Dean Koontz - Watchers

Title : Watchers (483 pages)

Author : Dean Koontz (1987)

Genre : Thriller (among others; see below)

Rating : A-

This Month I Read...
Watchers is considered by most to be one of Koontz's better efforts. A depressed man comes across a remarkable Golden Retriever while hiking in the southern California wilds. The dog promptly saves the man from a menacing something, they bond, and thus begins a suspenseful book-long chase involving a monster, a psychotic hired hitman, and some duty-bound and therefore not-on-our-side NSA feds.

Oh yeah, there is a love-story too, but we'll ignore that as best we can.

What's To Like...
It's fast-paced! No 50 pages of introductory yawning here. By the time page 30 rolls around; you've already been introduced to the man, the woman, her erstwhile tormentor, the dog, the monster, and the hitman.

The central character - the high-IQ dog - is a joy to follow. What if one of our canine companions was as intelligent as us? The dichotomy (wow, I always wanted an excuse to use that word) of a human-like mind in a dog's body is a fascinating study.

Finally, ther are no slow spots. You'll find yourself staying up late to read more of Watchers.

What's Not To Like...
The characters are fairly shallow. The good guys are completely good; the bad guys are completely bad. The romance is straightforward. The central cri-fi theme - DNA manipulation - has been done by others, and in a better-researched manner.

The ending is hurried and tepid. After 450 pages of a great build-up, the evilnesses are disposed of with remarkable ease. You won't guess the ending, but that's simply cuz you'll be expecting more.

Finally, Koontz leaves so many loose ends that you'll be tempted to roll 'em up into a ball of yarn. The hitman murders - unresolved. The sabotaging of a top-secret government research project - unresolved. The reason that the book is titled "Watchers" - unresolved. The consequences of genetic manipulation - unresolved.

Genres? We've got genres coming out of our ears...
This book must be a librarian's nightmare when trying to think of where to file it. We could call it a Thriller, yet the monster's character is sadly under-developed. Indeed, his only purpose for most of the book is to do a random grisly killing about every 70 pages or so.

Or maybe we'll file it under Romance, although the love story is obvious and trite. The girl has head problems; the guy magically cures her with his love; and she never has any relapses again.

How 'bout Cri-Fi? Except that Koontz never really tries to make the science seem plausible. Maybe Mystery - but as mentioned before, half the killings are never resolved.

Pehaps the best fit would be to call it a Boy-And-His-Dog story, and put it next to Lassie. But I don't think little Timmy ever had to deal with monsters that liked to gouge out eyeballs and decapitate its victims; nor hitmen that fantsized about bludgeoning pregnant women.

But I digress. Watchers is a great read; yet I doubt I'll pick up any more Koontz novels. In his 3-page "Afterword", Koontz states, "I believe that we carry within us a divinely inspired moral imperative to love, and I explore that imperative in all my books". In other words, if you've read one Koontz story, you've read them all. I intend to stop at just one.