Elsewhere

Dean Koontz can be counted upon to set us up with a good story that revolves around the age old conflict of good vs evil. He hasn’t let us down with his newest offering Elsewhere. We have a mother who went missing seven years ago. She just up and left. There’s a dad, Jeffy Coltrane and his daughter Amity. They live a simple existence in a small town. The dad repairs vintage Bakelite radios and resells them at auctions for huge profits. Everything’s simple – until – One of the homeless men living in the woods nearby gives Jeffy a package to hold for him with the warning to not to open, don’t look inside. “Better you don’t know. It’s the incessant need to know more and more and yet still more, to know everything this is the fast track to destruction.” Inside this box, he said was the “Key To Everything”, even valuing it at seventy-six billion dollars. Yes, Billion-with-a-B. Furthermore, claiming the fate of humanity now lay in Jeffy’s hands. And he left. This is NOT A SPOILER. It’s the start of the book. Of course we all guess that Jeffy opens the box. It’s in an attempt to hide the contents, the key to everything, from the black op helicopters and SUV’s that show up the next day. An agent claiming to be from the NSA searches the house and asks if they know Dr. Edwin Harkenback. Yep, they’re looking for Spooky Ed. The story is unraveling just as predicted. Well, at this point you get the gist of where the tale is starting. And Dean usually finds a place for an iconic loving dog but he seems to be missing here. But there’s Snowball. Is he a red herring or a white mouse? We have a good man, a good daughter, a good mouse, a missing mother, a dastardly black ops operative and Spooky Ed of unknown background. Let the adventure begin.

I used to be a big fan of Mr. Koontz books until, suddenly, I stopped. Not sure if it was books or me that changed. But I still check his new books from time to time seeking the old feeling of being completely engrossed in the story. This book comes close. The idea of parallel worlds was used many times in other books so the whole point is not the idea itself but how the author spins the tale. And Mr. Koontz spins it very well. The plot has just a right mixture of thrilling adventure and personal stories to keep reader engaged. All characters are either entirely good or entirely bad which, in my opinion, is very OK in this kind of book. There are also no attempts to explain the science behind the phenomenon which is also OK. The main protagonists are; a very precocious 11 years old girl (who wanted to have puppy but decided to get mouse first to practice) and her father. Together they will go for big and dangerous journey in alternative realities and, who knows, maybe they will even find a missing mother. Big parts of the story are told from the point of the view of 11 years old but 11 years old kids probably should not read this book. There is relatively little of gruesome gore and foul language but it is still a thriller/horror story meant for audience a little older than 11. Bottom line: five stars in light fantasy thrillers category PS. My one technical complaint is that this book cannot be read in landscape position. This may be a side effect of the ”kindle in motion” feature but, even after switching motion off, landscape orientation does not work.

I love Dean Koontz and was excited to read Elsewhere. I found myself skipping paragraphs and gave up after reading a third of this book. If you are a Koontz fan give it a try maybe this one just wasn’t meant for me.

I expected a lot more from Dean on this book. I actually had to look at the copyright because I thought this might have been one of his first books rather than one of his latest endeavors – it was that amateurish. The plot was unoriginal, the characters hackneyed and poorly developed. It was so formulaic that I could predict almost to the chapter when he would rescue a character by introducing a Deus ex Machina, or when the villain would (not unsurprisingly) survive a supposedly fatal event. The prose was tortured and cumbersome. There were no surprises. There were no unexpected plot twists. The ending was a foregone conclusion less than halfway into the book. I was hoping for something in the vein of Odd Thomas but instead ended up feeling oddly left out and unfulfilled.

I absolutely loved this book!! I read it in one day because I could not stop reading it. Dean Koontz is my favorite author, and I am never disappointed by any of his work.

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