As I mentioned in my own birth of a horrorblogger post, one of the books I read at an early age was a Norwegian translation of Dean R. Koontz’ Phantoms. I’ve only later figured out that it was this book, since I only remembered fragments of it. But I remember it scaring me when I was around 12 or 13.

So the other day, I picked it up and re-read it. It was definitely the book I had read in my youth, but it was not very good. Not at all, actually. The idea and setup are quite good, and there’s a Lovecraftian atmosphere that works well, especially in the beginning. The problem is more than anything the writing.

Koontz’ prose is often compared to that of Stephen King, since both are considered no-nonsense craftsmen, with effective writing styles that have little pretense of being high art. This comparison is quite flawed, however. Stephen King is like that, Koontz is just… bad. There’s expository and repetitive dialogue, horrible logical mistakes that any decent editor should have caught, clumsy prose, idiotic similes, and cliché upon cliché.

I’d heard that this was turned into a very bad movie, and I thought it was the presence of Ben Affleck that did it, but it turns out it’s likely it was just because it was based on a bad book.

In addition to some good ideas and being a nostalgia trip for me, its only other redeeming feature is that science is actually used in an explanatory and documenting fashion here, much in the way I hoped for in my technology and horror post. Too bad it’s not better written, it could have become a prime example of that. As it is, it’s just bad.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Books, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.