Ok, Who Really Wrote This Book?

I haven't read a Dean Koontz authored book in a couple of years but I don't remember him being this detail oriented. My paperback copy was six hundred and eighty-one pages. Enough already, this story could have easily been told in half that many pages. In bold type too!

That's not to say it wasn't an interesting story. It was. I guess you might say I enjoyed it despite itself. There is no doubt Koontz is one of the better story tellers around and this was a good yarn. Trouble is I read through five hundred pages of tedium to get to one hundred and eighty pages of knock down drag out excitement and that's the part I can't tell you about. So let's talk about what I can tell you about.

Dean Koontz's M.O. is that he writes very good horror and science fiction horror stories not unlike the other guy whose name also stars with K, only Koontz is less erratic.
With the other K, you get a good one, then an bad one, then an average one then a great one and so forth. Koontz doesn't quite get to the great threshold very often but he also stays to the left of average as well.

Main Characters:

Da good guys
Curtis Hammond - a ten year old boy (or is he?)
Leilani Klonk - a precocious, handicapped nine year old girl
Mickey Bellsong - A pretty twenty something ex-con (she was framed)
Aunt Geneva - Mickey's aunt
"Old Yeller" - dog who tags along with Curtis
Noah Farrel - semi retired private eye
Polly and Cass - beautiful, buxom former show girls.

Da crumbs
"Ole Sinsemilla" - Leilani's good for nothing drugged out mother
Preston Maddoc - Leilani's evil stepdad, whom she calls "Dr Doom".

Da yarn
Mickey and Geneva's new but temporary neighbor, nine year old Leilani is smart as a whip (who ever thought up that expression?), Cute as a button (another one, never saw a cute button yet) and sharp as a tack (ok, that one fits) but she is also handicapped, with a deformed left hand and leg (she wears a leg brace) and she obviously fabricates stories, saying her mother is an insane druggie and her step father has murdered eleven people that she knows about, including her severely handicapped year older brother. It seems that Dr Doom is a sort of Dr Korvorkian but worse, an advocate of mercy killings and more. Like killing his version of the misfits and Leilani falls in his version.

Yes, tall tales indeed, until Mickey get a taste of the utterly bizarre behavior of Leilani's mother "ole Sinsemilla" dancing in the moonlight and then jumping down Mickey's throat for calling her Sinsemilla. At this point Leilani's tall tale seems a lot shorter and after that and a couple other episodes, Mickey and Geneva are quite worried not only for Leilani's welfare but indeed for her life.

Curtis Hammond is running for his life. There is something evil after him, worse than evil, malevolent and it's closing in. In Utah, after visiting a sleeping families house to find clothes and food, the family dog trails after Curtis as he makes a hasty get away after the evil almost catches him. It seems, what is after Curtis has already killed his mother and now they're killing this Utah family, so not only is Curtis in danger but so is anyone he contacts.

And so on goes the story where our divergent characters, good and bad alike, are inexorably drawn to a confluence in a small town in the Idaho panhandle.

Conclusion

I think Dean Koontz is a very good writer. He seems to come up with unusual and original plots and he tells the story well with an open easy to follow writing style. Likewise One Door Away From Heaven is a well presented clever story in Koontz's classic Good versus Evil motif. His depiction of the characters, especially Leilani was excellent. He made you want to adopt her and similarly with Curtis, however this book is not without some faults.

The effort that Koontz put forth was overly loquacious and there was much too much attention paid to detail. An example that comes to mind is where Curtis goes into a truck stop bathroom. This bathroom, which has no real bearing on the story is described in such detail that some 140 words are used. I felt this excess of description turned a rather simple straight forward novel into a wordy complex story that, as I mentioned, bordered on tedium, not to mention the additional two or three hundred pages took me an extra seven or eight hours to read.

I have read many Koontz books, Coldfire, Hideaway, Tick Tock, Strange Highways, Lightning and others and I don't remember Koontz's writing being so distracting. It almost seems like Koontz supplied a plot and someone else wrote the book.

Regardless, the plot and story were interesting enough despite the overdone presentation to salvage the book.