Koontzland - Dean Koontz discussion
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The Bad Place
Stand Alone Novels 1986-1990
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The Bad Place (Group Read - May 2010)
I want to soft sell this as in disagreeing I want to assure you that it's simply a matter of taste. In other words, even if we disagree, I still like you...King's characters do indeed repeat. He does do more "in-depth" but there are still repeat characters. There is the flawed father figure is so prevalent in his writing that he shows up in almost every story. The difference often is in the range of the flaw (evil to merely a failure). There is also the weak hero (possibly a version of the former) the soiled heroine, he also has an entire cast of players he uses, immature children....children who are the mature ones. None of this is bad, it just works for him. Many are more deeply drawn than a lot you'll find in Koontz, but they're there.
Now as I said, I really am not a King fan, like Koontz I ended up reading his books because my wife liked "horror" fiction. I suppose my favorite book by King is Danse Macabre, but it's a non-fiction. I "got trapped" in the Dark Tower series and wanted to follow it through... I read many of his books, most fall in the middle of my "taste range" but mostly I truly hate his "Richard Bachman" books.
Mike wrote: "There is the flawed father figure is so prevalent in his writing that he shows up in almost every story. The difference often is in the range of the flaw (evil to merely a failure). "Are you sure you're talking about King ? Because this can be attributed to Koontz.
I agree with everything Becky has said. King and Koontz are compared only because they've been labeled as "horror" early in their careers. They share nothing except for this label.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. :) I've read almost everything that King has written, some many, many times, and I don't see his characters as repeats of characters from other, unrelated stories. They aren't interchangeable simply by switching their names around. I will agree with you regarding the flawed father figures, but I think that is a representation of his own fears of failing as a father and the fact that he grew up without one. Alcoholism and dependence also makes a lot of appearances in his characters because of his personal experience with both of those issues. In that case, yes there are themes, but the characters themselves are all different - they have different back stories, they have different personalities, they have different flaws, etc. I don't see that as a fault, because King's writing what he knows, and it's honest.
In regards to the "bad guy", those perhaps are the only true repeat characters, simply because King's books all kind of fit together to form a larger universe of stories, and his bad guys can be seen as varying incarnations of the same actual being.
But anyway, we're getting off topic. :) We can agree to disagree on this point.
I still like you too. ;)
I finished this one tonight... I wasn't impressed. :( I just really couldn't find anything to like in it, and it was a struggle for me to pick it back up once I'd set it down. Strange - yes.
Compelling - not so much. =\
Now I feel stupid because Im the one who recommended it to you. Hope you can find some forgiveness. ;)I found this book compelling from the first page. Whenever I put it down, I wanted to go back to it and read some more. Pop fiction at it's best.
Don't be, Maciek. There's nothing to forgive. I don't blame you at all. There's no way to really predict how someone will react to a book. There are so many different factors - the writing, the tone, the subject, the arc of the story, the characters, etc... This one just had a bunch of things that I didn't care for. In another situation or at a different time, I probably would have liked it, probably quite a lot!
This is propably the only Koontz book where I felt something for a character (Derek, one of the disabled boys). You mentioned an interesting thing. I've read reviews of books where readers mention that they loved them when they came out, but now after 10 or 20 years they find them childish. It has a lot to do with maturity. The simplicity and sometimes even obvious stupidity of some of the things in Koontz's books propably wouldn't bother me if I had read them at the age of, let's say, 14 or 15; now they bug me and reduce the amount of pleasure attained by reading the work.
Seriously, If Dean Koontz learned to write realistic people and realistic relationships, stopped throwing obvious jabs at Hollywood and other organisations, removed his political agenda these books would have been so much better.
Now they're pleasant in their simplicity, but apart from a good story there's nothing in them. But that's why I like The Bad Place: I found it a fascinating story with wonderful descriptions. Pure brain candy and a great way to spend some hours, engrossed with Frank Pollard running around and more than around.
