Book Review: From the Corner of His Eye -- Dean Koontz

I am a huge fan of Dean Koontz. I have read almost everything he has written, up until the turn of the millennium. I believe Koontz to be a gifted storyteller, prolific as hell, able to grab your sense of curiosity and hold it to the last page.

But then along comes a book like From The Corner Of His Eye, clearly the beginning of a series or trilogy or something. It is also clearly a good versus evil story. It has religious overtones (and undertones). It questions our sense of reality, our basic ideas of religion, morality, and being. It is such a gigantic reach, such an all-encompassing idea, that it fails -- but just barely, at least in the first book. Maybe it will pick up in the second (and third and so on).

But it is disappointing. I am such a big fan of Koontz that I actually own more than a dozen of his novels (hardback), so I report this novel's lack of completeness (although a complete story, while setting up another, is told) with a heavy heart.

Koontz has latched onto the idea of quantum mechanics and applied it to the human side of things, creating a work of philosophy, religion, and alternate realities. The antagonist, Enoch Cain, is a sociopath whose life of hedonistic narcissism crosses over, touches roughly, and sometimes eliminates the lives of those he comes into conflict with. Several protagonists, Bartholomew Lampion and Tom Vanadium and Agnes Lampion and Paul Damascus and Celestina White, all are touched by this man's brand of evil. Maintaining their inherent goodness and optimistic outlook throughout (except for Vanadium, a detective, who, like his namesake, has his doubts at times), most of the time with the support of minor characters like the eccentric Isaacson twins, brooders over natural disasters and human mayhem (but otherwise quite harmless), our protagonists forge into the future bravely until they unite about three-quarters of the way through the book. Obvious religious overtones are seen in Koontz' choice of names for his characters. And, like their names, the characters are predictable.