Name: The House of Thunder
ISBN: 9780425132951

Dean Ray Koontz

Twelve years after the death of her lover in a college hazing, Susan Thornton, hospitalized after a serious accident, sees the four men responsible for his death

The House of Thunder

Michael Springer

Okay, so this started off so uber-badass! Really! 

Well, badass for a Dean Koontz book. It was mysterious, tense, somewhat surreal. . . .I mean, it would've made an excellent horror thriller film. A woman wakes up in a hospital with no memory of how she got there. . . slight things in her surroundings start to bring back the hints of memories. . . and soon, the whole hospital begins to seem dangerous, the people around her are dangerous, everything is dangerous. . . and then, in the last 50 or 60 pages, everything gets all fucked up and jumbled and becomes more of a lame Nicholas Cage movie than a suspenseful mystery. 

One gets the impression that all of a sudden Koontz realized he had one month left before the book was due and he just rushed through, basically writing an outline for how the end of the book would go. This was very frustrating because, up to that point, this was my favorite Dean Koontz book. Back in the day, I wasn't too picky if his books were fair-to-middlin'; like Stephen King, he's entertaining even when he's not trying very hard. But with this one, he really had a good rhythm going, and everything was spot on, until he ejaculated prematurely, and his readers were left going, "What? That was it?" After which he didn't even have the courtesy to blush, but just insisted he had another book he was late for across town. 

Shame on you, Dean. This might've been the book that broke the Michael's back, and made him decide there were better investments of his time than Koontz. If this wasn't the VERY last one I read, it was very close to it. And, unlike Stephen King, I've never been tempted to give him another chance.