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TheBecks

TheBecks

Darkfall - Dean Koontz 2.5 Stars
Starting this book I actually had pretty high hopes for it. A voodoo priest comes to New York for revenge and calls upon dark spirits and forces of evil to do his bidding... and all over town, people are found dead and mutilated. It starts out with some pretty creepy scenes, and the action doesn't really let up after that. If I was just judging this book on concept, action, and pace, it would be a 4 star book at least. But unfortunately, this is Dean Koontz, who manages to take a good concept and Koontzify quite a lot of it into mind-numbing near unreadability.

By this I mean that I had some rather large issues with this book. First, Koontz shows once again that he is not a character writer. He's got two types of female characters that he just switches up between books. There's the Ball Buster Bitch and there's the Miss Independent Victim (That Needs To Love Again). Well wouldn't you know that Ol' Dean mixed it up here and gave us a 3rd type?? The BBB/Ms.IndyVictim/MamaBear! Yep. That Dean's just full of surprises!

Next, about midway through, this already disbelief-suspended plot got all lost on its way home. The evil voodoo dude forgot who he was pissed at in the first place, and switched targets and priorities and busted out all of the big guns for someone who was simply a sideline irritation to begin with... and not only this, but he created himself a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the sideline irritation becomes a major problem by boasting and taunting the NYPD. If he'd just gone about his business, he could have concluded it and been on his merry way without any issues at all. I guess that this is supposed to teach us that pride cometh before the fall, but really, all it taught me is that if I'm going to do some bad stuff, I should probably just keep a low profile about it and NOT tip off the cops to details of how to take me down. Y'know... Just sayin'. But again, this is a Koontz book - the tension and danger is more important than making actual sense.

Finally, there are authors out there who have brilliant observations on life and love and all that it entails, and communicate this wonderfully to the page in a way that provides the reader with interesting insight to their observations in a beautiful and honest way without insulting or condescending or preaching to the reader, or engaging their gag reflex. Then there are authors who are very bad at doing this, but are deluded into thinking that they are not, and write passages like this:
"...Love is the only thing that endures. Mountains are torn down, built up, torn down again over millions and millions of years. Seas dry up. Deserts give way to new seas. Time crumbles every building man erects. Great ideas are proven wrong and collapse as surely as castles and temples. But love is a force, and energy, a power. At the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card, I think love is like a ray of sunlight, traveling for all eternity through space, deeper and deeper into infinity; like that ray of light, it never ceases to exist."
(This is only part of a 3-page-or-so long emotionally motivational semi-monologue, skipped almost in its entirety by me because I couldn't stop rolling my eyes long enough to focus on the page.)

I did like the concept of Voodoo here, and how it is malleable to those who use it based on their intentions. It's like life in general this way - we each get one, and how we use it is up to us. I liked the resolution for the same reason. I liked the action and pace and the assassins (which I thought were cool). It's too bad that the issues I had were so large. This isn't a bad read if you're looking for something quick paced and interesting -- just don't be too picky about characterization or a logical plot. ;)