I loved him in high school. And he does have his strengths. But I think both as a combination of his running low on ideas, and me becoming aware of some of his fail, I just can't read him anymore.
Yeah, good thing I had fanfiction to set me straight on this score. ;) (I know some fanfiction can be as guilty of this as anything, but thankfully I haven't run across much of it yet.)
'P.S. Why are all your antagonists completely evil? You set up these potentially fascinating scenarios and all the moral complexity and tension gets leached out of them by revealing the antagonist to be more and more of a complete monster as time goes on until they're downright boring.'
THANK YOU. Stephen King tends to have the same problem. I think one of the reasons I liked Justin Cronin's 'The Passage' so much is because he has so much sympathy for every one of his characters (save for a few, like Richards and Jude) while never white-washing them.
Yeah, "completely evil without a shade of moral complexity" never works for me unless it's the scenery-chewing, fourth-wall-breaking kind, like Acheron Hades from the Thursday Next books.
The only book I've ever read by him was Odd Thomas and I adored it. Does this mean I should avoid his later novels? (I was warned off the sequels by the same friends who recommended the book in the first place.)
I managed to get twenty-five pages into the Odd Thomas sequel (I quite liked the first one too, though I thought the Big Bad kind of came out of nowhere and could've been scarier) and then I just had to stop, because every time I was just starting to get settled into the protagonist's narration and the unfolding of the plot, Koontz would derail the whole thing with a page-long snarky diatribe about atheists or Indian casinos or whatever political bee he happened to have in his bonnet. It didn't sound like the protagonist at all, and threw me right out of the story.
Dean Koontz is hit and miss. He comes up with all sorts of new problems and slaps one to a book. For example, 'The Taking' suffers from the Neal Stephenson 'non-ending' ending problem.
IIRC, Velocity went back on it's own promises. "XYZ will not be!" screams the plot. Then it -is- xyz.
And of course the whole labrador retriever thing but sometimes the good writing over comes this cliche.
I have tried to read a few of his books but can't force myself to finish. Life is too short to force myself to read bad books. I have many friends that just love him but I really can't figure out the attraction.
He used to be able to be really funny in counterpoint to the horror of his subject matter. I don't know if he's gotten worse, or if I just realized how much fail he was committing and that tipped the scales.
(Also, his mouthpieces used to be the funny side character that the protagonist didn't really take seriously, though they might be right. Now, the mouthpiece is usually the protagonist or someone of equal importance, and it's a lot less easy to bear.)
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D: Damnit, kinky =/= evil. Thank you for saving me from reading any of his books.
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(And in the interests of continuing to avoid it, don't click on anything labeled BDSM on AFF.net. 90% of it is just violent rape. D: )
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THANK YOU. Stephen King tends to have the same problem. I think one of the reasons I liked Justin Cronin's 'The Passage' so much is because he has so much sympathy for every one of his characters (save for a few, like Richards and Jude) while never white-washing them.
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IIRC, Velocity went back on it's own promises. "XYZ will not be!" screams the plot. Then it -is- xyz.
And of course the whole labrador retriever thing but sometimes the good writing over comes this cliche.
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(Also, his mouthpieces used to be the funny side character that the protagonist didn't really take seriously, though they might be right. Now, the mouthpiece is usually the protagonist or someone of equal importance, and it's a lot less easy to bear.)
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