The Face

After a season or so away from Dean Koontz, [The Face] reminded me why I love him so. Not every book he publishes is memorable. Some of them seem churned out in an effort to leave his own peculiar mark on the printed world through sheer volume. They sometimes cry for more attention to narrative and language. They sometimes seem knocked out of a mold chipped and worn from overuse. But, frequently, Koontz shakes off professional writing mold and steps into the dark regions of the unconscious to create a thrilling and engaging story, frightening for its familiarity with deeply held, untold fears. [The Face] is such a Koontz gem.

Ethan Truman surrendered to a life of numbing mediocrity after losing his young wife to cancer. Once a Los show more Angeles homicide detective, he now works as a security chief for a Hollywood superstar. The solitary and settled life rarely challenges him. But, when a dedicated stalker begins delivering enigmatic and disturbing messages to his employer, Truman’s long-silenced instincts and emotions are fully aroused. Puzzling out the meaning of these unusual deliveries soon brings the broken man to see things that make him doubt his own sanity.

Horrific demons, malevolent aliens, and twisted psychopaths made Koontz famous. But his ability to blanket every detail with vibrant and rich prose is all too often overlooked. And, in the midst of terrifying and ugly creations, Koontz always strikes at the heart of truly human feelings and fears. With a graceful style and lush characters, [The Face] succeeds in all of the ways that true Koontz fans are used to.

Bottom Line: An elegantly told good vs. evil thriller, complete with demons and ghosts, that connects us to familiar human fears and problems.

5 bones!!!!! show less

Koontz can be flowery, overly verbose, even turgid at times. But man, can he plot! What starts as a run-of-the-mill mystery/suspense story very quickly smacks the reader right between the eyes and keeps getting better and better. I loved the characters, especially Fric, and thought the ending of the story was magnificent. If Koontz had toned down the prose a bit this would have been top-notch. As it is, it's still worth the time spent - which won't be much since it's hard to put down!

Detta är första gången jag läser något av Dean Koontz har skrivit, men boken är jätte bra, handlingen är spännande och helt oförusägelebar. Karaktären Corky var onskan själv, men även alla andra karaktärerna i boken var mycket levande, jätte bra peronskildring och språk.

A re-read for me, and a well-plotted exceptional book for someone prepared to suspend disbelief and accept a storyline heavy on supernatural elements in a thriller involving a kidnap plot. Some of the descriptive passages could be called overwritten, and I can’t help feeling a little trimming would help the book. I liked the use of a child in this story, those chapters being some of the best. The parts which revolved around the antagonist(s) were a little heavy-going, but the various threads certainly keep the reader guessing with so many creating an intricate story overall. It’s hard to say more without giving the plot away.

This freaking book was over 600 pages! I don't even remember a lot of it since I started to skim. I have this in paperback and started to read it and started to skim in self defense. Not a lot of it makes any sense and then we get to what I think Koontz thinks is a killer ending and I maybe booed aloud for a full minute.

"The Face" is about Channing Manheim who is known as "The Face." Manheim is a movie star with a lot of fans. His security chief, Ethan Truman, is an ex detective who is now hoping to hunt down who is after Manheim's 10 year old son Aelfric (otherwise known as Fric) (I misread that name as Eric like ten times when I first started this book) who is getting mysterious phone calls.

I cannot with the bad guy in this one. show more Nothing he did made sense and I just didn't care. I swear that Koontz has some lackluster villains for most of his newest books. This guy is no It, Outsider, Randall Flag, Crimson King, etc.

Ethan is not interesting enough to hold this book together. He has a sad story (like most of Koontz's heroes in his books, he is a widower) but I just didn't care. He is trying to figure out the clues that are left behind in 6 black boxes (nope, still serious) and you barely get any movement on things. Just a lot of overly descriptive things you will not care about that make you want to scream.

We hear about Ethan's dead wife Hannah a lot and apparently she was perfect (as the dead wife's or alive heroines are in Koontz's books). She also weirdly started to remind me of Odd Thomas's girlfriend Stormy. Probably because there is an allusion to other things to come after death that sounds like her.

