Recent Reading: The Good Guy by Dean Koontz

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Recent Reading: The Good Guy by Dean Koontz

kay, so decades ago I read a lot of books by Koontz. Later, I got rid of most of them, but I kept, I don’t know, half a dozen or so because I liked them enough I thought I’d reread them. (Which I did.) And then later I read one of the Odd Thomas books because I picked it up somewhere, and I liked it well enough to read that whole series. I don’t think the series is flawless, but still, I did like it – I think some of the Odd Thomas books are probably among Koontz’s best.

So then I picked up The Good Guy in a used bookstore or something and put it on my TBR shelves. It came out in 2007, but I just read it now. This reminded me about everything the Koontz does well, plus everything he doesn’t do as well, so I thought I’d write a post about that. With spoilers, just so you know, but after all, the book has been out for 18 years, so most people who were planning to read it probably already have. Anyway, spoilers ahead!

Timothy Carrier is an ordinary guy who enjoys a beer after work. But tonight is no ordinary night. The jittery man sitting beside him has mistaken Tim for someone else – and passes him an envelope stuffed with cash and the photo of a pretty woman. Ten thousand now. The rest when she’s gone.

This is the part of the back cover text that’s accurate. The rest is a lot of vague “everything he thought he knew about himself will be challenged” and “must discover resources within himself” hogwash, because actually, no, Tim is perfectly clear about who he is and what personal resources he’s got to draw on. The line, “I have a certain set of skills” might drift through the reader’s mind at some point, and this is fairly accurate. This is kind of a Reacher scenario, because Tim basically wins every fight and saves everyone he has a reasonable chance of saving.

And this is the first important thing to know about Dean Kootz:

A) The good guys win.

Not just that, but everybody the reader desperately wants to live through the story does, in every novel. Dean Koontz has never, as far as I know, written Horror; he’s written Horror Lite. The reader can relax into a Koontz novel in a way that is impossible with Stephen King or a lot of other Horror authors, because the good guys win; the bad guys lose; the most important innocents are all right at the end; if there is a dog (pretty frequently there is a dog) the dog is fine; and true love prevails – usually true love is an important plot element. So you could also call these Cozy Horror, using various definitions of Cozy that include romance beats, which I think is accurate – though as a rule the protagonist isn’t a quirky female owner of a shop in a small town, so if that’s necessary for your personal definition of Cozy, then these don’t fit.

Oh, I should mention, this particular novel isn’t actually Horror at all, it’s a Thriller. And it’s Thriller Lite, because again, we know the good guys will win and the characters we most want not to die are safe. If you did a Venn diagram for Horror, Thriller, and SF, Koontz would rather often be found in the intersections. Lightning, for example, is a thriller with time travel, so it’s a Thriller/SF – the time travel is clever and well done, by the way, and if someone wanted to read just one Koontz title to see what they thought of it, Lightning would be a good choice. The Good Guy is pure Thriller, and not one of Koontz’s best, though I have to say, with more than a hundred books out, that’s not as strong a statement as it might be.

Regardless, the certainty that the most important innocent characters will be fine makes Koontz a really interesting contrast to Stephen King, because among other things these two authors do differently, at least for a while there, in a King novel, you could absolutely, with total assurance, count on some nice, innocent (female) character dying near the end, despite every possible attempt to save her. This is Tearjerker Girl, whom I have mentioned before, and she is not a character, really. She is a transparent manipulation of the reader, and she is the reason I stopped reading King novels twenty years ago, because she was always present and entirely identifiable from the first second she stepped on stage. So with a King novel, the reader says, “Oh, there’s Doomed Tearjerker Girl,” while with Koontz, the reader says, “I’m so glad I know FOR SURE Tim’s mother won’t be seriously harmed, whew.” So this is a very different reading experience, and obviously I much prefer Koontz even though I think King is objectively a significantly better writer.

B) Koontz leans on dialogue.

While both Dean Koontz and Stephen King are good at dialogue, Koontz really leans hard on snappy dialogue to carry the story. In this case, with a Thriller, the setting is contemporary, so the need for description is much less than if Koontz had been writing Horror and needing to describe grotesque scenery or monsters, and therefore in this book, honestly, the dialogue is often doing almost all the heavy lifting. Koontz is, as I say, good at dialogue, so this is fine. I should do a post about dialogue-heavy scenes that work vs dialogue-heavy scenes that are basically white rooms, because if someone less skilled tried this, I think the white room would be a potential failure mode.