You're definitely right about that, Maciek. I remember reading Koontz when I was a teen and really liking them (although I can't remember now which ones they were - so maybe they weren't as liked as I think that I thought they were, LOL), but now I don't think I would like them as much, being the different reader that I am. And you're right, Koontz's personal agendas get in the way of the story, and are distracting. I like when I feel that the story is almost telling itself, but so far with Koontz I don't feel that way. I can always feel his hand and influence on the story. *shrug*
Well, as I said: when Koontz makes his point, he makes his point. LOL !The Bad Place still beats his recent efforts. He was at his best when he wrote chillers like it. Now he tackles bigger than life topics and unfortunately most of the times fails miserably :(
We need to be cognizant of the fact that everyone doesn't feel/think this way... To any who disagree, that's cool.
Mike wrote: "We need to be cognizant of the fact that everyone doesn't feel/think this way... To any who disagree, that's cool."True... I've not read as much of his work as everyone else here probably has, so my comments are just regarding the ones that I've read and remember, and still are only regarding my opinions.
Sometimes I get caught up in the discussion and forget to contextualize... *blush*
No biggie...(odd word that). I do to, we all do. It just hit me as I read through the comments.
I just finished this one last night and rated it 4 stars (I think 3.8 would be more appropriate). I enjoyed it after about halfway through. I still lacked a deep connection with the characters right through to the end. ***Spoilers*** However, I did feel very badly for Clint and his wife when Candy killed her, leading Clint to kill himself rather than live without her, which I find both moving and selfish simultaneously. There were some significant scientific problems with this book that I just could not overlook. First, the type of specific cognitive deficits that Frank suffered from not reconstructing himself perfectly after each teleportation would not have occurred. If anything, he would have suffered very general deficits, rather than first losing all his episodic memories, followed my mathematics, and so forth. Second, taking hallucinogens would not cause genetic mutations, that's just silly. Third and most importantly, a hermaphrodite inseminating itself would not allow for a bunch of different siblings, because there is only one source of DNA!!! If anything, it would have generated a bunch of clones of the parent, but I doubt that would even occur. I wish it had gotten more in depth with the alien diamond feces world, as that was very interesting, and I would like to know more about the creators of the biomachines and where they are from.
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Dustin wrote: "were they diamonds or rubies? I guess I could look it up but I don't care to right now."They were red diamonds.
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Dustin the wind Crazy little brown owl, Colorful Colorado
(last edited May 12, 2010 05:26PM)
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Regarding the Pollard family, I think Dean got some ideas from Stephen King's Carrie. I also see some similarities between the Pollard Family in The Bad Place and the Peacock Family featured in the X-Files "Home" episode. To Dean's credit, the X-files aired several years after The Bad Place was published. Like in the case of STRANGERS, I think the X-files creators got some ideas from Dean's fiction.
info on "Home" X-files episode (CONTAINS SPOILERS):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_%28...
I don't really see any similarities between Carrie's family and the Pollards. The only family that Carrie has is her mother, and aside from the religious fundamentalism (which was true in the case of Carrie's mom and I felt a kind of mental illness in Roselle) they weren't similar at all in my mind. But that's just me... :)
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*********Spoilers********The sex thing was only with Candy, though, due to his... irregularity. It didn't feel that that was a familial trait, or that it was anything taught by Roselle as rote - none of the other kids were anything like that. I think that Roselle used the "virgin" births as part of her sickness/manipulation of Candy. It was more like she wanted to use him to do her bidding than that she was seriously concerned with his soul.
And telekinesis, yeah, I suppose, simply in the case that they did have abilities, but I don't really feel like they were similar - the Pollards's abilities were strange and had too many rules and limitations. Carrie's telekinesis was something that she grew into as a teen, and wasn't groomed to, and had no control over. I'd never have thought to compare the two...
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"What happens if there are others like her? What happens to the world?"
