This one was sort of a mixed bag for me, there was a lot i liked about it, and a lot i didnt like about it. I loved the huge cast of characters, all of which i thought we fun and well developed. The parts where the action was good, it had me completley sucked in, however a lot of the book really felt bloated and dragged on. Plus the story itself was just kind of wierd and quirky. Overall a good book, you'll either love it or hate it most it likely. ( )

Background

A quintet known as The Coasters once recorded a song called 'Along Came Jones.' It was mildly successful.

‘Along Came Jones’ is comedic. The lyrics poke fun at silent, melodramatic, Western movie serials of the "if-you-don't-gimme-the-deed-to-yo-ranch" sort -- the kind that featured smirking villains in the mold of Snidely Whiplash and heroines named Nell. The plots were always the same: In order to extort from Nell the deed to her ranch, Snidely tied Nell to the railroad tracks in front of a train, or he tied her to a log and sent her down the conveyor into the sawmill, or he strapped her to a wagon-load of dynamite, or . . . something. It made no matter because regardless of what Snidely did, he never got his hands on the deed. He was always thwarted when the hero (The Coasters called him 'Jones') came along in the nick of time. Thus the gal was always saved and the bad man was always punished.

They haven't made films like that for a very long time, reason being that today's film audience is too jaded. These days, children above the age of four or five get bored with such stuff.

I have a nephew, 45 years old. He is an adamant Dean Koontz fan. A couple of people I used to work with were crazy for Dean Koontz novels. For a while there it seemed every time I turned around, somebody shoved a Dean Koontz novel in my face: "Here, man! You gotta read this!" Too bad I was always reading something else.

So it was years before I learned to appreciate Dean Koontz. My awakening finally came when I read ‘One Door Away from Heaven’ (New York: Bantam; 2001).

Procedure

I wasn’t more than six or eight chapters into the book when I picked up on the style of it. One chapter ends with the protagonist in a jam; the next chapter ends when that situation is resolved. Often the resolutions are violent. When the narrator's focus shifts to another character, the chapter/action sequence repeats.

It seems Dean Koontz fans find that narrative style and pace exciting. There are 73 chapters in ‘One Door Away.’ For me, then, the novel was 36 verses of ‘Along Came Jones,’ each with slightly different lyrics.

The chapters average eight pages each. After one or two hundred pages of those fast-paced, melodramatic ups and downs, I began to get seasick. When I realized there were four hundred pages left, I put down the book for a few minutes and drove to Walgreens, where I bought Dramamine. At the 7-11 across the street, I scored a pound of Jack cheese, a box of Ritz crackers, a gallon of Dago red and a six-pack of lemon-lime soda.

Home again, I made myself a pitcher of wine coolers. Then I diced the cheese into a large bowl of crackers, poured myself a long one and settled on the couch, determined to find out why people like Dean Koontz novels. At the end of it all the cheese and crackers were long gone. I quit building wine coolers after 350 pages, threw my glass away after 500 pages, and ended up (p. 606) suckin’ on the jug. That book was an awful ride.

Next day I studied and revised my notes. Day after that I read about half of the book for the second time, checking my notes again as I did so. At some time during that second night, I awoke to the conclusion that those who actually enjoy Dean Koontz novels are those who simply don’t know any better. If ‘One Door Away from Heaven’ is typical, then nobody able to pass a sixth-grade, reading-comprehension exam could suffer through more than one such book.

Faulty Morals

It seemed to me then that Koontz’s stuff is written without conscious thought for the amusement of people who don’t know how to think. In all the 606 pages of ‘One Door Away,’ I found two passages that I feel are key to what I'm driving at. The first occurs on pp. 246-47. Koontz there wrote:

"By the time Laura turned eight, she understood that her family wasn’t like others. A conscience had never been nurtured in her, not in the Farrel house, but nature had given her a strong moral sense. Shame came easily to her, and everything about her family mortified her more deeply year by year. . . . She wanted only to grow up, to get out, and to make a life that would be ‘clean, quiet, not a harm to anyone."

The second occurs on p. 249. There we learn of Wendy Quail that:

"She was a hollow creature into whose head had been poured evil philosophies that she couldn’t have brewed in the cauldron of her own intellect; and if in her formative years she had been exposed to a gentler and humbler school of thought, she might have been the committed healer that now she only pretended to be. She was plates and platters of plights and pickles; she was ice cream therapy; but although she was worthy of being loathed and even of being abhorred, she was too pathetic to merit hatred."

