What the Night Knows

So annoying. Most of the time I only read in bed. The problem is this book is scary so I can't sleep. Meaning i can only read this one during daytime. (I used to be able to read the scariest books and had no trouble sleeping. I am getting old)

Update. I stopped reading because of the above mentioned problem. Will pick it up when the time comes Vacation or something. Sepr 18 2012

Abysmal. One of the worst books ever. What started out as a very interesting premise - a dead serial killer possessing someone and making him kill his family - turned out to be a haphazard, beyond silly revenge story with nonsensical victims, idiotic killings and illogical - and bountiful - killers.

The protagonists are - of course - the perfect family. Husband is a cop. Wife is a prolific artist, beautiful, intelligent, tough. She home schools their three brilliant beautiful perfect precocious children. Their household help is perfect. Their dead dog is perfect. By the end I wanted them all dead.

Thankfully I borrowed this from the library, and did not pay for it. I just wish I had my time back, and this awful book scraped from my memory. ( )

Koontz has his mojo back!!
This book kept me hooked from page one all the way thru to the end just like his earlier books did.
I recommend this book to anyone who is a Koontz fan and loved his earlier writing. ( )

I loved this book. Couldn't put it down. It has EVERYTHING a reader could possibly want - family, true love between husband and wife, murder, mystery, and a little touch of supernatural mixed in. ( )

I seem to be reading quite a bit of Dean Koontz's novels lately. Fortunately, he tends to be an excellent writer, since there are so many of his books out there (more than 60). What the Night Knows is an effective thriller about a murderer who comes back from the dead to kill the one person he failed to kill in his first lifetime - which person had, 20 years earlier, killed the murderer.

John Calvino is a homicide detective. As a young teen, Calvino narrowly escaped being killed by the psychopath who murdered Calvino's parents, then molested and murdered his two sisters. Twenty years later, Detective Calvino hears of a gruesome murder of a family, and becomes convinced that the killer (a teen-aged member of the family) had been possessed by the spirit of the killer of Calvino's family. The race is on, as Calvino tries to stop the spirit from going on another rampage of murder, the last of which would be of Calvino and his family: wife Nicolette, 14-year-old Zachary, 11-year-old Naomi and 8-year-old Minette.

The story development is really taut and very nicely structured by Koontz, as I've come to expect from him. To my mind, Koontz is one of the very best horror/thriller writers producing today, and this book is in keeping with his usual nearly immaculate style. If anything detracts from the compelling nature of the story, it would be the way he develops the three Calvino children. They seem far too precocious to be as far too clueless as they seem to be - but this is only a minor quibble.

The ending to the story is, when you reflect on it, the most unlikely ending, but the only ending that could resolve the problem of a murderous spirit.

Koontz has rapidly become one of my favorite authors. I recommend his work without reservation. ( )