I have a love-hate relationship with Dean Koontz. He's a great storyteller but a lousy writer. He comes up with brilliantly imaginative ideas that he executes so badly he's often frustrating to read, because I see all the wasted potential in that idea.
- His main characters are always a lonely, tough-yet-sensitive hero cop and an impossibly beautiful, impossibly rich female damsel-in-distress. Often including an annoyingly brilliant, precocious child and a golden retriever dog. Would it kill writers to come up with an inept, bumbling child character who isn't somehow psychic?
- His dialogue is as excruciating as anything from the Star Wars prequels. I think it's because he has the John-Grisham-syndrome of having no sense of humor at all. His books don't have that funny-in-a-sick-way sense of mischief you get from a Thomas Harris or Stephen King or Clive Barker.
- Even though I often agree with him politically, his preachiness is really hard to take because it distracts from the story, has nothing to do with the story, and is done is a bitchy, snobby, pissy way. Please keep politics out of my fictional entertainment, even if I agree with it.
- His overflowery purple prose is really tiresome, especially in his most overrated, stupidest, idiotically plotted book, Intensity, in which he spent multiple paragraphs describing the feeling of biting into a chocolate bar. This plot expects me to believe that a killer with such extreme heightened senses wouldn't notice a stowaway in his RV on a 500 mile drive. And expects me to believe that in his various stops, she would rather play cat-and-mouse games with him instead of wasting a million opportunities in which she could have called the police. All because she overheard him mentioning having a prisoner in his remote cabin. Riiiiiight. I've never read a more ridiculously-plotted story in my life!
- His main characters are always a lonely, tough-yet-sensitive hero cop and an impossibly beautiful, impossibly rich female damsel-in-distress. Often including an annoyingly brilliant, precocious child and a golden retriever dog. Would it kill writers to come up with an inept, bumbling child character who isn't somehow psychic?
- His dialogue is as excruciating as anything from the Star Wars prequels. I think it's because he has the John-Grisham-syndrome of having no sense of humor at all. His books don't have that funny-in-a-sick-way sense of mischief you get from a Thomas Harris or Stephen King or Clive Barker.
- Even though I often agree with him politically, his preachiness is really hard to take because it distracts from the story, has nothing to do with the story, and is done is a bitchy, snobby, pissy way. Please keep politics out of my fictional entertainment, even if I agree with it.
- His overflowery purple prose is really tiresome, especially in his most overrated, stupidest, idiotically plotted book, Intensity, in which he spent multiple paragraphs describing the feeling of biting into a chocolate bar. This plot expects me to believe that a killer with such extreme heightened senses wouldn't notice a stowaway in his RV on a 500 mile drive. And expects me to believe that in his various stops, she would rather play cat-and-mouse games with him instead of wasting a million opportunities in which she could have called the police. All because she overheard him mentioning having a prisoner in his remote cabin. Riiiiiight. I've never read a more ridiculously-plotted story in my life!
