Tina Evans is newly divorced from her husband. Their marriage disintegrated shortly after their son, Danny, died in a tragic bus accident. He was only twelve years old.

Now, about a year later, Tina lives alone in the house that they once shared. She still works at the same casino in Vegas that she always has, except now, instead of a dancer, she is the director of a show that she hopes will be an amazing success. All of her time, efforts, and thoughts are focused on this show. She has plans for more shows after this one ends. This might be Tina’s way of dealing with her grief. At the start of the book, she is convinced that she sees Danny sitting in a car in the parking lot. Her hopes crash when she realizes that the boy she is looking at is not her son, after all.

At first, I thought I was reading a ghost story. Tina has left Danny’s room exactly as it was the day he died. She has a housekeeper who dusts and cleans it, but otherwise it has been untouched. One day, she comes into the room and notices that the chalkboard easel has been knocked over. As she picks it up, she sees that the words “NOT DEAD” have been written on it.

There is an excellent scene where the housekeeper experiences what appears to be poltergeist activity when she is trying to clean Danny’s room. The temperature drops. Ice forms on the window, and flat surfaces of the room. Model airplanes spin, and poster rip themselves into pieces while they are still attached to the wall.

The housekeeper is a no-nonsense woman. Koontz takes the time to fully describe her and her life, and I really enjoyed the short story about the housekeeper. She remains undaunted by the freaky events in Danny’s room. Here is my favorite paragraph from this book:

“But she didn’t believe in ghosts. There were no such things. She believed in death and taxes, in the inevitability of slot-machine jackpots, in all-you-can-eat casino buffets for $5.95 per person, in the Lord God Almighty, in the truth of alien abductions and Big Foot, but she didn’t believe in ghosts.”

Tina at first, believes that her husband is the one who has been breaking in, and writing on the chalkboard in Danny’s room, in an effort to mess with her head. Later, she changes her mind, and is concerned that a stalker is following her. She tells her concerns to a man she recently met, and has started to date, named Elliot, who just so happens to be a lawyer. Suddenly, the ghost story turns into a full blown thriller. There are secrets, explosions, and hastily made escape plans.

I was kind of disappointed when I realized this wasn’t a ghost story. I wasn’t prepared to be reading a thriller, all of a sudden. Later, the book gets a science fiction flavor, and then it became interesting again. The ending answers the main questions that were posed at the beginning of the story, which worked pretty well. However, I was still left wanting to know what happened next. I would have liked to read the sequel, except I don’t think a sequel to this book ever got written. (At least, I am not aware of it).

I didn’t love this book, but I did enjoy it. It kind of jumped around with genre, and I didn’t feel like it completely pulled off each genre equally well. However, there were some real gems within these pages. I really enjoyed the mini story about the housekeeper. The book was written in 1981, and I found the scenes describing the computers the characters were using, (with the blinking cursors, and dot matrix printers) to be nostalgically entertaining. It’s a quick read, and there is a lot going on at the same time. But, it just didn’t grab me in the way that a good ghost story would have.

It starts with rain. Actually, it starts with a torrential downpour that comes out of nowhere, late one night. Molly, a writer, happens to be awake when the rain starts. She notices that the rain glows, and smells funny, and comes with an ominous and disturbing feeling about it.

Molly decides to do what one would expect the heroine of a horror novel to do: she goes outside to investigate. A large group of silent and nervous looking coyotes have gathered on her porch. They seem to be afraid of the bizarre rain, or, possibly, some evil force that Molly can sense in the nearby woods. Amazingly, the coyotes have no problem with Molly when she impulsively decides to step out on the porch, and stand among them. This short scene feels very mystical, and is my favorite part of the book.

Molly’s husband, Neil, a former priest, also feels an ominous presence coming from the rain. He starts murmuring strange statements while he is still asleep, somehow.

From here, things get really freaky. Molly and Neil experience some seemingly impossible things. Molly’s collection of music boxes spontaneously go off all at once. They both start to see a shadowy form that appears to be right behind them when they look in the mirror, but does not seem to be in the room with them.

