Koontz's 'Fear Nothing' is shockingly awful

By Aaron Zamost

Should Koontz pen another story as shockingly awful as his most recent tale, I'll certainly be fearful for a long time. In his latest thriller, Koontz unveils Christopher Snow, a man haunted not by silent voices, small devils, or even disturbing memories, but by the bizarre genetic disorder xeroderma pigmentosum (XP). Victims of XP are extremely sensitive to cancers of the skin and eyes, and even momentary exposure to light can prove fatal, so Chris continually avoids the light of day. Yet events he witnesses on the eve of his father's death force him to look behind the façade of Moonlight Bay in a desperate attempt to discover the truth beneath the city's darkness. With the stage set, it appears as if we've buckled our seatbelts for yet another spin on Mr. Koontz's Wild Ride. But the roller coaster is rickety at best, with too much uphill preparation, a lousy climax, and an especially cheesy drop.

The novel begins at a fast pace. After Chris stumbles upon a group of men intent on switching his father's corpse with that of a murdered hitchhiker, he sets out on a mission to discover the conspiracy in his hometown. Chris attempts to untangle this mystery with the aid of his surfer friend, Bobby, his disc jockey girlfriend, Sasha, and his Heineken-drinking--but nevertheless brilliant--canine confidante, Orson. Along the way, the group becomes involved in a shadowy government cover-up, an animal psychic friends network, and a deadly game of hide-and-seek. It's a typical Koontz synopsis, as far as the novel's trend towards dynamic paranoia goes. The suspense, however, is strangely absent. Any tension felt by readers is grounded in the agitated longing for Koontz to answer some of the most basic questions about the novel. Who are these characters? What the heck is going on? Is that Koontz's real hair in the photo on the jacket? Halfway through the tale, the reader still has no answer to most of these questions.

As the story continues, Chris spends the rest of the night unraveling the increasingly bizarre secret. It quickly becomes clear, however, that nothing here is as it appears. Seemingly upstanding citizens become engulfed by primal desires, mysterious creatures ravage the city by night, and the arcane syndicate behind this reasonably concentrated conspiracy suddenly fears that its effects have grown worldwide.

Despite Koontz's progression towards a presumably wild climax, the scenario is remarkably flat. Koontz spends too much of the book's conclusion attempting to impart his own personal philosophy on the reader, and not enough intensifying--let alone explaining--this crucial period in the novel. It's almost as if Koontz believes his popularity has made his opinion so important that he can waste 391 pages telling the reader his view on life. "We are an arrogant species," he writes. "How we perished by our own hand may be more important than how we came into existence in the first place." If I had wanted to spend $26.95 on arrogant philosophy, I'd have purchased a book by Nietzsche. I can only pray for the Canadians who must shovel over $35.95.

If you're searching for a typical book by the prolific "Master of Suspense," this is not it. Koontz effortlessly drags us through his torpid tale with the cockiness of his beach bum characters. His typically suspenseful writing takes a field trip and is replaced with a distressed, overwrought narrative, riddled with unnecessary tenets and annoying surfer lingo. "Fully pumping mackers" and "live twelve-footers" have replaced Koontz's usually thrilling accounts of human anxiety and fear. Yet what is most notable about Koontz's writing in Fear Nothing is that he uses a first-person narrative, which makes his exaggerated, elaborate descriptions even more unnecessary and bothersome. His penchant for surfer-dude enthusiasm exhausts most of the book's suspense, and even for brand-new Koontz readers, the "surf-kissed charm" of Moonlight Bay might prove irritating and unconvincing. Hopefully, the next time I rush to the bookstore, Koontz's mid-life crisis will have ended and he will once again present what I always fear in his books--terrifying plots, not terrifying style.

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