Koontz continually proves me wrong, and maybe it's because I haven't yet read enough of him to really know for sure what his "thing" is. I thought it was really psychotically deranged killer pursues female protagonist for 400 pages and that's it. Usually the derangement is something on par with Michael Myers--a particularly soulless and nihilistic evil. Well, there appears to be more to Koontz's writing than that, and Life Expectancy is an other deviation I'm delighted to read. I just read From the Corner of His Eye, which was especially surprising. This one is a little less so, and yes, the narrative style gets a little annoying. The protagonist tells us in the early going he has tried to inject his story with as much humor as possible. The self-awareness of this declaration is not very smart. I would have preferred he let us see that for ourselves. A rave in the front of this edition compares the humor to Dave Barry, which is also giving it way too much credit. In truth, I found its self-aware wit pretty annoying, but the pace was brisk enough and the surprises well enough executed to hold my interest. I just wish that the heroes would have taken their situations a little more seriously when it was warranted. Koontz does it better when he plays it straight.