They turn on the television and learn that this strange rain is happening pretty much all over the world. There are many floods. A strange typhoon has appeared in the ocean. In some places, it is snowing, and children are playing in the odd glowing snow. No one knows what is causing it. One of the live newscasts ends with a camera man dropping the camera, and half of the reporters severed head landing on the ground. Whatever is going on, it’s not good.

Conveniently, both Molly and Neil not only have a gun, a rifle, and plenty of ammo for each, but are both skilled with using these weapons. They take these with them when they decide to drive to the center of town, believing that gathering with other people will be safer then staying by themselves.

A radio broadcast plays audio from the Space Station, which seems to currently staffed by half the countries in the UN, based on the quick glimpse we get. Molly and Neil listen as unexplained alien invaders phase through the doors of the station, and slaughter the astronauts.

Who are these alien invaders, and what do they want? This is unexplained for most of the book, which adds to the tension in the story. I give Koontz credit for creating an extremely creepy setting. It seems that these aliens have come to Earth to take it, in every sense of the word. The description of the alien looking landscape, and the creatures that come out of it, is vivid enough to make my skin crawl.

Unfortunately, I had a lot of problems with this book. So many things are just too convenient. Molly and Neil just happen to have guns and ammo lying around the house, and both are trained to use them. Molly has a nearly photographic memory for phrases and words, and this ability makes her able to instantly recognize when other characters start quoting poetry. She even knows what poet wrote it, and what poem the quote is from. Despite the horrible things happening around her, she manages to memorize a phrase that appears to be gibberish that was said by the alien that invaded the space station….. and decode it later on!

Molly’s past includes a traumatic event that happened when she was a child, which (not to give too much away), involved her protecting some other children that her father was trying to kill. Later, she and Neil become protectors of stray children.

Neil just so happens to have once been a priest, in a book filled with biblical references, few of which come from him. If you are not a person who is familiar with the Old Testament part of the bible, or someone who doesn’t happen to belong to a faith that believes in it, much of this book is going to have little meaning for you. I was not impressed by this. I like my horror stories to be scary, creepy, and even a bit disgusting at times. I don’t want to get to the end of the book only to learn that the events that happened were because the God of the Old Testament wanted them to happen. Such a disappointment! Why did all this destruction and horrible things happen? Why did so many people die? Because it was God’s plan. This is not an ending, it is a cop out.

The invading aliens are vicious and violent. To me, the inclusion of aliens in this book appeared to be specifically so the author could create new and incredibly disturbing ways to torture people. Now, I understand that there are a lot of people who enjoy books and/or movies that involve graphic scenes of torture. I am not among them. To me, this was overkill, and largely unnecessary. It especially bothers me that tons of people got tortured in this story not because of a war, or because of insanity, or even because someone was possessed by a demon or other evil force. It was because God said so. Oh really? So, for no reason then. Great.

This was not my favorite Koontz book, by far.

I love books that contain a bunch of short stories! These are not easy to find, particularly books that contain short stories all by the same author. It seems that in order to get a publisher to let you do a book full of short stories, you must first become a famous, money making, author. Otherwise, your short stories are destined to become part of an anthology with a whole group of less well known, (or completely unknown) authors, or in some of the literary magazines that print short stories. The less lucky authors of short stories will end up with their stories in a box in their closet, or, taking up space on their computers. Koontz includes at the end of the book a little note (of sorts) for readers, describing his own experiences trying to get his short stories published.

The title of the book “Strange Highways” comes from the very first story in the book. It is one of the longer short stories in this collection. Joey Shannon, a forty year old alcoholic, goes back to his hometown to make arrangements for his father’s funeral. He thinks back to all the times he disappointed his father, and his mother, and drinks some more. He thinks about his amazingly successful older brother, P.J., who has become a famous writer, traveling the globe, and sending money back to his father. Much is said about the funeral, about how the other people in the town also disapprove of Joey, and how badly his drinking has affected him. I found the first part of this story so dark and depressing that I seriously considered giving up and moving on to the next story.

