The original version of Phantoms was written in 1983. I’ve read plenty of Koontz’ books, but the real fan when I was growing up was my sister, who read a ton of them. I’ve been challenged to write horror elements into a book and I’ve been doing research, including reading horror-esque books, in preparation.

Lots of people say Phantoms is the scariest book that Koontz ever wrote. He says he writes suspense, not horror, but this came highly recommended.

Sorry, I didn’t really like it. Here’s why.

 

I’ve got another post that I’ve been kicking around about the challenge so I don’t want to go into it too much here, but this is something that a lot of people online have recommended as a “scary book”. Sorry, it isn’t scary. Not remotely. In fact, I don’t even know that it’s well written. That might be a little harsh, but let me go into the story.

When physician Jenny brings her much younger sister, Lisa, home to a small ski resort town that she lives in, no one is there. The town is deserted. Then, they start to find bodies. Immediately, Jenny calls the police from the next town over and the nightmare begins. People are getting killed in bizarre ways that no one can explain and they are afraid to leave the town, lest they infect the larger world with whatever terrible disease must be responsible. A special team of chemical weapons experts comes in and finally, a former scientist turned conspiracy-kook arrives because he’s worked out what’s really going on. Can any of them make it out alive or is this just the beginning of the end for the world?

That sounds like at least an interesting premise. The characters, at least the main ones, are decently written, although everything is really poorly telegraphed throughout. We know, for instance, that Jenny and her sister are going to survive. They are the obvious final girls. When Jenny falls for one of the deputies, he becomes another obvious survivor. There was no real fear for those three surviving. The rest of the characters were very thinly written because they existed only to get killed.

There was a child-killer that popped up every couple of chapters, but he was completely unnecessary, as was the motorcycle gang that hung around the town, just to be evil. All of that could have been excluded and nothing would have been missed. They never posed any real danger to the main characters and their story just got thrown in at the end as they were quickly dispatched.

Worse, the “evil force” was poorly done throughout. We don’t get any real indication if it’s supposed to be some supernatural evil or alien force or whatever and the answer in the end was ridiculously unsatisfying. Some of the things that the book tried to blame on this “evil”, we already know that’s not what happened. Granted, I can give the book a pass because it was written 50 years ago before we knew about the Roanoke colony or the fate of the dinosaurs, but in retrospect, it looks kind of silly. That is not how any of this works.

The whole justification for the “evil” was hokey at best. Clearly, this thing couldn’t have evolved on this planet, yet there was no indication that it came from anywhere else. There wasn’t even an attempt to provide an explanation for something so completely alien. It wasn’t even scary because the three main characters had plot armor that couldn’t be penetrated.

I am trying to give it the benefit of the doubt, being as old as it is, but this just wasn’t entertaining to me. Granted, nothing scares me so as a horror novel, nothing is going to receive high marks, but just from a story standpoint, most of it was people standing around and talking and nothing really going on. It’s not slow burn, it’s dead stop. Plus, they brought way too many people into it to even be potentially scary. When the governor is ready to send in the troops and the news has leaned and there are media crews all over, what do we think is going to happen?

The disposable characters are largely dumb and doing exactly the thing necessary for them to get killed while the survivors are all very smart and coming to conclusions that they have no reason whatsoever to even suspect are true, because that’s what the story requires. Solutions just come out of thin air and things that don’t get solved immediately, like the expert’s identity, make no sense why they couldn’t find out. If this was written in the age of the Internet, it would have been a 5-second Google search.

So sorry, just not impressed with this one. I have liked other books by Koontz, but this just didn’t do anything for me. I’ll probably take a look at one of his sci-fi books next and then maybe jump to something more modern, just to see if anything has changed.

I’m not reviewing every book that I read, but I’ll do a smattering of them, when I find something I want to talk about. So back to the pile! Keep on reading!