For centuries, argument has raged over what is known as the nature/nurture controversy. In starkest terms, the nature side argues that people are born with moral sense while nurture theorists hold that the mind of the newborn human infant is a blank slate that needs writing, an empty hole into which moral sense must be poured by parents, family, and members of the community. Now comes novelist Dean Koontz, who aims to settle the antique debate by arguing both sides of the issue. Koontz apparently believes (and wants readers to believe) that some folks (Laura) are born with moral sense while others (Wendy) must be taught.

Now I’m not here to argue that Koontz’s position is wrong or that it’s right. I just want to point out that nobody knows for sure how moral sense is installed in children just as nobody knows for sure which system of morals is the proper system to install. What is certain is that the position Koontz takes entails some weighty consequences.

Suppose, for example, that moral sense is a worthy asset. Many people would agree that is so. If it is so, then many people will consider he or she who is born with moral sense a ‘better’ person who is genetically superior to those born without moral sense.

Run down that line of reasoning, it turns into a slippery slope that ends – willy-nilly – in a mire of racism or sexism or some other lethal prejudice. One group feels entitled to lord it over the others, and how can anyone decide with certainty who belongs in which group?

In the real world, those who think themselves qualified to make such decisions are called ‘bigots.’ And that’s where thinking of the sort that Koontz wrote into this book will always lead those who think in that way.

Those who read ‘One Door Away,’ if they pay attention to what they’re reading, will see that Mr. Koontz is already fighting a bigot’s crusade. Throughout the awful, didactic screed that he and his fans are pleased to call a novel, Koontz rails against moral relativism, against Utilitarianism and Utilitarian bioethics, against euthanasia, against news media, against Hollywood film-makers, and hosts of other folk whose beliefs or behaviors demonstrate (in Koontz’s eyes, at least) some moral imperfection or laxity because of which they merit ‘loathing and abhorrence.’

Look back for a moment at Koontz’s treatment of Wendy Quail: ". . . if in her formative years she had been exposed to a gentler and humbler school of thought, she might have been the committed healer that now she only pretended to be." Koontz doesn’t even allow the possibility that if Wendy believes in what she is doing then she does not ‘pretend’ to be a committed healer because she truly believes herself to be one and probably does her best to act accordingly. The one way, Wendy is guilty of fraud and deserves to be punished. The other way, Wendy is merely mistaken and deserves to be corrected and given another chance. Koontz is all for punishment. I would he were a little less certain.

Faulty Language

Regarding Koontz’s use of language in the passage on Wendy Quail: I have never knowingly seen an object called a ‘plight’ Neither have I seen a plate of plights nor a platter of those items, whatever in the world ‘plights’ might actually be. Pickles I have seen and enjoyed, and pickles are good if they’re made from a good recipe. So far as I know, I’ve never met a person made of ice cream therapy and none of the ice cream in my freezer has been to therapy – though some of those new ‘Ben & Jerry’ flavors look as if they could take a slow walk through three months in detox without sweating the carton.

Mysterious, misapplied, comestible metaphors aside, my ‘New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary’ tells me that the preferred definition of ‘abhor’ is to "Regard with disgust and hatred" and that to 'loathe' a thing is, preferredly, to treat it in a "hateful, displeasing or offensive" manner. Things being so, I expect it would be difficult to ‘loathe’ and ‘abhor’ Wendy Quail without feeling some hatred for her – if she ‘merits’ hatred it or if she doesn’t.

This from p. 376:

"Cass moved in the highest levels of Hollywood society, where she had eventually calculated that of the entire pool of successful actors, directors, studio executives, and producers, 6.5 percent were sane and good, 4.5 percent were sane and evil, and 89 percent were insane and evil. In accumulating the experience to make this assessment, she had learned to recognize a series of eye expressions, facial ticks [sic], and body-language quirks . . . that unfailingly alerted her to the maddest of the mad and to the most monstrously wicked of the wicked. . . ."

Cass and her sister are the heroines of this book. They are voluptuously beautiful, deadly, and virtuous to a fault (In 606 pages, neither of ‘em gets laid). It seems, then, there are two lessons to draw from that particular tale: one being that in Koontz’s estimation, morbid paranoia is a desirable asset; the other being that we should ignore facial tics but beware facial ticks, which are known to carry Lyme disease.

Other boners, as bad or worse than we’ve seen here, are scattered throughout the book. Those who read above the level of children are struck by such things. Dean Koontz fans evidently don’t mind them at all.

