By any measure, he has succeeded spectacularly.

He has said that in reading stories he escaped and learned that other lives were different, and this motivated him to strive to make a good life for himself.

Koontz may well have had himself in mind when he wrote that through stories you can “learn to shape your own life into a story of the best kind.” He came from a very poor family, and his father was a violent alcoholic. For years it has been routine to see Dean Koontz novels on bestseller lists, often in the top spot. He is as popular as he is prolific-his books having sold more than 500 million copies in 38 languages. He has also published novellas and collections of short stories and been a poet and a screenwriter. He is a phenomenally prolific novelist-more than 100 novels so far, including ones he wrote under 10 different pen names early during his 52 years as a published author. You could live a thousand lives through stories-and learn to shape your own life into a story of the best kind.Ĭonsider yourself blessed if you are among the millions who have discovered how extraordinarily entertaining, enriching, insightful, and intelligent Dean Koontz’s stories are. Stories were the blessing of intelligence. To me this is a major flaw in editing.“Devoted,” Dean Koontz’s latest bestselling novel, has several characters none of us would ever think to be avid readers, yet he writes of one of them:īella could not live without stories. This caused me to come out of the story and go back and check to see if I was correct.

Later, when she is in bed she notices a stain that should not be there as the housekeeper had just washed the linens. One of the main scenes, and this is not a spoiler, is when the character Shacket is in Megan’s bedroom and he relishes in the smells from the unwashed sheets on her bed, making the point that had they been clean, he would have been disappointed. This book also falls into the trap of when an author is a best seller the editing is not always what it should be. Unfortunately, the story is completely predictable and upon reaching the end my only thought was, “Okay.” The characters are poorly developed and true to form the plot is thin, just thinner than most. Sadly, this one does not have the tension nor story that Watchers had. One of my favorite novels is Watchers, and this could be described as a sequel to it. This book fits that to a tee, except for the enjoyable to read part. What I enjoy most about his writing is his mastery of words that make thin plots enjoyable to read. In my bedroom is a bookcase with every Koontz novel and short story collection, three of which are signed by him.

Koontz devoted