From Slang Terms Explained: A Parents Guide:
To rip off a Carrie: to cause either violence or destruction; mayhem, confusion (2) to commit arson (From Carrie White, 1963-1979)
I think Candy "ripped off a Carrie". Maybe other readers don't see a similarity but I do. As a sidenote: I also thought the following book which I read shortly after Carrie, ripped off a Carrie :-)
Alright... I'll allow it if it's clear that it was a rip-off job. :P
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Don't worry... I see similarities like that all the time. I didn't here, though, maybe because I didn't care for the book, and don't want to associate it with anything else in my mind...?
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http://disabilityisnatural.com/
I don't want to get into too much of a debate except that people with disabilities are just like any group of people when it comes to how they want to be referred - I think it's on an individual basis for example: Indian or Native American? Black or African American? My wife who was born with Cerebral Palsy, does not like the word "Handicapped" but some people don't have a problem with this descriptor :-) I think it is fair to say as Mike pointed out, Dean has made notable improvements with the way he describes people with disabilities in his later books and he clearly has an equally soft spot in his heart for people w/disabilities as he does for dogs - this is even more evident in his work with Canine Companions for Independence (CCI) where these two are brought together :-)
Thanks for that Dustin. Very interesting stuff... I browsed through it and read the "Hierarchy of Insults" article as well as the "People First Language Chart", which seem to be the closest that I saw to what we were talking about. I understand that Dean's use of "moron" and "idiot" and "imbecile" in the book were probably meant in the clinical way, but my take is that these words HAVE changed in the public usage - right or wrong. So to use them, even in their intended manner, is to risk the reader seeing it with a negative connotation, as I did.
I will agree with the article's author that we should not use these words this way, and in a perfect world, we would not. I don't think that many people give much thought to it - myself included, and I'll work on changing that. I just think that Dean's usage of the words he chose implied a meaning that he probably didn't intend, and that's always a risk for authors. *shrug*
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Dustin the wind Crazy little brown owl, Colorful Colorado
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I agree :-) Here is just one example from The Bad Place - these were the words of Candy near the end of the book in chapter 51:
"Why don't they kill you people at birth? What're you good for? Why don't they kill you at birth and chop you up and make dog food out of you?"
and this one also from chapter 51:
"He remembered how neighbors and other people had talked about his sisters - and also about him when, as a boy, he had been kept out of school because of his problems. Violet and Verbina looked and acted mentally deficient, and they probably did not care if people called them retards. Ignorant people labeled him retarded, too, because they thought he was excused from school for being as learning disabled and strange as his sisters. (Only Frank attended classes like a normal child.)"
Today, I don't think Dean would use these types of words even in the voice of a villain, maybe I'm wrong but I don't think he does this anymore. Below are passages related to disability and differences. I think you'll see how he handles things better these days :-) These are just some examples from books I've read recently for what they're worth :-)
"A dog will get in your way."
"Not this dog. He's one of those highly trained service dogs. When we switch from shotguns to .50 Magnums, he can reload the empty weapons for us."
-Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, book three: Dead and Alive
"She would not tolerate pity from anyone. She bristled at the thought of being perceived as weak or unfortunate and she had no capacity whatsoever for being patronized."
-By the Light of the Moon
"...institutions, sanitariums, care homes, places where people might as well be canned meat where they're put on a shelf and dusted from time to time."
-By the Light of the Moon
"...at three, she became an assistance dog of another kind with Gerda and me. She mended us in many ways."
-A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog
"I didn't even trust the eighty-year-old lady whose head bobbed with palsy. Some professional thieves were masters of disguise; the tremors might prove to be a brilliant bit of acting. But her chin wart sure looked real."
-Life Expectancy
"Eccentric means off or aside from the ordinary, off or aside from what is considered normal. As a civilization, through consensus, we agree on what is normal, but this consensus is as wide as a river, not as narrow as the high wire above a big top."
-Life Expectancy
Punchinello: "I'm not prejudice against black people. They should have equal rights and everything. I just don't like the way that they aren't white."
