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 enlarge | Author: Dean Koontz
Publisher: Bantam
Category: Book
List Price: $27.00
Buy Used: $0.77
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Avg. Customer Rating:  207 reviews
Sales Rank: 5215
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.6
ISBN: 0553804820
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780553804829
ASIN: 0553804820
Publication Date: November 27, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Former Library book. Book has some water damage, but book is still completely readable. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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| Customer Reviews:
 Inspiration June 27, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Of course this book isn't up to par with some of the scariest mind-boggling material that DK has given us in the past. However, I believe that this book is the one that helps us feel closest to his heart.
 sick, sad and stupid June 25, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Just got done listening to the audio book. I had to keep listening to see how much sicker it could get. Unbelievable villains that are so silly they are laughable. Save your money, go to a book store, read the last page of the book and see how STUPID the ending is.
Wanted more June 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Most of this book was great. I love Koontz caracture devolepment.I just wanted a better ending. I felt like it was wrapped up to fast and left me unfulfuilled.
You've Got to be Kidding! June 22, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
It is unpleasant to admit that a great one has feet of clay, especially a great one whom one has come to expect has no flaws artistically. But such is the case when I just completed reading Dean Koontz's The Darkest Evening of the Year. It is an example of the courtesan revealing herself to be nothing more than a whore with good make-up.
The great Koontz traits are here--innocents in peril, deranged evil psychopaths on the march toward Armageddon, righteous causes beautifully expressed, lavish prose that requires one to read slowly and repeatedly--but this book is a mess. It's a great man writing simply to write, either for money or expediency, but without conviction or compelling need. A pay check will do.
Koontz, when working with his favorite dogs, golden retrievers, can still call forth a tear to the most jaded eye. But really! This is just a mish-mush. He creates a sinister psychopath, Vanessa, who is nothing more than a wan imitation of his great female nutsoid, Datura. This girl has no reason to exist, she has no background, family, or believability that would have produced such a monster except for Koontz's desire to shock us.
Then there are the trademark Koontz tropes--the nice guy who kills at the end of a chapter, so coldly, so irrationally. The weird but believable sub characters who populate an underworld we hope does not exist. The use of the word "susurration." (I wait for that and the use of the word "butter" to make sure I am truly in "le monde Koontz.") But this book is all formula, no substance.
Let's see. There is the demimonde of a child who is inarticulate but wise, oh so wise. Dogs have prescience and supernatural goodness and direction. Intuition trumps all rationality and reason. Coincidence is accepted as a "not to be questioned" fact of life. This book, in short, drips with the formulaic Koontz fantasies that can make even his best works descend into laughable, eye-rolling nonsense that sabotages his considerable skill and creativity.
I have a golden retriever who is the love of my life, but he is not capable of sensing evil, as are Koontz's dogs. I am glad that there are people so dedicated to their preservation and protection that a whole subspecies of people have evolved to create evolved habitats for them. But that these dogs have become so evolved as to be able to predict and direct human events, including sprouting wings and reversing time and tragedy, is just too preposterous for words. Dean Koontz is drinking and petting his golden retriever and growing lachrymose and insane.
This book adheres to the Swiss Cheese School of Dilapidated Writing. Holes, holes, everywhere there are holes in this inane plot. He pulls on his successes in other works, recycles them, and fails to substantiate any coherence. The arch villain, Harrow, is not really who he says he is. Harrow seems to have evolved in the writing and given a plot twist that is jejune. I didn't buy it for a minute.
Vanessa is his true downfall--incredibly creepy and unlikeable but totally unbelievable on every level. Datura, in Odd Thomas, on the other hand, was totally great and believable. Vanessa is just a piece of Koontz schlock. Oh look how horrible I am--I will abuse and kill an autistic child. Right.
I hate it when Koontz subverts his talents for a paycheck, knowing that his books will sell, no matter how implausible. He can, and does, create a turn of phrase better than anyone else, but there are lines in this book that are truly laughable. Pseudo profundity is expected to cancel plot deficiency and character plausibility. Well, Dean, it doesn't. This book is neither moving nor exciting. It is simply a sentimental wallow in Golden Retriever Uber Alles nonsense.
I have loved Dean Koontz's talented forays into the world of the insane and the frightening, but this book reveals his predilection to trivialize his talent for personal gain. If he has no better ideas for a book, then he should quit writing. Every great artist needs a gray eminence who will tell him that his work should not see the light of day, but apparently Koontz doesn't have this person at his publisher's. He needs to have this person to say, "Dean, this is crap--delete it, burn it if you have printed it, but don't put this out there."
Let's make a list of the absurdities of this story: Amy Redwing gets a call from a nun dead for ten years. Brian, a low-level talent of architecture, suddenly develops a skill for drawing of a golden retriever, drawings which are of unmatched excellence but which inspire Amy to do the equivalent of "That's nice." A murdered child channels herself to get revenge through a golden retriever that has her same name. An abused child also channels the dead girl with the same dream. Amy is an orphan, plus two, who is befriended by a golden retriever in a convent that adopts the dog and eulogizes it in what is virtually a pagan ritual. Now, this kind of nonsense goes on and on, but it all adds up to some kind of kinky catharsis for Koontz, but not for the reader. The reader is left wondering about the sanity of the author and the publishing house.
Dean Koontz has always walked the tightrope between realism and the supernatural, but here he allows himself to fall over into the realm of fantasy and unbelievability. He allows himself to wallow in the maudlin, forsaking his duty to his readers to present a plausible explanation for the brush with the fantastic.
This book is poison, without any redeeming virtues. Avoid it at all costs, but do not ignore the rest of the Koontz body of work. Someone failed him here.
Final Note: The title has nothing to do with the story whatsoever!
 It has its moments, but still a disappointment June 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Although certain parts are deliciously suspenseful, I grew tired of Koontz's maudlin passages about the dogs. The canine storyline was not well developed, and the ending was abrupt and not satisfying. But like I said, the book does have its moments.
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