Also, as a side note, something else that is also extremely characteristic – compared to King, Koontz has MUCH less of a potty mouth and MUCH less of an inclination to describe bathroom-related nastiness, and I have to say, I do prefer Koontz for that reason too, though, I mean, it’s a minor point compared to character mortality.

But let’s look at a snippet of dialogue:

After an enjoyable conversation and a satisfying meal, Tim said, “I’m going to need your gun.”

“If you don’t have money, I’ll pay. There’s no need to shoot our way out of here.”

“Well, there might be,” he said.

“You mean the white Chevy sedan in the parking lot.”

Surprised, he said, “I guess writers are pretty observant.”

“Not in my experience. How did he find us? Was the sonofabitch there somewhere when we stopped in the vacant lot? He must have followed us from there.”

“I can’t see the license plate. Maybe this isn’t him. Just a similar car.”

“Yeah right. Maybe it’s Peter, Paul, and Mary.”

Tim said, “I’d like you to leave ahead of me, but by the back door, through the kitchen.”

“That’s what I usually say to a date.”

“There’s an alley behind this place. Turn right, run to the end of the block. I’ll pick you up there.”

And so on, this is a random snippet; I literally just flipped the book open and started typing. How much scenery is there in this snippet? I didn’t want to type this much, but there are 26 lines of dialogue here with just two (short) lines of description. This story is REALLY dialogue heavy, and that’s something I don’t think I really noticed before. I mean, it’s been a long time since I read anything by Koontz, so I think maybe I didn’t notice as much about what he was doing last time I read one of his books. Regardless, this has got to produce a fast-paced feel to the story, and I hereby vote for this as one contributing factor for Koontz’s popularity.

Also, yes, obviously, the characters are way more inclined toward clever quips while in deadly danger than might perhaps be realistic. This is extremely typical, and when you see comments about Koontz characters all being the same, I think it’s because they all, or a huge proportion at least, talk like this, quick and witty. I personally kind of enjoy that even if it’s handled almost exactly the same way in a lot of Koontz books, and I bet I’m not the only reader who does, so I bet this is another reason for Koontz’s popularity.

I’m not saying there’s zero scenery, because that wouldn’t work, of course. The details are clever and eye-catching, which probably reduces the need for all that much description. Once you say the wall between the kitchen and garage has been removed so a classic car is kind of in the kitchen, and you’ve had your protagonist pause in surprise to think about this, then you’ve set a scene so memorably that you probably don’t need to do a lot more with description – as long as you move the action along with dialogue.

C) So, pacing.

Honestly, there’s not a lot to this particular story. It’s thoroughly straightforward. Somebody mistakes Tim for a hitman and passes him the envelope with cash and the photo of the intended victim; Tim heads straight for her – the address is included – and warns her, and the two of them are on the run from then on. They sure don’t get a lot of sleep for a couple days. The bad guy isn’t a single assassin, he’s a single assassin with a support team and he keeps tracking Tim and Linda faster than would seem reasonable, except that Koontz makes it pretty believable.

So it’s basically one narrow escape after another, until the bad guy finds out where Tim’s mother lives and uses her to pull Tim toward him.

This is Koontz raising the stakes, and I think the reason he did that is because the good guys keep winning every encounter without any serious damage, which is fine, and I’m happy this is Thriller Lite, but after this happens enough times, the pattern is also potentially going to let the reader relax too far. I think bringing Tim’s mom into the story worked well to punch up the stakes and make the ending more thrilling, but it was nice to know that Koontz would never do anything horrible to the mom – she’s a great mom and a great character – just as he wouldn’t kill the dog. (There’s a dog, and she is also fine an the end.)

The pacing is also exaggerated by shortening the chapters. Many chapters are about four pages long, and the pages have generous spacing for the text. This is practically a novella, because although it’s 450 pp, the line spacing is so generous that it would really be more like 225 pp – maybe a little more, but this looks close to double-spaced to me.

