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.

Sphere - Michael Crichton

This is the first Michael Crichton book that I have read. And only the second sci-fi book for me. So as such I don’t really have a lot of frame of reference to give an opinion on the book. I mean, it’s only natural that if one has read a lot of books in one genre, then any new book will be called good or bad in comparison with the past experiences. So my review of this book is really absolute, rather than relative.

I am not quite sure if I enjoy the sci-fi kind of books. I actually thought that it would be quite obvious that I would enjoy such books, considering that I have quite a bent for anything related to technology and I do love fantasizing about futuristic technology myself. Plus, I also enjoy the sci-fi movies immensely, even if for the average Joe they are absolutely crappy. So, the odds were pretty stacked up in the book’s favour to start with. And Michael Crichton has quite a reputation for the sci-fi books.

But then, even though Sphere is extremely pacy, I found the plot a bit lame. The book is about the underwater adventures of a crew which has gone to explore a spaceship discovered in the depths of Pacific Ocean. And it is a gathering of people from diverse fields: a mathematician, a marine biologist, a psychologist… to name a few. And they are all there to solve the puzzle of the spaceship. How did it get there? What could be inside? Who did it belong to? How the hell to open it? And life gets weirder and dangerous as they start discovering the answers to these questions.

Now, let me clarify, I find the plot lame, not boring. By plot, I don’t really imply the whole story. I just mean that the defining thing, the repercussions of exploring the mysterious spaceship, around which the whole book is, is a bit stupid for me. I say lame, because I would have expected something entirely different than the scheme of things that roll out, given the underwater setting. But hey, I ain’t the author here. Still, the suspense in the book is actually quite good. And the climax is quite thrilling and fantastic, with logic totally preserved in the presence of highly unlikely science being thrown around. That for me is the most important thing for a sci-fi book (or movie). And the narration of Michael Crichton is actually quite impressive and doesn’t get overly carried away with the scientific descriptions of things. So a lot of things actually offset the lameness of the “plot” for me.
Last word… As pop-fiction “literature” the book is very readable. You will quite enjoy it. And don’t quite get nitpicky like me and you will enjoy it thoroughly.