"The Darkest Evening of the Year"

[shaddragon]

"Man's best friend just made an enemy. And one woman will stop at nothing to save the dog she loves. Even if it means paying for her courage with her life."

Oh, good grief.

Enough with the dogs! He's used the same Einstein - with different names and breeds - since Watchers. It was good then. It's now a tired, tired character. And his plots have

Comments

[pamills]

In 2007, his dog Trixie contracted terminal cancer and developed a tumor in her heart. The Koontzes had her put to sleep outside of their family home on June 30. Trixie was an ex service dog and he is very involved in raising money for a service dog organization.
I think his books are sweet, if a bit boring. When did it become fashionable to always be cynical and jaded about everything?

[shaddragon]

The boring is what I'm objecting to, and the repetition. My problem isn't with the dogs, per se (I loved Einstein!), it's that he's been recycling the same characters for years and volumes now.

To me, that's a writer gone either lazy or lost his imagination. I liked when his books weren't boring. :)

[genkitty]

*giggle*

I only have a few Koontz books. I always described him as a mellow King. Watchers is one of my favorite books. I'd never gotten around to getting more of his stuff, and now I know to vet future purchases carefully.

[shaddragon]

I truly love his earlier stuff. Watchers is almost top, but Strangers wins. The Bad Place, Lightning, Cold Fire, Twilight Eyes... others. But in the last five-seven years, he's written almost nothing that I could stand - the exceptions are the pair about Christopher Snow (whose name makes me twitch for sheer blatancy of it-- hi, albino whose surname happens to be Snow), Fear Nothing and Seize the Night.

Incidentally, he's not always a "mellow" King. The Bad Place is particularly brutal, but he's got others that are as violent or more so. Dragon Tears is another vicious one, if I remember it rightly - it's been a while. I read that at an age where when my mother got to reading it, she took it away.

What I object to is that in the boring recent stuff, I try to read them and I can tick off each character. Clone of Einstein. Clone of the guy from Watchers. Clone of the guy from The Bad Place. Etc. Similar motivations, similar backgrounds, similar reactions, renamed and plunked into only slightly different situations

[genkitty]

Aye. I have Bad Place, Door to December, and Watchers. Bad Place is bloody, but imagine how King would have done it! :) King /deliberately/ turns the grossout dial to 11, Koontz is just bloody. Hell, Watchers is bloody too.

I'll keep an eye out for the titles you mentioned, and thank you for the list :)

[shaddragon]

Hm. We must have different things come to mind for the two. King has some grossout books, yeah, but the ones of his I love tend not to be - the Dark Tower books, Lisey's Story, The Talisman, Bag of Bones, Insomnia.... Most of those are intense and dark but compared to some of the imagery in The Bad Place, they strike me as almost tame. Psychologically nastier, lower on the gruesome dial.

But it may be that I compare both of them to Clive Barker, and neither can outdo him for gruesome.