What the Night Knows (with bonus novella Darkness Under the Sun): A Novel
Dean Koontz
Random House Digital, Inc.
I will TRY not to give away major plot points in this book because the whole point of it is suspense, and if I take that away from you, you'll really have no enjoyment of it.
Two warnings: this book is a) not Dean Koontz's best work ever, and b) kind of a ripoff of the movie "Fallen" (for the record, I have no idea if "Fallen" was an original idea, but it just reminded me so much of it that I was singing. "Time is on my side…" over and over while reading the book, which got seriously annoying). I stuck with it because it's Koontz and I figured it would get better, and it has the traditional stuff of his that I like: a decent lead man, an idyllic love, and of course, a dog. In this, it is a ghost dog, but it totally counts. The characters are odd. The main character, John Calvino, is pretty well developed. You understand his motivations, you care about what happens to him. But he is really the only character in the book that doesn't seem flat or cartoony. I thought the whole thing with his wife and the humility roses was stupid; it probably was supposed to make her seem endearing but came across as wasteful and vain to me. She had to have a flower delivery for certain events to happen, I get it, but couldn't John just have bought them for her? The kids have to be young in order for what goes on to be believable, yet their dialog is completely unrealistic. Especially because they seem so physically fit and intelligent but do all these stupid things for no other reason that anyone can gather other than they're kids. I was a pretty well-read child with a decent vocabulary and I'm telling you, most adults don't even talk like that. Some of the "bad" people in the book are completely ridiculous. Essentially one of the characters kills children because she feels it is environmentally responsible, being as children are a drain on natural resources or something. I don't know if Alton Turner Blackwood's journals were an attempt to scrounge up a little sympathy for the guy but really I just wanted to get back to the story. It didn't really explain what was going on at that time but more like what went on 20 years prior, and if that was so interesting perhaps Koontz should have written THAT story instead.
I would find myself starting to buy into the premise and then get saddled with scenes like the one in the hospital, and wanted to stop reading. If people could essentially be possessed by touching ANYTHING, and nobody is strong enough to stop it, how the hell is it supposed to be defeated? The answer, unfortunately, was kind of stupid. It would have to be, simply because the whole book you are lead to believe that this is such pure evil it is basically insurmountable.
Some things in the book got rubbed in the readers' faces a lot: great, the wife is successful and they live in a crazy big house, I get it, let's move on please. But stuff I didn't understand, like what the hell Minnie actually built with that lego thing (besides a deus ex machina), was so vague it seemed like maybe Koontz went back after the book was over and thought, crap, I better make a few references to this throughout the book so it seems like it was relevant all along. I'm used to weird or abrupt endings to books but this one was kind of…well, without giving it away, it felt like Koontz just got tired and decided to move on, but then there's the novella which makes the ending seem kind of off. I didn't know what I was supposed to take from it. Was Blackwood being nice at the beginning of the novella and then changed his mind? Why? Or was he just a murderous jerk using a poor burn victim to find new people to kill? I don't know and even if Koontz writes another novella to explain, I doubt I'd read it. He seemed like such a different character at the beginning of the novella and by the end it was Crazy Blackwood again.
The blurb on Amazon claims : "Here is ghost story like no other you have read." and perhaps not, but I certainly saw "Fallen." I even liked it. The ending of that didn't piss me off nearly as much, either, and it is a doozy. I don't want to make it seem like I hated the book, because that isn't quite the word for how I felt when I finished it. I was done with it about a week ago and I still work the ending around in my head a bit trying to fit it together. It just doesn't work. I am a Yankees fan, and sometimes when they are just playing like crap, swinging at everything and making stupid mistakes, I'll shut off the game. I say to the TV before I turn it off, like they can hear me, "If you aren't going to try, I'm not going to watch." There are a lot of games over the course of a season and they are not all going to be good, or pretty, even. This book was like one of those games I turn off, except I kept reading it and expecting something to gel. Koontz has written a lot of books over his career and this is just not one of his good ones.
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