-Life Expectancy
"Insanity is not evil, but all evil is insane. Evil itself is never funny, but insanity sometimes can be."
-Life Expectancy
"He intended to make the world a happier place by eliminating ugly people wherever he found them. And he found them everywhere."
-Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, Book One: Prodigal Son
"...to speak of it would be to say that he recognized her deepest vulnerabilities, which would imply a pity that robbed her of some measure of dignity, as pity always does. She knew what he knew, and she knew that he knew it, but love grows deeper and stronger when we have both the wisdom to say what must be said and the wisdom to know what never needs to be put into words."
-False Memory
"A man who has one pet monkey might be viewed as charmingly eccentric. But a man who has made his home into a monkey house, with scores of chattering chimpanzees capering through the rooms, will have lost credibility with the mental-health authorities."
-Brother Odd
Jason "plasborgma" wrote: " There were some significant scientific problems with this book that I just could not overlook.(...)that's just silly."You know, I never thought about taking it seriously. Koontz is not a "serious" writer; his books are meant to entertain you, that's why I was able to overlook the faults you mentioned. It's rather obvious that the science here is TV-like, and requires a suspension of disbelief. If he only wrote people like people he would be great.
Dustin wrote: ""A dog will get in your way."
"Not this dog. He's one of those highly trained service dogs. When we switch from shotguns to .50 Magnums, he can reload the empty weapons for us."
-Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, book three: Dead and Alive"
This is too funny to pass by ! Nex time we'll be reading about a sniper dog.
You know sometimes unpleasant words and unacceptable phrases are used to point out their very absurdity. We need to be careful not to get so hyper sensitive that we fail to get the point. For example, Mark Twain was an early and loud voice against slavery and for full equality for African Americans, and he used irony concerning people's attitudes in his writing to point out the absurdity of treating one group of humans different from any other group of humans. Today often all some people see is the language used and demand his books be banned because they are perceived as "racist" when they are actually the furthest thing from racist. Sometimes when we pull out our magnifying glass to examine every single word and phrase we miss what the writer actually said.
Candy Pollard is by far one of Koontz's most sinister villains!!!
That's the thing though Mike, I am/was not sure what Koontz was saying. He seemed to actually use a mix of meanings. When other people talk about Thomas, they do so in outdated and no-longer-generally-used-to-mean-what-they-once-did clinical terms: Moron, idiot, imbecile, retard
But when THOMAS talks about himself, he uses the word "dumb" almost like an unconcious insult as well as a general descriptive word about himself.
There was nothing in this book that made me think that Koontz was not writing in all seriousness when referring to this stuff... I didn't feel that he was making any kind of statement like Twain was. And, honestly, I think that if a book doesn't stand up to scrutiny (because readers WILL scrutinize it, whether they should or not), then it's not well written. Discussion regarding a book is good, but if a reader is at fault for mis-interpretation, then we're all in trouble, because there's not really any such thing in my opinion. We all have different minds, and see things based on our perceptions and experiences. Authors have a responsibility for making sure that their intended meaning is clear if they want to make a statement - whether through outright commentary (which we know Dean can do) or through satire (which I haven't seen from Koontz - yet anyway), or whatever. If they decide to make their meaning ambiguous, or if they aren't able to make it clear, then criticism is the chance they take.
I could have missed the references to satire, but honestly, if there was satire here, it wasn't clear.
I haven't read Twain in a long time, since middle school at least and I don't remember much of it, so I'd like to re-read his work now. To me, though, there is no comparison between Twain and Koontz. Just my opinion. :)
Koontz has written better books with more completely drawn characters...that being said. i think the point was that Thomas had suffered and been taught in some way to think as he did. One of the the big parts of the dream they had included having Thomas with them in a better environment. I don't rate this as one of Koontz's best, but from the bulk of his writing I know he is sensitive to most people. i suppose we need to remember the time when this was written, but still i think some of the wording chosen was for the very effect that words would have. Of course anything like that is simply "there" as mostly this is a horror story and brain candy.
