Musings from Brian J. Noggle: Book Report: <i>Mr. Murder</i> by Dean Koontz (1993)

Book Report: Mr. Murder by Dean Koontz (1993)

I inherited this book from my aunt, and with her legacy I'll read plenty of horror/suspense fiction in the next couple of years.

This book deals with a suspense writer whose family is stalked by his evil twin. I get it. It's Stephen King's The Dark Half, without the birds. I had a lot of time and extra thinking energy through the first 120 pages, which Koontz spent lavishly assuring us that the writer is a good family man and that the dark, er, copy is a bad man. I explained to Heather that I was turning the pages out of discipline and not desire. Face it, it's no Odd Thomas.

After the first quarter of the book, the action picked up and the story began. I'd have enjoyed it better if the first 120 pages had been 30 pages and if the dark half--an inadvertent clone, as it turns out--hadn't fallen to a caricature.

I note that one of the reviewers on Amazon couldn't stand the PC tone of some of the books asides. Odd, for the political asides were not what one typically considers PC--pro gun ownership, pro independence and self reliance. They were more libertarian than anything else, affirming the family as the basic unit of society, and so on. I believe a lot of the stuff, so I could make it through them even though they were semipreaching in nature. I could have also lived without the author taking the assumed name of John Gault at the end of the book.

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:43 AM