A gift card for Christmas brought this book into my home. I had recently sworn not to buy Koontz books until they got a little better, but my excitement over this won out.
And yay, this one is so much better. Koontz managed to completely creep me out, make me question strange noises in my home and do double takes at shadows. The climax of the book occurred at work on my lunch hour and he made me come so close to taking an extended lunch just to finish. Kudos, Mr. Koontz!
John Calvino is a homicide detective and we land right has he is entering a state mental hospital to find out why a 14 year old boy just butchered his entire family. Right from the start, we get a feeling of "That was weird. Why did he do that?". We find out that John's family was also butchered by a madman 20 years prior. That madman, Alton Turner Blackwood, seems to be coming back from Hell to start his murder spree again. A Hell that Calvino sent him to.
I had some frustrations with the book, mostly with the overly creative language used. Koontz seems to be more into lengthy descriptions of late, instead of straightforward writing, but I let it pass because the plot moved along pretty quick. Thankfully, unlike some of the Odd Thomas books, we don't have pages describing one object. My other frustrations came with the characters but as I kept reading, I saw that those problems were actually part of the plot and it made more sense.
I'm pretty glad I bought this book, I'm almost a believer again.
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