Despite how I feel about a book--whether I am enjoying or despising it--I always make every effort to finish. However, in the case of "From The Corner Of His Eye," it was one of the most daunting tasks to complete this novel. I have long been a Koontz fan since beginning with "Hideaway," but this novel is unfortunately one of his weakest efforts. His villian is certainly engrossing and intriguing, yet his motivation is flawed and difficult to even believe (even Koontz's efforts at explaining Cain's delusional beliefs surrounding his foe seem tame to the reader). Agnes Lampion, one of the novel's (too-many) protagonists is dripping with so much optimism and one might say extreme naivety that it's hard to even connect with her--it's like trying to associate with a deity. But these faults pale in comparison to two major disappointments: 1) While Koontz has always been a strong storyteller and plot-master, the prose in "FTCOHE" is almost laughable at times. Many of his discriptions, while well-intenioned, end up sounding like a high-school freshman's first attempts at writing. Case in point: "Week by week, the slender sapling of frustration had grown into a tree and then into a forest, until Tom began every morning by looking out through the tightly woven branches of impatience" (p. 681). Dean--tisk, tisk... And 2) I have never--and I stress NEVER--read a book with such extreme (and annoying, I might add) build-up, all of which led to the most anti-climactic ending I have ever read. Cain's demise is so quick and down-right lame that I thought perhaps I had purchased a defective copy and a few pages had been left out (although I must say that Koontz's reference to his earlier "The Bad Place" was quite amusing to see). Do yourself a favor and definitely skip this trite mess. If you're looking for a stellar read from Koontz--who is usually a much better author than he shows here--check out some of his best works. A few options might be: Watchers (his best), Mr. Murder, Phantoms, Hideaway, and/or Dragon Tears.
Rating:
Summary: boring
Review: I am on page 240 in this book and I am bored with it. So far this book has no horror or even suspense to keep me reading. Maybe it will get better, but I have already given up. I am disappointed because I have read a few of his books before and found them interesting, but I don't recommend this one at all.
Rating:
Summary: slow start
Review: I am finding this a very hard book to get into 40 pages in and it is weak-should I go on? will it get better? and is it worth it to read all those pages? Maybe he has abetter book.
Rating: 
Summary: Dean Heads for the Oprah Book Club
Review: Buried somewhere within this 729-page (in paperback) tome, there is a classic Dean Koontz horror novel that is about 300 pages long. It's got all the hallmarks of a Koontz classic of unbridled suspense and dread, with some of the highly unique characters that Koontz always has a knack for creating. This includes a truly creepy bad guy, revealed to be nothing but a ... loser in the depths of his sheer evil. Plus we have a relentlessly grizzled old detective, a pair of bizarre and eccentric twin brothers, and two supernaturally gifted and otherworldly little kids. Add to this some good build-up in the chase after the bad guy, and a manageable (for the time being) touch of the supernatural, and this book has the earmarks of a Koontz classic. But like I said above, that's only an estimated 300 pages. Instead of wrapping up this potentially lean-and-mean story, Koontz instead piles on another 429 pages of heartwarming sentimentality that is downright imposing in its scope. Characters often spend pages and pages soul searching and moralizing on the mysteries of life and love and friendship, in voluminous speeches and sermonizing that would give even the most syrup-resistant members of the Horse Whisperer's fan club a stomachache. As this book moves past page 600, the reader is more worried about wading through the syrup than rushing toward the climax. You barely notice as the bad guy is dispatched in one anti-climactic sentence, then you are faced with a further 30 or 40 pages of sermonizing. This is the worst in excessive melodrama, as you fight your way through the forced sadness and heartache while knowing that everything will turn out fine in the end, with an avalanche of happy family values as your reward. At least this book's super-loveable and personality-rich golden retriever doesn't appear until four pages before the end. This development in Koontz's strategy has been slowly developing over the years, and as a long-time fan it's been inescapable for me. He is no longer a writer of enthrallingly creepy suspense and horror novels that keep you on the edge of your seat and continue to haunt you after you're done reading them. Koontz has now developed into a writer of self-help novels with melodramatic moralizing and desperately loving characters that teach the reader to have faith in the world. Tailor-made for the Oprah book club as it were.
Rating:
Summary: Welcome to the Land of Oprah
Review: His 38th novel has gore and chills, but the bulk of this tedious tome is about love and the importance of love and if you don't have love you will never be happy--something romanticists have been trying to convice us for over 50 years. So it comes as no surprise to hear him deliver lines like ''Every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will and unconscious example. Each smallest act of kindness...reverberates across great distances and spans of time''? Or comfort us with the thought that ''He's always at least watching from the corner of his eye''? Or note that ''coincidence is the result of mysterious design and meaning''? Yech. ... Without getting too much into the story, you can read about it elsewhere here, let's just say the plot summaries all eventually converge. ... Everything Happens for a Reason and We're All Connected on This Crazy Planet stuff. .. When fans discover their faithful author spewing out holy water instead of blood, you'll find it as distasteful as stale communion wafers. Loaded with pop-'60's references and literary ridiculousness, the plot buckles under its own meta-spiritual weight and sludgy prose. That might be OK if the book was at least entertaining, but as it progresses further and further into its slathering lectures on love, meaning of life, physics, Zen, tragedy, etc..., the only thing you can wonder is what happened to Koontz and how do I get him back. Hopefully, this was just a temporary thing.
Rating: 
Summary: Koontz rules
Review: "Reaffirms... Koontz is Great! The characters are wonderfully complex. We are introduced, get our first impressions, form our opinions and gradually, with a growing acquaintance and familiarity, the characters are revealed. My preconceptions of the characters were quite suddenly, suprisingly, and satisfyingly shattered about 2/3 through. Lots of fun!! I didn't much care about the whole quantam physics angle, but it didn't hurt the story either. Once again, Koontz's characters are so well developed complete with philosophical and psychological profiles. We really get an angle from each character's point of view. Amazing!! And this is one book where I couldn't wait to get back to the villian. Even a second reading immediately after the first is a great experience!! In my opinion, Koontz' Best!
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