The story got better, (but remained dark). Joey starts “seeing” a dead woman, who is reaching out to him. No one else can see this woman, and so, Joey assumes he is hallucinating. On the way out of town, Joey sees a road that should not exist, because the town removed it years ago. The houses located beyond the road were located on a fault line, of sorts, and ended up being torn down as well. He thinks back to a fateful night when he was back in high school, and something P.J. convinced him to keep secret. This road that should not be, this “strange highway” turns out to be Joey’s salvation. He gets transported back in time, to that very important night, and given the chance to make things right. The rest of the story is a combination of an incredibly suspenseful chase between the two brothers, and a whole lot of Christian symbols and iconography. Not my favorite story in the book, by far, but, a good read nonetheless.

There are a total of fourteen stories in this collection, all of which are dark, scary, and creepy in a number of ways. My overall impression after reading all the stories is that there was an underlying theme of “you get what you deserve”. The evil are punished, or, at least stopped in some way. Bad actions reap bad consequences. The innocent are saved, rescued, or rewarded in some way. If you happen to be angry at someone, this book will serve as a virtual way to exact revenge on that person, as you harmlessly substitute them for one of the evil characters.

My absolute favorite story is the second one, called “The Black Pumpkin”. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and so, this story caught my attention right away. Tommy, an eleven year old, visits one of those places selling pumpkins under a tent around Halloween. He goes with his father, and his slightly older brother, Frank. An old, extremely creepy man sits towards the back, surrounded by the pumpkins he has hand carved and decorated. Frank becomes enamored with a large, black pumpkin that is misshapen, has wart like growths, and sharp teeth. The old man says that people are to pay for his pumpkins the same as the not yet carved ones, and “only give me what you wish, you get what you give”. Ominous! Frank, being the nasty kid he is, gives the old many only a nickel. Tommy goes home terrified about what will happen that night, what the pumpkin will do. The old man gives him a warning, of sorts, but that doesn’t make things easier. Freaky story, with an element of Grimm’s fairy tales in it. My favorite, by far!

“Miss Attila the Hun” is a story about alien abduction (in a particularly gruesome way), and a tough teacher who tries to save the town.

“Down in the Darkness” made me cringe the entire time I was reading it! Recent immigrant finally saves up enough to buy his family a big house. The house comes with a door to a basement that only he can see, and the basement contains something horrible, that wants to be fed. There are some real world elements in this story that just make me sick to my stomach, because Koonts references some horrible things that really did happen to some people.

“We Three” and “Kittens” involve children, who are attempting (in very different ways), to punish the adults in charge of them for the perceived mistreatment they children believe they have received from said adults. These are some of the shortest stories in the book, and both gave me chills, which continue as I write this and think about each story. If you are going to read only one story in this collection, it should be one of these two. You won’t be disappointed.

There is one story that gives the reader some comic relief, but still manages to be scary. “Bruno” is about a detective, who finds a man-bear that appears in his living room. Bruno is from some other dimension, tracking a bad guy, and the main character, who happens to be a detective, decides to help him. All sorts of interesting information spills out about the differences between Bruno’s world, and ours. Wait until you read who made Bruno’s gun! Fans of Simon Green will like this story best.

There are a few more stories in this collection that I didn’t even mention, for you to discover on your own.

I was rather disappointed with this one.

This book was first published in 1980, and, to me, it hasn’t aged well. Bands in bars are playing songs by Billy Joel. Police are using land lines at the scene of the crime to call in information to headquarters. A famous agent uses a phone at a posh restaurant that was brought out to him, and puts down the receiver when his client arrives. The killer searches for an actual phone booth to make a call from, and is disappointed when all he can find is one of those phones with a small plastic screen surrounding it instead. The main character wants to know what her date thinks of the television show “Mork and Mindy”. All the clothing mentioned, as well as the way most of the settings are styled, are hopelessly stuck in time.

These small details kept jarring me out of the story, sticking out as something very wrong. The parts where the killer was chasing after the other characters, I kept thinking “Well, why doesn’t she just use her cell phone to call the police?”. Maybe I’m just not ready to think of a story taking place in the 1980′s as a “period piece” yet.