Faulty Plot

The protagonist of ‘One Door Away’ is a little boy named Curtis. Curtis has a sentient, sapient dog with whom he enjoys non-verbal communication. Curtis and the dog are on the lam.

Indescribably horrid creatures from somewhere off-planet murdered the boy’s parents. Now they pursue the boy, seeking to kill him for reasons beyond his ken. Curtis and his ‘sister’ (the dog) evade the hunt by moving fast, on foot, through vast, empty sections of Utah, Idaho and other Western states. When they manage to hitch a ride they move faster still, but ‘the hunters’ always find them.

‘The hunters’ (many, many of them) move cross-country in gee-whiz combat vehicles which carry some sort of cloaking device that allows them to look like anything whatever. The one described on p. 363 ‘seems to be a fortress on wheels.’ It has ‘compact buttresses, ramparts, terrepleins, scarps, counterscarps, bastions made aerodynamic, condensed and adapted to rolling stock.’ The human eye perceives it as a Chevy Corvette.

The hunters track their quarry with some Star-Trek, high-tech gizmo that detects the ‘fingerprint’ of the boy’s energy emissions. It can see around corners. It can see through buildings. It can see in the dark. It can see for miles and miles and miles aaaaand miles (Thanks, Pete!).

With all of those hunters and all of that hifalutin’ hardware deployed to run down a kid and his dog, the plot of Koontz’s novel begs a few questions: “If the hunters got gizmos like that, how did the kid manage to get away from them to start with?" "Why can’t the hunters identify the boy’s hiding place (wherever that might be at any given time) and catch him while he’s asleep?" "And why (as on p. 363) do the hunters think the boy is in the motor home when in fact the boy is hiding 40 or 50 yards away from the motor home?”

The answer to all such questions is obvious, and it is just this: ‘One Door Away from Heaven’ is a stupid book that only stupid people could enjoy.

Coasting Home

In fairness, I note that if ‘One Door Away from Heaven’ is a stupid book (and it is), ‘Along Came Jones’ is an equally stupid song. Yet The Coasters’ song is good entertainment while the Dean Koontz novel is not. That is so because the song is a joke that wants to be laughed at while Koontz’s lousy novel is a joke that wants to be taken seriously. The one joke is cute and offers a good time on the dance floor; the other insults our intelligence and peddles pop-stand bigotry packaged as a higher moral code.

I understand Mr. Koontz has a lot of fans. He sells books by the millions, having written dozens and dozens of novels of which I have read only this one and have never written any. On the other hand, if I was a Dean Koontz fan and if ‘One Door Away from Heaven’ is in any way like other Koontz novels, I believe I’d sit down with myself and ask me some serious questions about what I put into my head. More plainly: If I was a Dean Koontz fan, I don’t believe I’d tell anyone.

No stars on this one, people. 'One Door Away from Heaven' isn't just a stinker: it's the whole latrine.

Since this is going to be a rather critical review, I should preface it by saying that I am a big Dean Koontz fan, I grew up reading Koontz, and I loved most of his books up until this one. This is where he got unbearably preachy (in a sort of quasi-New Age/born-again Christian kind of way). I suppose he'd been hinting at it in his stories and novels for years, but it wasn't until toward the end of the book immediately prior to this one, From the Corner of His Eye, that he became more boldly explicit about it---and since that book still sold millions of copies, I guess he felt he had a mandate to go into full-blown Jesus freak mode in this one. Well, here's one reader he lost. I finally got all the way through this one, but only because I already had it on audiobook and had nothing better to listen to at work one day. This book is still two steps above, say, the Left Behind series, but the fact that it can be put in the same category with it for comparison at all is not complimentary.

Similarly, Koontz has lost all sense of restraint in terms of style. After all, why say something in only one way, when you could treat the reader to three witty metaphors, or four...or five (usually three, though, I don't know if there's supposed to be some special religious significance to that)? And enough with the alliterative triplets! Koontz seems to think they're amusing, or poetic, or something, but a "gaggle of giggling girls?" Gag me. To be fair, Koontz can really turn a phrase, and he's generally a fine writer, but it really seems like he's trying too hard...or not trying hard enough to edit. I suppose with the super-blockbuster status he's achieved, Koontz's publisher allowed him to de facto fire his editor.

