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Summary
Author Notes
Dean Koontz was born on July 9, 1945 in Everett, Pennsylvania. He received a degree in education from Shippensburg State College in 1967. A former high school English teacher as well as a teacher-counselor with the Appalachian Poverty Program, he began writing as a child to escape an ugly home life caused by his alcoholic father. A prolific writer at a young age, he had sold a dozen novels by the age of 25. Early in his career, he wrote under numerous pen names including David Axton, Brian Coffey, K. R. Dwyer, Leigh Nichols, Richard Paige, and Owen West. He is best known for the books written under his own name, many of which are bestsellers, including Midnight, Cold Fire, The Bad Place, Hideaway, The Husband, Odd Hours, 77 Shadow Street, Innocence, The City, Saint Odd, and The Silent Corner.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Playing police logic against the supernatural, Koontz ( The Bad Place ; Night Chills et al.) delivers fairy-tale horror in the form of a detective thriller. In southern California, police detective Harry Lyon and his partner, Connie Guliver, find themselves hounded by a golem who appears in the shape of a towering vagrant. Called Ticktock because he grants his victims only hours to live, the vagrant has tremendous physical power, a taste for gruesomely described violence and the ability to stop time and rearrange reality. Koontz romps playfully and skillfully through this grown-up enchantment, dealing out such motifs as a talking dog and taking potshots at recognizable pop culture: e.g., the book's epigram is a Garth Brooks lyric, and during a killing spree the murderer yells out titles of Elvis Presley songs. The prose may occasionally strike a false note, but Koontz's breakaway bestseller pace does not dally for the mot juste. As irresistible (and nutritionally valuable) as a stack of brownies. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selections; Mystery Guild featured alternate. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An electrifying terrorfest in which Koontz (Hideaway, 1992, etc.), inking his silkiest writing yet, takes on the serial-killer novel and makes it his own. Koontz hooks us at once (``Tuesday was a fine California day, full of sunshine and promise, until Harry Lyon had to shoot someone at lunch'') and never lets go. Harry is a cop, and the man he guns down--with help from Harry's partner, Connie Gulliver--is a crazy who disrupts the cops' restaurant-lunch by shooting the joint to bits. It's an exhilarating opener--and it's also a lovely red herring, because the crazy has no connection, other than as another symptom of the rot of modern life, with the killer that Harry and Connie take on later. He's Bryan Drackman, who fixates on the cops when he's drawn to the restaurant carnage. Bryan, like most serial killers, believes that he has godlike powers; but Bryan--and here's Koontz's ace--really does. Mutated in the womb by radiation and drugs, Bryan has grown into a sociopath who can conjure up any entity he wants--especially ``Ticktock,'' a giant who stalks Harry, Connie, and several others, including a dog whose periodic narration (``Piece of paper. Candy wrapper. Smells good'') is so charming that you don't mind that Koontz used a similar dog-ploy in Watchers (1986). Ticktock warns Harry & Co. that they'll die at dawn--and it's only late into the night that they learn of Bryan's greatest power: the power to stop time, which unveils in a jaw- dropping set-piece in which the cops flee through a frozen world with Ticktock close behind. But Bryan, the cops now know, must sleep after his time-stopping binges: Can they find him before he wakes up? Koontz gets a bit preachy about social decay--but his action never flags in this vise-tight tale that'll rocket right to the top of the charts. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for March)
Booklist Review
The latest from prolific, best-selling Koontz is about Harry and Connie, a male-female cop team that has to catch a psychokiller who interrupts their lunch by opening fire on the restaurant. Shortly thereafter, Harry is threatened with death by a bum with blood-red eyes who's also been threatening street people. Turns out there's no relation between the lunch-loonie and the death-bum, but there is between the bum and Bryan, a rich young maniac gifted with psychokinesis--the ability to move things at his mental bidding. Stephen King has said nice things about Koontz and bad things about grade-B horror meister John Saul, which just goes to show you shouldn't give King's opinions too much weight. Popular though he is, Koontz is a bore. Only if you're stuck on a long flight or overnight in a dinky motel should you read him word for word. This effort gets so stale by the halfway mark that it's impossible to care whether the flatfoots get their ghoul. (Reviewed Dec. 1, 1992)0399137734Ray Olson
