Strangers - Dean Koontz

Horror reading, while I enjoy it tremendously has mostly been limited to Stephen King. There have been few other one off novels like Shadowland, Walkers, etc. not written by King that I have read, but there is no author that I have really read on a consistent basis. And Dean Koontz is, well, popular in the genre, and I thought why not.
So I picked up Strangers.
Firstly, at 700 pages, Strangers is a big book. It is classified in sections on the basis of dates at which events occur in the lives of the central characters. And while you do not pay any attention to the dates whatsoever, you do understand what the author was trying to achieve. So there is Dominick Corvaisis – a writer who has sleep walking incidents which escalate to frightening nightmares, Ginger Weiss – a surgeon with a lot of promise whose career is threatened by blackouts and violent fugues, Father Brendan Cronin – who suffers a loss of faith and starts exhibiting mystical curing powers, Jack Twist – a ex-military ops, wronged by his country and ends up being a highly sophisticated thief, Ernie Block, who runs a Tranquility motel with his wife and suddenly develops a phobia for the dark and some other seemingly inconsequential people, as far as their import in the world is concerned, whose life is unraveling with similar disturbing symptoms.
The build-up of this part of the book is great. The way Koontz breaks on to the reader the causes for the above disturbances, and how the characters, at least some of them discover, which all seem psychological in their origin, is exceptionally well handled.
So then these ‘Strangers’ gang up and try to determine the cause, and correct it, not realizing the scale of the foes that they are up against… which is where the book starts its downward slide.
Climax of the any book, more so horror books, is vital. A bad climax will leave an extremely bad after taste in your mouth after you have turned that last page. And if the climax is as long drawn, and eventually as bad as it is in Strangers, the feeling of regret of reading 700 pages is overwhelming and takes away most of the good aspects of the book that you thought were there. There are some well thought out characters, but filling up volumes of pages so you can build them and losing the plot in the purpose does not serve any purpose.
And plus the book is not scary at all, primarily because it is not really a horror book. So the choice went wrong all the way.