Dean Koontz is very much hit and miss for me. When he hits, he knocks it out of the park (Life Expectancy, Odd Thomas) and when he misses, it's a total fail (Darkfall).

The Door to December, like most of Koontz's books, deals with the eternal battle between good and evil. I struggled with this one though, mostly because of the subject matter. As the mother of a 5-year old daughter, the theme of extensive child abuse and torture made me incredibly uncomfortable. But I enjoyed Koontz's writing style, and his characters, as usual, resonated with me. I particularly connected with Laura, and could easily relate to her enormous capacity for loving her daughter. I also thought Detective Haldane had a powerful protective streak that was enormously likeable and made him easy to root for.

I did think the book ended too abruptly, though. I would have liked more closure, and I wanted answers to some of my lingering questions. What happened to Ross Mondale? Did Melanie ever recover? It might have been nice to have an epilogue! (Though having said that, my edition of the book had an utterly hilarious Afterword by the author that almost made up for the unsatisfying ending.) ( )

Review: The Door To December by Dean Koontz. 4.5* 09/03/2022

I’ll never give up on Dean Koontz because he always comes through for most readers. His books are amazing and he writes with precision, his stories are organized to have them flow over the pages. His characters are well developed and they enhance the story with the way he uses dialogue throughout the pages.

Writing this story Dean Koontz had style, a good plot, drama, horror using his supernatural effects. The story had so many things happening but written well enough to follow. It begins with Laura, a child psychologist whose husband left her and kidnapped their daughter at a very young age. Six years later Laura gets a call from the police and they want her to go to a location and see if she could tell them what was being done in fabricated lab that her husband and another doctor were doing experiments. They did inform her that her husband and partner were dead at the scene but they did not have any idea what lead up to the horror of the bodies. All she really wanted to know was if her child was also there. The story was full of twist and turns and it kept the reader not knowing what was coming next. What surprised her was that they where living not far from her and she hired an investigator with no results to where her husband moved…! ( )

Re-read as part of a hoped-for book clearance, though often listed as a horror writer, Koontz is really a supernatural thriller author. I’ve heard some complain about many of his recent books (of which I’m behind on), but it’s too easy to forget some of his old works are superb. Whether you like his work, many are well-plotted, well-written, create tension with simple sentences, and get in more than enough character development. Those who know about story structure can see in which books it shines out. Alas, the surprise twist is terribly simple to work out, and the ending, after a long but absorbing journey, seems to happen too fast. Still worth reading. ( )

Please note that I gave this book 3.5 stars, but rounded it up to 4 stars on Goodreads.

So I read this as my final book for Halloween Bingo 2016! This one was for the "It was a dark and stormy night" square. Lucky me for picking this to just read for the month of October and realizing as I read that most of the book takes place during thunderstorms/rain and the opening scene the main character (Laura) who arrives at a crime scene in the middle of the night during a torrential downpour. I also just realized that Koontz always seems to have his characters going to and fro while it is raining outside.

I read this book years ago in my 20s. I thought it was okay at the time, but something about it stuck in my craw and I couldn't figure it out until I re-read this. I did not like the character of Lieutenant Dan Haldane. We find out that he hid how bad a fellow officer was years ago due to some sort of messed up loyalty, and only then though he is initially indifferent to the character of Dr. Laura McCaffrey, he finds himself attracted to her after he sees her vulnerability. At one point he even notes he loves it when a woman is in trouble and he can save her.

The story starts off with Dr. Laura McCaffrey who is taken away by police car to a crime scene (don't get me started on this). She is only informed the police have found her husband who she was on the verge of divorcing 6 years ago. Her husband, Dylan, kidnapper their daughter and Laura has lost any hope of finding her missing daughter Melanie. Then Laura is told that her husband is dead and so are some others, and he was only living a few blocks from her this entire time (don't get me started on this). We find out that Laura is brought to the crime scene because Lt. Dan Haldane wants her to see the scene because he thinks that Laura's estranged husband was doing experiments on their daughter. From there, "Door to December" has Laura doing what she can to find out what happened to her daughter (she is eventually found wandering) and figure out what her husband and his friends were doing.

Laura is a child psychologist and plans on taking off in order to work with Melanie to help her. I actually liked the character of Laura, though I didn't really get any idea how she supposedly did hypnosis to her daughter and didn't get that her giving her daughter commands to tell her what was done to her was probably dancing around the crap her husband Dylan was doing to Melanie. I also don't know if Dean Koontz gets how hypnosis works, but that's a long topic for another day. I don't like how Koontz portrays Laura as a beautiful woman who someone doesn't get that she is beautiful and he has her as being awkward until she meets her husband. We also have Dan interjecting that she is attractive and he can't see how she can view herself that way. Blech. I thought Laura had more chemistry with her personal bodyguard Earl then she did with Dan. At least Melanie seemed to like him more too.

The character of Dan had a lot of backstory and I didn't think that any of it was necessary or needed. We know that Dan wants to save women who are in danger and he notes a lot of the time that he is attracted to Laura and wants to kiss her. Whatever dude.

We have Melanie in this story and I wish we had focused on her a little bit more. Instead Koontz has her as autistic except some of the time and it didn't even make sense.

There were a lot of secondary characters in this one (this book is over 500 pages) and besides Earl there were not a lot of them that I was too impressed with. We have Dan going around interviewing a lot of people and some of them are good and some are terrible people.

I think if the plot didn't include the FBI, LAPD, some international organization that is trying to take over the world, etc. the book would have worked better. The story only really shines when you start to realize what is happening to all of the bad people in this book.

The writing was okay, but sometimes Koontz is just way too melodramatic when describing something. Who knew there were so many ways to write about the rain. I also don't even know if the things he writes in the book about hypnosis, behavioral modification, etc. are even true. The hypnosis thing didn't even sound right to me.

The ending just kind of happens and we have everyone realizing who has been killing all of the people in the book. I feel like the story was also showing that Dan planned on being in Laura and Melanie's lives (shaking my head) and was probably already thinking of ways to romance her. ( )

OMB...this was utter rubbish. I kept on reading in the hope it would redeem itself and improve, but no, no sigar.
Note for 2020: stick to the 100 pages rule - if the book is not to your liking, put it down and start a new one. ( )