Review: The Door to December by Dean Koontz

The Door to December by Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz has a gift for generating unease in his readers. A woman is awakened in the middle of the night because her ex-husband has been found gruesomely murdered along with two associates. She comes running, because her ex had stolen her then three-year-old daughter when he ran out on her and she’s hoping to find her little girl. What she finds is much worse than even her darkest fears. Her ex has spent the last six years experimenting on their child—forcing her for days into a sensory deprivation tank and electrocuting her as a corrective measure to encourage right thinking. It was a quick and sudden reminder to the reader that humans can be the biggest monster of them all. It also made me wonder if maybe the now nine-year-old girl was the killer who had beaten the men so thoroughly they weren’t recognizable anymore. Then the girl is found a few blocks away, naked, in a daze, and NOT covered in blood as she would have been if she’d killed the men, and things get so much more mysterious.

 

Even as the girl is put in the hospital, a hit man is hired to murder her and all the while the mysterious killer keeps bludgeoning new people to death. And who was paying for the experiments? The Russians? The Iranians? Or even the U.S. government? The story moves forward at a rapid pace in two general directions. The first is the detective discovering who was involved in harming the girl to begin with. The second is the girl’s mother trying to help her daughter recover from this horror. And all the while something inhuman keeps murdering everyone involved, getting closer and closer to the little girl.

 

Just what did she unlock when she opened The Door to December? As with so many of Koontz’s novels, you won’t want to put this one down after you start it.