77 Shadow Street is by far the best Koontz I've read (even given the psychology bias towards Odd Thomas [guess what the T in my name is...]) and I'm not a fan. Koontz shows exceptional skill at quickly building attachable characters and establishing the 'rose red' haunted house setting.

Of course the genre is so hastily established, one suspects some theme-bending twists and Koontz does not disappoint. After all the blurb says it all (look yourself I don't want to spoil anything.)

Despite this I find an old complaint of mine resurfacing. Despite his best efforts Koontz can't seem to keep his own personal opinions out of his writing - I guess half the motivation of being a famous author is to get your point of view some page-time, but it doesn't serve the story when towards the end of the book when the big reveal happens you feel like Glenn Beck wrote the part of the 'bad-guy' and I find myself wanting to correspond with Koontz just to tell him that science isn't quite as bad as he makes out.

Diverting from hypocrisy I also have a reviewerly reason for not giving 77 S.S. 5 stars - Koontz weighs his story down with an overdose of characters. The book is probably a good 100 pages too long, due to needing to flesh out each introduced person, which also makes the plot a little repeditive as we have to see each person's first experience of the 'supernatural' and ultimately only a few of the characters are vital as P.O.V.'s the rest could have be demoted to minor, as an unfortunate side effect of over-populating your narrative is a sense of pleasure each time someone dies so you don't have so many people to keep track of. This is particularly obvious when Koontz switches from having a P.O.V. per chapter to labelling paragraphs with the central character's names, much slowing the pace and reducing the empathy.

That all said, 77 Shadow Street was an epic ride, and a highly original piece (a rare find these days!)