That's one reason I think we need to be careful of over-thinking it.
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My vote is for the villain in False Memory :-) Be sure to take our group poll on the subject:
http://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/27...
I can never actually settle on one villain. There are so many different facets of evil for a villain to cover.
That's true Mike, regarding the way Thomas had been taught to think, and about the dream, but my complaint isn't so much with that, it's more with the narration, especially since it's an omniscient narration. Just my own feelings and interpretation, but it rubbed me the wrong way. I would have been more able to accept the same words used if they had come from a character, because then they'd have seemed a part of the character and not an extension of the author.I didn't set out to look for every little nuance and hidden meaning in the writing, and in fact I thought that I would like the book quite a lot, as everyone seemed to speak highly of it, so I was ready to just sit back and enjoy the ride... But it didn't work out that way.
Koontz isn't my favorite author by a long shot, but I am still willing to read his books and try to judge them fairly based on each one. I try to judge a book for the book and not for the author or the author's body of work. But in this one, I did feel like the dated terminology hurt it, and made it seem unintentionally different than it was probably meant to, and as I said before, the way it was written made it seem as though it was Koontz's opinion - even if I'm dead wrong about that, it's how it seemed to me.
I'm not putting him down, and I don't think I'm being unreasonably harsh in my opinion either. I'm not trying to overthink it, I'm just trying to communicate the way I felt as I was reading it. *shrug* I don't really expect universal agreement, LOL, I'm just discussing my impressions of the book. :)
Becky wrote: "...satire (which I haven't seen from Koontz - yet anyway), or whatever. If they decide to make their meaning ambiguous, or if they aren't able to make it clear, then criticism is the chance they take. I could have missed the references to satire, but honestly, if there was satire here, it wasn't clear...."I have never known Koontz to use satire. The closest he comes to it is in The Face, from his books I have read so far.
Just finished The Bad Place this morning. This is the first Dean Koontz novel I have read in a very long time. I remember being totally engrossed in his books. So as I read the last page of this one, all I could feel was disappointment. Tons of weird, that's ok. But there was something that just didn't click with me. It was a bit too twisted for me. I liked Thomas and his picture poems. I appreciated his creativity and sensitivity which was needed when you also had a character like Candy. The perfect symbols for good and evil.
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Did you like those twisted sisters and their cats?
I will try another Koontz book. I am planning on reading Phantoms. Like I said I have other books by Dean and thought they were great. Yes, the twisted sisters and the cats put me over the top. The engineered bugs weren't as bad as the cats.
My other thought was that The Bad Place was written 20 years ago. Maybe its not a book that stands up to the test of time.
I think that in comparison with his recent works The Bad Place wins, hands down. I can't stand his ugly moralizing tone which eclipses the story - The Bad Place is Koontz at his very best, when he was still able to conjure up an exciting plot which is best compared to a roller-coaster ride.
Maciek wrote: "I can't stand his ugly moralizing tone which eclipses the story..."LOL He just replaced with a different ugly tone. (Or at least I thought he did.)
The different ugly thone must be more bearable to me then. LOL!
I just finished this today and I really enjoyed it. It reminded me a lot of By The Light Of The Moon which is one of my favorites. (Ex. The teleporting thing and how Candy could sense someone after touching an object that had been in their possesion) But with a much darker side. I was very happy with the way it ended and I won't go any further for anyone who hasn't read it-But I was very pleased and felt that everyone was at peace, which is the best way for a story to end. The whole Pollard family just really freaked me out, which I was happy about haha. Another Koontz novel crossed off the list and I'm already one third of the way into another but I really think The Bad Place is going to stay with me a while:)
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Koontzland - Dean Koontz
Books mentioned in this topic
Carrie (other topics)House of Reckoning (other topics)
The Kult (other topics)
The Bad Place (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Shel Silverstein (other topics)Dean Koontz (other topics)
My comments here are just my opinions, not meant to sway anyone else from their own. :)