Norm de Plume's Reviews > Intensity

** spoiler alert ** I hate Dean Koontz, but I go through books quickly and have to have something to read at work, and when it comes down to it, I'll read anything you put in front of me even if it's bad just for something to do. Allegedly, this was one of his better books. The best book I've read of his, I would give two stars. Don't even remember what it was called. It pains me that this man is the second best selling author in the US. Seriously.

Why? Well, where to begin? Let's start with characters. Dean Koontz doesn't create characters, but caricatures. The main character's stories of childhood trauma aren't remotely believable. If her mother didn't give a shit about her and was constantly moving around, why would she even bother to bring her for 16 years? Everything is so extreme in her character that there's never any remotely realistic motivation for any of it. Meanwhile, the villain is concerned only with intensity, mostly written in italics, because italics are apparently intense. His philosophy is that any intense experience is worthwhile. Basically, he should be on the X-Games doing flips on motorcycles and appearing in Mountain Dew commercials. The way Koontz beats the shit out of the intensity motif, I could barely manage to focus my eyes well enough to keep reading because they were rolling so hard.

How about his craft? Clunky, uninspired, repetitious prose with awful dialogue. I don't remotely understand why people buy this guy's books. There is nothing compelling about his craft. For a guy they call "The Master of Suspense", he lacks all sense of subtlety. He constantly holds the reader's hand unnecessarily as if afraid they won't get it any time he uses some kind of symbolism. Not that it's common with Koontz. He's always saying more than is necessary and it gets a little insulting over time, as if he thinks his readers are so stupid they can't possibly pick up on the things he's writing without help.

So, his plots must be super-awesome to make up for it all, right? Let's face it; with most pulp, people don't give a shit how it's written. They only care about the story. This story is about some chick who goes to a friend's for the weekend, only to have the entire friend's family killed and end up the sole survivor riding along with the killer, trying to come up with a way to take him down and save some girl she's never met that the killer has locked in his basement. The upside of this story is most of it leaves the heroine alone, so you're not subjected to the cringe-worthy dialogue that the book opens with. It also means that Dean Koontz has to find some way to create his particular breed of melodrama through sometimes very slow events, so he prattles on for pages about a cramp in the heroine's ass, or we're subjected to her internal dialogue as she freaks out about how she will surely sustain a grievous spinal injury by slamming the chair she's chained to into the stone fireplace wall by backing into it. Every time she takes a whack at it, "OHHHHHHH GOD THE PAIN IT HURTS SOOOOOOO BAAAAAAAD!" Gimme a fucking break. It's make of PINE. Fuck you, Dean, it's not dramatic that you lack a basic grasp of physics. Half of this book is her considering a fairly simple action and then contemplating the multitude of ways it could go horribly wrong and leave her critically injured. There's no real drama and nothing to care about, so Dean Koontz tries to manufacture some by telling you how you should feel about what she's doing.

I can't even begin to convey how inane this book truly is. Hopefully I've given you some idea.