I’d heard many years ago that Dean Koontz was a guy with a great sense of humor. Sadly, he now seems to think that suspense goes better with a laugh.
Or perhaps he’s trying to demonstrate what the main character says, that’s it’s good to laugh even when facing terrible times.
However, it’s difficult to read this without thinking that Dean is having a good laugh at his readers.
TICK TOCK was a supernatural suspense novel that used humor to good effect, but RELENTLESS is just too silly.
Cubby Greenwich is a writer (we’re never told what kind of novels he writes, except they’re not suspense) who has just received a bad review from an infamous critic.
However, until Greenwich is forced to, nobody has yet connected such bad reviews with the subsequent horrible deaths of those authors and their families.
Soon after the review, Cubby and his wife Penny are tasered in their bedroom by the reviewer. Cubby hears from an earlier author who got this treatment, whose wife and two daughters were killed by the reviewer.
He and Penny take their six year old son Milo and dog Lassie, and go.
If you’re willing to grant the author belief in homicidal book critics, to make the story work, I think that’s stretching the sense of wonder, but stranger things have happened.
However, Milo and Lassie are where this novel gets downright… Milos is a genius who can rig up life-saving machinery in the back seat of the car (and if I told you exactly how the machinery saves a life, you’d have a fit). Even Reid Richards of the Fantastic Four used his lab.
And that doesn’t explain how he knew to guide his parents to buy Lassie who is also far from a normal dog.
It’s okay with me that Penny is an artist famous for her purple rabbit with big ears. But her family!
Her mother and father make their living as professional explosives experts who blow things up. It must pay well, because they have established various secret sanctuaries to prepare for the end of the world.
Oh yes, Greenwich’s own background is hardly normal. As a six year old boy, he was the sole survivor of a family massacre, where his youngest uncle and friends killed everybody else. Why did they spare the boy? He doesn’t really know — okay, that’s understandable.
But this background make using violence to protect his wife and child Poignant and Significant and his reasoning that it’s okay to defend himself and his loved one a Moral Choice.
Oh, and to make things even sillier, the book critic is part of a secret government conspiracy that kills writers such as him as part of a dastardly plot to destroy civilization as we know it.
Despite the lack of credibility here, I believe Koontz is serious in believing our values are at risk — I even share his concerns.
However, I can’t imagine how Koontz ever thought this was a novel to take seriously.
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Relentless by Dean R Koontz
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