As for the specific content of the novel, it's part detective story about a drunken ex-cop private investigator who is good at what he does but cares too much, part drama about a deformed little girl living with her abusive mother and stepfather and the neighbors who try to help her, and part road-trip/buddy movie about a little boy and his dog and all the interesting characters they meet on their trek...all familiar, almost cliche elements, but Koontz puts his own touches on each and manages to bring them all together at the end plausibly, though not terribly satisfyingly (the ending is frankly, even leaving aside the stupid theological elements, dumb). The main characters are sympathetic and wonderfully heroic at times (although his spunky heroines are all pretty much the same, just at different ages), and some of the side characters the boy meets during the road trip movie part of the story are hilarious (a Gabby Hayes lookalike in particular is great). The villain, however, is simply a strawman who represents the ideas Koontz disagrees with for him to rail against.

Which brings us to the book's thematic problems, of which there are really too many to discuss here, but some of the major ones can't be overlooked. To be sure, Koontz is right to explicitly criticize (and even label as evil) Peter Singer, a real-life ethicist who is surely among the worst in modern academia (and that's saying something). And Koontz's broader criticisms of utilitarianism generally are often on-target. But he combines Singer with Jack Kevorkian to create his villain (whom he actually calls "Dr. Doom"), thereby attempting to brand anyone who disagrees in any respect with G. W. Bush's "culture of life" b.s. as a monster. And in case you haven't gotten the point yet, believe it or not there are more than one of these thinly-veiled Kevorkian characters (in entirely separate storylines, not just like there's a whole gang of them running around or something). Entirely absent are any considerations of whether a patient is terminally ill with no hope of anything that could really be called a human life in their future, of whether all their other options have been exhausted, and most importantly of whether *they* *choose* to end their own suffering; to assist them humanely and compassionately is literally no different from the most gruesome murder in Koontz's eyes---thus Koontz has his villain dispatch people whom *he* (the villain) views as unhappy indiscriminately, with or without their consent, sometimes with a painless injection, sometimes with an axe. In short, Koontz offers us God as the sole source and arbiter of ethics---an extremely dubious position, to say the least---or (an incredibly extreme version of) utilitarianism, as our only ultimate alternative. It should go without saying that this is a false alternative.

Turning to psychology, Koontz offers us more of the same sort of nonsense. One character is a self-destructive drug addict who likes to cut herself---and Koontz informs us that her problem is...wait for it...too MUCH self-esteem? Is he serious?! Unfortunately, he is. It's perfectly true that the "self-esteem" movement that is so prevalent in our educational system today turns out neurotic, narcissistic sociopaths with absolutely zero ability to relate to other human beings, but this has nothing to do with genuine self-esteem, based on actual achievement. Rather, what Koontz has clumsily taken their word to be real esteem for the self is mere pseudo-"self-esteem", based not on an individual's actual choices or character but simply on having been born, as they are told that "everybody's special" regardless of what they actually make of their lives and selves.

Koontz fares no better when he ventures into metaphysics than he did in ethics. The worst bit is at the end, when the hero asks the villain, who believes that life on earth was designed by super-intelligent aliens, "Well then who created the aliens?" Koontz seems to think that this question obliterates the villain's position, and that the obvious answer is, "God." But he seems to have failed to notice that the same question can be applied to God with equal validity. After all, if life is allegedly so complex as to require an intelligent designer in order to explain it, any designer able to fill that role would have to be even more complex, and thus in even greater need of such an explanation in turn. The only real answer the intelligent design people have to this is that the chain has to stop somewhere in order to avoid an infinite regress, so it should stop with God, who is eternal. But why have God at all, when one could just as easily posit that the universe itself is eternal (and extend this to any "irreducible complexities" within it, though I don't think there really are any in the sense the intelligent design crowd means it)?

The problem with Koontz's attempts to incorporate philosophy into his novels is that he's not a very good philosopher, and this kind of sloppy thinking only hurts his books. He writes (or used to write) good thrillers, and he writes with great humor, and he should stick to that...and get a better editor. ( )

UFOs, aliens, an empathetic dog, a crippled girl, and a host of supporting characters overcoming past traumas to reach out to others all are combined by Dean Koontz in a book that is the most compelling statement I have ever seen made about the right to life, no matter what one's condition. As always with his novels, few things are what they seem.Two basic plots run parallel before their heroes find themselves coming together to fight off a very evil villain. "What is one door away from heaven," is a question that one character has asked another since her childhood. The answer, along with the overall theme of the book, is enough to make us all examine our lives more carefully ... and be thankful that Koontz's writing reflects his beliefs so honestly ( )

Dean Koontz? Really! I generally like Dean Koontz, but he really stepped up his game for this book. The chapter about the snake is just brilliant. If you are going to read a Dean Koontz book, this should be the one. ( )