And, one more thing causes the pacing to seem fast. The assassin is not that big a problem; if there is one assassin after you and you killed him, boom, problem solved. But what we have here is the support team, which means someone wants to kill Linda for some reason that’s unusual. This isn’t a disgruntled ex or anything. This is a mystery. Why why why is someone pouring resources into killing Linda?

And the reason is rather thin, imo, but it basically doesn’t matter, because once the assassin is dead, Koontz kind of handles the big stuff in an epilogue. He doesn’t call it an epilogue, but it acts like that. In this ending, Koontz compresses time and summarizes events and shows just tiny snippets, and as a result, the story is structured like this:

Setup …. Fast Paced Cat And Mouse Game …. Good Guys Win …. Epilogue, The End

And I think that one result of compressing time at the end is that the actual story is the cat-and-mouse game with the assassin and neither the author nor the reader is all that interested in the political stuff that led to all this trouble. This can be described in the vaguest possible way, because all you need is closure. Koontz is using these final epilogue-ish chapters to tell the reader – and I do mean tell rather than show – “Here you go, everyone lives happily ever after, the bad guys who were responsible for all this have also come to justice.” But that isn’t part of the actual story, so he doesn’t dwell on that at all, only just enough to hand that reassurance to the reader.

I think that works rather well, even though a compressed-time report of a happy ending or just resolution could be a real flaw in a different book. This is not, for example, a political thriller, because the political machinations are almost completely elided. This is the sort of thing that pulls the story out of being something other than a quick and clever beach read or airport novel – it’s simplicity and its fast pace.

D) Characters.

This is also a beach read / airport novel because the characters are flat as pancakes.

Tim is a hero. He is the Hero Archetype. We don’t find out his backstory until very close to the end, but nothing about it is surprising when we do find out about it. Linda is actually a bit less flat. As a side note, her tragic backstory involves growing up at the time of the Satanic Panic and her parents were running a daycare at the time, and there you go, that’s a great way to create a tragic backstory.

This particularly struck me because in the first child abuse case that was presented to the grand jury, which I’m still a part of for the next couple months, but the point is, when the assistant prosecutor presented her brief summary of the case, I did raise my hand and ask, “So, all of us over a certain age remember the Satanic Panic era, yes? And I would sort of like to know that current procedures prevent that kind of problem, so can you tell us about that?”

My impression is that no one else on the grand jury actually knew anything about that, which does surprise me, because it wasn’t that long ago. I mean, forty years or so, but a lot of us are easily old enough to remember this clearly, so I’d have thought more people would remember that revolting hysteria and how it destroyed the lives of many innocent people, including, no doubt, many of the children in whose minds false memories were created by clueless or uncaring prosecutors and psychiatrists. Anyway, yes, procedures are now in place that should prevent the creation of false memories in children, and at least in this county, I think that those procedures are followed. I don’t know that for a fact; I just got that strong impression. I would have significantly less faith in that in a big city, probably. I just thought of all this because of the female lead’s backstory. I don’t think backstory alone gives a character any kind of depth, but in this case, it kind of does because of the way Koontz handles her, making her the sort of character who can overcome a lot and recover from deep emotional bitterness.

But she’s still flat. Just not as flat. Tim is the Hero Archetype, Linda is … the plucky woman who overcomes tragedy without losing hope, let’s say, which is not as archetypal, but not rare. The cop friend is The Good Cop, his boss is The Boss Who Cooperates With Bad Guys, the feds are Bad Feds.

Also, this is a story with villain pov scenes, though Koontz handles this in a way that isn’t too intensely disagreeable. The bad guy assassin is just soooooo weird and crazy. Also – this is interesting – the assassin has no memory of his childhood, and this is the exact opposite of trying to get the reader to sympathize with a bad guy because of his Tragic Backstory. This is super interesting in light of my recent post about does-understanding-the-villain-force-reader-sympathy, because it’s sort of like Koontz thought, “How can I make SURE the reader does not sympathize with my villain?” and then stripped out any hint of a backstory. So this is one reason the villain pov didn’t bother me here – this villain is weird, while the kind of villain who bothers me most is petty, selfish, self-righteously stupid, cowardly, cruel, and also more realistic. Also, we see the assassin kill people, but we don’t see him torture anybody, which reduces the awfulness of his pov scenes. Also, those scenes are short. This is a book with really short chapters, remember.