The story takes a good long time to get where it is trying to go. First, the reader is introduced to the bad guy, Bruno Frye. He sits in a restaurant, eating an ungodly huge amount of food, and thinking about exactly how he’d like to kill the waitress.

Then it jumps to a bit about the heroine, Hilary (a name I cannot read today without immediately thinking of Hilary Clinton and her upcoming election campaign), who is a newly rich screenplay writer. She is the stereotypical formerly abused kid from inner city Chicago that grew up and “made it”. She now lives in a big house in California, but is still haunted by the demons of what she endured as a child. Granted, it was pretty bad, but it just comes across so…. I don’t know… “After School Special”. Hillary is also fighting to be a success as a screenwriter, and having difficulty because she is a woman. That part feels so very outdated as I read it now, in 2007.

Then the book jumps to Tony, the hero of the story, a detective who really would rather be an artist. He’s just too afraid to make that jump. He is another walking stereotype, and it’s clear right away that Hilary and Tony will meet and fall in love. It takes forever to get there, and you get to sift through a lot of “but how can I trust you, after the abuse I suffered through?” stuff. It’s no suprize when they finally do get together, because it was so blatantly telegraphed in the preceding story. The love scenes are poorly written, and made me cringe more than some of the scenes where people were getting stabbed and killed. Ick!

Bruno, of course, attacks Hillary and tries to kill her. He thinks she is his dead mother, Katherine, back from the dead. She survives, and when he comes back to try a second attempt, Hillary ends up killing him. So many pages are spent detailing exactly what happened to Bruno’s body. Where it was found, what hospital it went to, where the autopsy was done, which funeral home prepared it for the funeral, etc. etc. It’s a big neon sign flashing on and off that says “This guy is coming back from the dead.” I wasn’t surprised when Bruno seemed to return from the grave.

This book leaves a lot of important details hanging until the very end. There is a whole other story line the reader slowly and painfully discovers bit by bit as you dig through the story about what happened to Bruno when he was a child, and what happened to his mother as a child. Some attempt is made to feel sorry for this homicidal maniac, because he was also an abused child. Hillary feels sorry for him, reflecting on her own terrible childhood, which to me, felt very fake. This is a guy that tried to kill her more than once, and was a serial killer for years and years, claiming many victims. Who could empathize with that?

Anyway, in short, I didn’t really enjoy this book. It feels very dated, it takes forever to get where it was going, and it throws together at the end what could have been a much more interesting story if it was more developed. The characters are flat, and the story line tends to signal ahead of time way too much of the events before they happen. Just wasn’t scary enough for me.

If you like Koontz, do yourself a favor, and read The Husband instead. It just came out in paperback, and is ever so much better than Whispers was.

Click here to read my review of The Husband by Koontz.

Mitch is a gardener. One day, out of the blue, someone kidnaps his wife, calls Mitch on his cell phone, and demands a ransom of $2 million, cash, in what seems like an impossibly short span of time. At first glance, this sounds like a plot line I have heard before, in several other books, and quite a few movies as well, for that matter. The title didn’t inspire me much either. I mean, The Husband? That’s not a scary title! That sounds more like a title for a romance book! C’mon, Koontz! Have you run out of ideas? I wasn’t looking forward to reading this one.

To my surprise, Koontz had me at the first chapter. I am amazed at how much I enjoyed this book! Each chapter is short, (only a few pages), and every chapter has some twisted surprises hiding inside it, just waiting for the reader to trip over them. At the end of every chapter, I wanted more. What happens next? What does Mitch do, now that this incredibly bad unexpected thing has happened? How is he going to get his wife back, with this new setback in his way? It’s like crack for readers, and I considered calling in sick to work one day just so I could stay home, read more, and find out what happens!

So, overlook the tame sounding title, the story line you think you know, and give this book a read! This book is a thriller, and I highly recommend it. It would make for a spectacular summer read for those of you on vacation with some extra free time on your hands. Those of you stuck working like I am will be just at tempted to take a sick day and finish off this book!