This is an old book, first published in 1983. Nevertheless, it maintains a lot of the characteristics I enjoy about Koontz’s most recent books. It’s amazing to me that he’s been at it for more than 25 years and that his first books already had those characteristics I like. Maybe you think this is a bad thing rather than good; maybe it shows a lack of authoristic development that his newest books don’t show radical improvements over his initial ones. I don’t think so.

First, I think the books have improved. While the characters in Phatoms seemed quite accessible to me and I feel like I got to know them, I certainly didn’t develop as strong a connection as I have to more recent characters like Odd Thomas and those in Life Expectancy. It’s also hard to explain, but I think the prose is tighter and more accessible to the general populous. This is a good thing because Koontz writes popular fiction. He doesn’t try to write The Great American Novel (TGAN) with each of his books; it seems that he’s more interested in writing books that people actually enjoy reading. Those that provide a temporary escape from the stresses of daily life. This is important because it’s taken me the better part of 20 years to realize that I don’t need to write TGAN and I would be comfortable writing popular fiction.

On to the actual story…this is more of a straight horror novel than his other books. In fact, in the afterword, Koontz regrets writing this book inasmuch as it got him labelled as a horror writer. That being said, I consider it a thriller more than a straight horror novel. While the basic premise of the story is basic “these people are trapped and the unnatural killer feeds on them and you know that more people are going to die every 30 pages or so,” I was quite pleased with the additional scientific explanations that most horror novels leave out. While the scientific explanations did push the bounds of credulity, I was able to accept them as a bonus to an otherwise fairly standard horror novel.

There were a couple of down points to the book, though. First, there were too many central characters for me to keep track of. While Koontz does put in the reminders you need to remember the characters (e.g. the deputy sheriff said, she shook her long brown hair), I still couldn’t track all of them. The two main characters are a woman and her younger sister. These were easy for me to track and I enjoyed getting to know them. The problem came in with all of the police officers. Most of the rest of the cast are sheriffs, deputies, etc. and were too similar for me to follow. This is one of those things that I haven’t noticed in his more recent books.

*MINOR SPOILERS*

There were also a couple of plot points that I just didn’t understand. There is the whole side story of the biker gang and the wife/child killer. I waited and waited for these stories to come into the main trunk of the story and claim some importance, but they never did. Or, at least, I don’t feel that they did. Both the killer and the leader of the gang do end up talking to the “Ancient Enemy” and promise to carry on his work…but otherwise they seem completely tangential and I would have liked the book better without them.

Overall, this was a reasonably good book and I did enjoy reading it. Nevertheless, I would recommend most any of Koontz’s more recent dozen books over this one. So if you’ve already read most of his recent books (like I have), and you can pick up a copy of this book cheap, do so and marvel at the writing machine that is Dean Koontz.

If you like Dean Koontz the way I do, you’ll like this book.

The thing I like most about Dean Koontz books is the characterization. I can’t always put my finger on it, but there’s usually something about his characters that draws me in immediately so that I get attached to them and can’t put the book down. This book was exceptionally good in that regard. I listened to this book on Audio CD and I remember thinking about just the first 10 minutes that I was already hooked on the characters.

This book reminded me a lot of my favorite Dean Koontz book, Life Expectancy. I think that was the first Dean Koontz I read and the reason I keep reading them is the great characterization I first found in that book. The main characters in Relentless are so much fun that you can’t help but smile even when they’re under mortal threat by seemingly supernatural bad guys. The fun banter and jokes between the family members (and dog) make you wish that you could maintain your humor under stressful situations.

<possible spoilers ahead>

The other Koontz book this reminded me of was Dark Rivers of the Heart. This connection is due to the conspiracy theorist slant of both novels. In each, a government agency has basically unlimited resources and are on a personal mission to kill the main character(s). There is lots of conspiracy theorist goodies in here like the main female character’s parents who have an underground bunker in the desert complete with deadly booby traps by the front door.

But it keeps going back to the characters. Even the weird parents in the bunker have a great sense of humor and joke and play, albeit in a potentially offensive way to vegetarian tree-huggers.

In all, I think this is not on my top five list of favorite Dean Koontz books, along with Life Expectancy and Odd Thomas. Which is really good, because there have been a couple of books of his recently that didn’t grab me and I was almost getting to the point of expending my limited reading time on other authors. But this book has renewed my love for Koontz books and I anxiously await the next.