The writing for this one was tough to shift through. Too many off the wall things happen in this one (i.e. a mob guy named Dunny with ties to Ethan dies and becomes a guardian angel....no I am not drunk that did happen). This book needed trimmed. The flow was awful too. I still say that Koontz cannot write a child to save his life. Fric was not great and I hated his name too (I already said that, but going to bring it up again.)

The ending was dancing towards absurdity. I guessed what was going on with Dunny and Typhon and I just rolled my eyes a thousand times. show less

I'm not a big Dean Koontz fan. In the past I hadn't 'read' any of his books, but I have listened to three of them on tapes or CDs I borrowed from my dad for long road trips. The only one of these I remember off hand was "Tick Tock". I remember really being impressed with Dean Koontz's ability to really paint a scene, but I also remember that of the three books I listened to... I had already run into a lot of recycled ideas. I probably had bad luck of picking books with similar concepts out of his numerous (219 by LT's count) books. Regardless, I wasn't impressed.

However, I recently got a pile of books from people who were leaving Japan and going back to their home countries. Among them was an advanced reader copy of "The Face". I took a show more quick look at the top few reviews on LT and, assured it was fresh material, decided to pick it up for light reading. The result was a few days with vastly shortened sleep hours. I found it very difficult to put this book down... until I reached a certain plot point. I still enjoyed the book from that point, but I wasn't compelled to continue reading. I'll get to that in a moment, but first, a summary of the book.

The title of the book, "The Face", refers to the world's biggest celebrity, Channing Manheim... though it also gains a double meaning in the final pages of the book. However, "The Face" is only a very minor character in the book, only discussed in reference to his relationship to the two protagonists, Manheim's son, Fric, and his chief of security, Ethan. As the story begins, The Face is away making a big movie in the days leading to Christmas. Ethan is examining a black package, the last of five, that have been delivered to Manheim's home... and definitely seem to be threats of some kind.

The story, usually chapter-by-chapter, switches between the two main protagonists Ethan and Fric (and occassionally a friend of Ethan's who is helping him with the mystery, Detective Hazard Yancy), and the antagonist, Corky Laputa, an anarchist, who thinks breaking into the well secured home of the world's most famous actor and comitting an unspeakable crime will be the masterpiece in a life dedicated to chaos.

This switching between perspectives is what makes the book so hard to put down. At any given point in the book at least one of the main characters' chapter's has ended in a cliff-hanger. By the time that character reaches a point of relative safety, another is in danger, but that isn't the only thing that kept me from being able to put the book down. The hook in this book is that there is a supernatural entity (would it be a Koontz book without one?) who is playing with reality. Early in the book, Ethan is gunned down, as he clutches his wounds and prepares to die... he wakes back up before the meeting that lead to the shooting... with his own blood still under his finger nails. It is the wish to find out what super natural entity/ies or involved and what they are doing that keeps you reading. It is very well done... until one entity literally calls up one of the characters on the phone and directly explains what he is doing... at that point at least half of the suspense of the book immediately fell off.

Still it was a really satisfying big of light, though not short, reading. If you like supernatural suspense, give it a try! show less

(unabridged audiobook read by Dylan Baker): The two main characters here are Ethan Truman, chief of security for megastar Channing Manheim, and Fric, Manheim's lonely but surprisingly normal 10-year-old son. Ethan begins the story by investigating some strange packages delivered to his employer, which earns him a fatal shot in the chest...only to wake up back in his truck, unharmed but with his own blood under his fingernails. Also lurking in the wings is Corky Laputa, self-proclaimed anarchist and servant of Chaos, spreading fear and dischord however he can.

When it comes right down to it, I enjoyed this book very much, thanks in no small part to Dylan Baker, the reader. His voice acting was convincing, his narration was engaging, and show more he managed to keep me interested - even rapt in parts - all 19 hours. However, I had a few complaints even Baker's massive talent could not quell. First, the sappy ending: this being Dean Koontz, I knew that Good would trimph over Evil in the end, but the overly saccharine fate granted a character I didn't care very much about in the first place was tiresome. Second, the flowery description: most of it was fun and useful in setting the mood, but there's only so many times you need to describe the rain. Third, there were lots of lengthy details and backstory that weren't necessary to the story. I have a feeling Reader's Digest could trim this down to a novella and lose nothing.

Certainly not my favorite Koontz novel, but I may have to track down more audiobooks read by Dylan Baker. show less