Dude, Koontz's 'Seize the Night' doesn't hang ten

COURTESY BATNAM BOOKS Surf's not up as Koontz's book crashes and burns.

It's disappointing to say, but upon completion of the Great Dean Koontz's new "thriller," Seize the Night, only three things have become clear to me. (1) Dean Koontz doesn't read The Yale Herald. (2) Dean Koontz couldn't care less about what I have to say. (3) Dean Koontz isn't what he used to be. So I labeled his last book, Fear Nothing, "flat," "cheesy," and "shockingly awful"--big deal. So I pleaded that he abandon the surfer lingo, the surprisingly ridiculous scenarios, and the dreadfully static characters--whoop-dee-doo. Did Koontz heed my cries? No. As a matter of fact, Seize the Night, a sequel to Fear Nothing, returns to the same anticlimactic, poorly-written surfer nonsense that destroyed his last tale.

So where did we leave off? Christopher Snow, with Sasha and Bobby, his hard-core buds, and Orson, his bitchin' lush of a dog, have just discovered that a modernized retrovirus has escaped from a private military installation in Moonlight Bay, Calif. This awesomely lethal strain, like, totally transforms ordinarily decent townsfolk into masochistic killing machines, destroying their human capacities and forcing them, as Snow describes the process, to "become." Snow, however, has since remained the same. Afflicted with a rare skin disorder, Xeroderma Pigmentosum, he is extremely sensitive to light and can only venture outdoors when it's dark, with every inch of his body covered by clothing and smothered in SPF-five billion lotion.

As if an earlier narrow escape from death by monkeys (seriously, monkeys) wasn't enough to deter them from their nightly Hardy Boys escapades, Snow and gang decide further exploration of the mysterious Fort Wyvern is needed to stop the apocalyptic pathogen. As karma would have it, Orson the Wonderdog and four local children are promptly abducted and hidden deep within the government fortress. Snow and his wily pals venture into the night, searching for clues, solving mysteries, and dodging those crazy killer monkeys.

Dude, this book totally sucks. And frankly, that scares me more than any craftily concocted Koontz novel ever did. Seize the Night is Dean Koontz PG, devoid of the infamous monsters, timeless heroes, and vivid literary passages that made nearly all of his past books worthy of national holidays and city-wide parades. In place of distinguishing gems like these, not to mention a little thing called "closure" (which, like Fear Nothing, this novel sorely lacks), Koontz substitutes exhausting characters, foolish language, waste-of-space paragraphs, and--I almost forgot--bloodthirsty monkeys.

Granted, the occasional "sharky" word or "bogus" phrase might not leave one "totally clamshelled," but the persistent use of "maximum real" passages leaves the average reader with a "full-on skull-splitter." Koontz's writing used to be different. His books used to be so exquisitely detailed that you wouldn't fully appreciate the excellence of his text until you finished the book. But now, old-school Koontz passages are celebrated as bit players with brief cameos, not as actors with starring roles. I don't delight in his prototypical sentences anymore; I thank God they're there.

If you stripped Seize the Night of all of its beach bum shenanigans and doddering Nancy Drew capers, you'd be left with a textbook Dean Koontz Mad Lib. [Title character] lives a normal life until he discovers that a crazed [bad monster thing] has destroyed the serenity of [fake California city], forcing him to [action verb] and end the terrible nightmare. He also has sex with [vulnerable heroine].

To be generous, Koontz's surfer-free prose is still exquisite, and his uncanny ability to make monsters seem real and monkeys seem scary is gloriously apparent. What makes Seize the Night so insufferable, though, is the lack of an interrelated plot or a thoughtful exposition. So many seemingly consequential events early in this novel are insignificant chapters later, and presumably suspenseful passages end with no later mention and no consequences. For example, thirty pages are devoted to Snow hiding in a closet, from which he later escapes unharmed. This incident is unsuspenseful, unrelated to the rest of the novel, and unfortunately simian-related.

Mr. Koontz, it's as if you've "become" something so terrible, something so inhuman, that you would actually consider returning to the panned individuals of Fear Nothing. "Gnarly" this, "maximum" that, yadda yadda yadda. Please, I'm begging you, write another Cold Fire, burn that silly toupee, and read The Yale Herald. Because, in your own "skull-splitting" words, "Dude, you've got more psychosomatic symptoms than Scrooge McDuck has money."

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