Book Review: The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz

The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz
Bantam Books
354 Pages
Copyright 2007

The Darkest Evening of the Year is my last book for the Four Legged Friends challenge. Unlike the previous two, this one is a work of fiction.

The story begins with Amy Redwing and her boyfriend, Brian McCarthy on the road. They are on their way to rescue a golden retriever from an abusive drunk. When they reach the home, they discover that while wife and son have been abused by the man, the dog herself has not been. Amy buys the dog, Nickie, for $2,000 cash out of her pocket. She and Brian take the dog out of the home and then go back to rescue the humans.

Immediately afterwards, Brian finds himself obsessively sketching Nickie; first her face and then increasingly more in depth, her eyes. He feels possessed by some sort of supernatural force to capture a deep mystery that is hidden in her eyes. At the same time, Amy has taken Nickie home to her other ‘kids’, a pair of golden retrievers called Fred and Ethel. She immediately begins to notice that Nickie does not behave like a normal dog and neither do the other dogs. It is clear almost from the moment Nickie enters the house that she is in charge.

Both Brian and Amy have secrets in their past. They are secrets of a colossal magnitude that will lead Brian, Amy, and Nickie to a meeting with destiny that has been years in the offing.

I know that’s a pretty slim account but I don’t want to give too much of the story away. It may sound like the back of the book but it’s the best I can do without ruining the story for anyone else who wants to read it.

As I’ve come to expect from Koontz, the villains in the story are of two types – either comically overblown or so . . . creepy that they make it difficult for me to continue reading the story. There are both types in this story and the creepy ones were so, for me, horribly creepy that I once again didn’t want to finish the book.

Another thing I’ve come to expect from Koontz are quotes that resonant for me. This book is no different. Here are a few of my favorites:

“Intuition is seeing with the soul.”

“Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.”

“To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.”

“At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.”

Koontz recently lost his golden retriever, Trixie. This book is filled with the love he has for dogs in general and goldens in particular. Dogs are, as he has said in other books, much closer to God than people because they have simpler souls. I can’t argue with that.

There are two things about the book that I can honestly say I didn’t like. First, Koontz switches from third person to first person. I found it intrusive at times. The second thing is the ending. I’d have to say I was disappointed. Koontz spends 350 pages building toward the climax and then, in something like a page and a half, it’s over. That wouldn’t be a bad thing but for me it was almost like an after thought. It felt almost like it’d been tacked on in a rush. I was disappointed because I wanted more. What, I have no idea.

Recommendation: In spite of the things that I didn’t like, I can still recommend this one whole-heartedly. There are definitely parts where Koontz is at his best and those parts make up for the disappointing ending.