Tim’s mom is a very minor character who appears just toward the end, and she is fantastic. We barely see her, but we get a very clear impression of her. I hereby recommend her as an example of a minor secondary character who is drawn quickly and clearly. Also, when we first see her, she is making an apple pie. Raise your hand if you think that’s pure chance. Anybody? I think this is Koontz saying, “This is a great family, a family with old-fashioned virtues, look, she is making an apple pie.” This is also a way of setting up quintessential, archetypical normal life, which is then disrupted by the intrusion of evil.

E) Coherence.

So, speaking of evil, I think Koontz is an fine example of an author who has deep convictions and puts those into his novels, usually integrated into the story enough that he doesn’t come across as preaching a message, but certainly there are obvious moments where the Message comes through pretty clearly. I mostly agree with him – the Satanic Panic was inexcusable on several levels, so when Koontz indicates he believes this, I nod: Yes, Author, you’re right, that was a disgraceful episode that showcases a serious moral and cognitive failure at every level of society. Yes, I agree that society is still at risk of this exact kind of failure because human nature includes a strong tendency toward stupid, vicious mob hysteria. But it’s a pretty clear Message, and one reason I think Koontz can get away with this is that the Message bits are brief. He’s keeping the pace so fast, it’s a couple lines now and then, not a monologue. AND because he is good at pointing to the Message in a way that the reader is probably going to agree with. The Satanic Panic was utterly disgraceful; it’s hard not to agree with that, because it was.

My impression – if I were writing a thesis about Koontz as an author, I would read books published at ten-year intervals and look for this – but my impression is that Koontz, like Mark Twain and Terry Pratchett, has become far more angry about institutionalized stupidity, corruption, and injustice over time. I think this comes through clearly in his later books, and I just don’t remember it from his early works – but I was younger, so I might have missed it.

Koontz also has deep religious beliefs. I mean, I don’t know that for a fact, I’m just sure of it from reading his books. All right, Google, tell me about Dean Koontz … yes, he converted to Catholicism way back when. Well, I think that shows quite clearly, though even when the story metaphysics is explicit, it’s often thoroughly divergent from real-world Catholicism, while more often story metaphysics isn’t explicit at all. But I think his own beliefs structure the themes underlying at least his later books and provide a deeper level of thematic coherence that would otherwise be lacking. I’m not sure this is as true of his early books, but I think it’s very clear in his later books. AND, one of those beliefs is that good should triumph over evil – not only should, but will, in the end.

So I don’t think he handles his stories the way he does because he’s deliberately trying to give readers what they want and hit plot points that will make his books popular – which evidently is how Lee Child, the author of the Reacher books, did it. I think Koontz really believes this is how the world should work, and on the deepest level how it does work. I think that’s why in his novels the good guys always win and innocence is always protected and the dog always lives through the story. And I think that’s one reason I prefer his later books to his earlier ones, and why I massively prefer his books to King’s, even though I do think King is the better writer in a lot of ways. Not in every way, because as I said above, I think King is much more transparently manipulative of the reader than he should be, more so than Koontz, or maybe just in ways I particularly detest. But if I were picking one or the other as “better,” then I’d say King is better, even though I like Koontz much more.

King is better at description, does far more characterization, and is massively better at creating distinct worlds. I think actually all of that boils down to: Stephen King is not all about pacing and because he can and does slow down, he can pour more depth of description and characterization into his novels. A lot more, generally speaking. And then he does something like having Roland let the kid fall to his death in the Dark Tower series because gosh, one must have priorities, and I recoil in revulsion and stop reading the series. Koontz would never in a million years have his protagonist make that decision. That right there is a big, big reason I prefer Koontz.

Overall, I think a novice writer could do worse than read a handful of Koontz novels and think hard about story setup, pacing, and the use of dialogue as the primary vehicle for everything else in the story. I wouldn’t necessarily pick The Good Guy for that. I’d pick a couple of the famous ones, such as Watchers, and also Lightning, and definitely at least a couple of the Odd Thomas series.

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