alternative title: sympathy for the devil (what would YOUR choice have been? text your answer to 11222)

i would like to spend this blog post summarizing one of the worst conclusions to a novel i have ever read. a while back, i bought a book from the local pharmacy on a whim. it was a book placed on the side of the magazine section, on the #3 spot on the rack for the “top ten books” (by whose standards, i do not know). it was dean koontz’s latest book, entitled “relentless”.

now, i wrote this book off almost instantly. the writing style was amateurish. the characters were too witty to be believable. the whole thing, i think, starts off as a metaphor for the author’s own qualms, in that his last few books were badly reviewed – so he makes the main character in this book an author in the same situation, and writes off the reviewers who gave him negative press as “hacks”. the two main characters have a 7 year old son who is a genius, a serious genius – like, he welds together scientific marvels in his bedroom.

so i didn’t like it. the first four chapters bored me. then, the book takes an odd but thoroughly entertaining move as the author confronts a negative reviewer, who proceeds to hunt down the family and tries to kill them.

what follows is 400 pages of very exciting stuff. a serious “page turner”. this family has to avoid this deranged guy who is tracking them down almost impossibly.

now, this seemed to be a serious thriller. it’s all very realistic and intense. it is, through and through, a thriller. in the main character’s backstory, it is revealed that when he was a child, a bunch of his uncles hopped up on methamphetamines came into his farmhouse and killed his entire family. intense stuff!

and then we get to page 401 out of 432.

i mentioned the kid was a genius. i didn’t mention that throughout the novel he is working on some kind of invention. there is not much build-up as to what it is, but it is consistently mentioned. whenever the main character asks his son what he is working on, the son answers “you wouldn’t understand it”. when it is revealed what the invention does, i nearly lost it. i got to page 401 and the reveal of the invention came about.

a teleportation device.

…

here is me shortly after reading that page.

i was reading in a coffee shop at the time and stared at the page in disbelief. i was seriously into this book. it was cruising to an exciting finale. and it went crazy baseless science fiction without hardly any prelude? i sat staring at the page for probably five minutes.

it didn’t end there.

about halfway through the book, a chapter ends with a phrase like “we would not be so at ease had we known one of us would be shot dead and our lives would never be the same”. WOW! one of the three main characters is gonna be shot dead by the end of the book! i wonder which one it’s going to be!

in the last chapter, after a crazy nonsensical conspiracy theory is unfurled unsatisfactorily, a random villain shoots the author dead. that’s pretty shocking. i was about to forgive the crazy teleportation section that went down a few chapters earlier because dean koontz took the risk to kill off the main character.

BUT THEN

the author is resurrected!

…

…

turns out, another of their genius seven year old’s inventions was a salt shaker that, when activated, sends the holder back through time about fifteen seconds. it’s about explained as well in the novel as i did in that last sentence.

now, i dont mind a little crazy sci-fi. i mean, my favorite show of all time is “lost”. but don’t throw it on me out of nowhere, koontzer! seriously the fastest turnaround i have ever experienced in a piece of media from “this is awesome” to “wtf”.

jkd