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One Door Away from Heaven
Leilani Maddoc's tenth birthday is nine months away. Micky Bellsong is convinced that in nine months and one day, the girl will be dead. And no one seems to care but Micky herself.
Micky has a history of making wrong choices and living only for her own desires, but her decision to save the child's life - and pit herself against an adversary as fearsome as he is cunning - takes her on a journey of incredible peril and stunning discoveries, a journey filled with tragedy and joy, with humour, terror and hope, a journey that will change her for ever
Micky has a history of making wrong choices and living only for her own desires, but her decision to save the child's life - and pit herself against an adversary as fearsome as he is cunning - takes her on a journey of incredible peril and stunning discoveries, a journey filled with tragedy and joy, with humour, terror and hope, a journey that will change her for ever
Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
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About the author
Dean Koontz
906 books39.6k followersAcknowledged as "America's most popular suspense novelist" (Rolling Stone) and as one of today's most celebrated and successful writers, Dean Ray Koontz has earned the devotion of millions of readers around the world and the praise of critics everywhere for tales of character, mystery, and adventure that strike to the core of what it means to be human.
Dean, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirit of their goldens, Trixie and Anna.
Facebook: Facebook.com/DeanKoontzOfficial
Twitter: @DeanKoontz
Website: DeanKoontz.com
Dean, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirit of their goldens, Trixie and Anna.
Facebook: Facebook.com/DeanKoontzOfficial
Twitter: @DeanKoontz
Website: DeanKoontz.com
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 932 reviews
January 28, 2014
The one about the little boy alien and the dangerous young mutant.
I like this book it's one of my favorite Koontz books. I'll say this, you won't find this exact plot elsewhere. It draws you in and gets you involved with the "participants". It's between a 4 and a 5...but I figure it tipped the scales and went on to a 5. As I said a favorite among Koontz's work for me...I've read it several times.
What else can I say? Not much without spoilers. There's a bit of laughter here, a dose of tears and some great lines in the mouths of some great characters. I mean what other book offers shape changing aliens, a dangerous young mutant, a psychopathic serial killer, an insane drug addict, someone who can't tell the difference in their own memories and the old movies they've seen, a P.I., alien bounty hunters, a hoarder,....and Amazons? Oh yeah and possibly Gabby Hays, though in all honesty it turns out to be a lookalike. Hope that isn't too much of a spoiler.
Buckle up join in. The book has laughter, pathos, action, and storytelling, not to mention an actual plot and the above mentioned fully formed characters.
5 stars. Highly recommended, enjoy.
I like this book it's one of my favorite Koontz books. I'll say this, you won't find this exact plot elsewhere. It draws you in and gets you involved with the "participants". It's between a 4 and a 5...but I figure it tipped the scales and went on to a 5. As I said a favorite among Koontz's work for me...I've read it several times.
What else can I say? Not much without spoilers. There's a bit of laughter here, a dose of tears and some great lines in the mouths of some great characters. I mean what other book offers shape changing aliens, a dangerous young mutant, a psychopathic serial killer, an insane drug addict, someone who can't tell the difference in their own memories and the old movies they've seen, a P.I., alien bounty hunters, a hoarder,....and Amazons? Oh yeah and possibly Gabby Hays, though in all honesty it turns out to be a lookalike. Hope that isn't too much of a spoiler.
Buckle up join in. The book has laughter, pathos, action, and storytelling, not to mention an actual plot and the above mentioned fully formed characters.
5 stars. Highly recommended, enjoy.
May 3, 2010
One Door Away From Heaven (2001) - spoilers...but do you really want to read it ?
This is basically a 700 page long borefest - formulaic characters, formulaic stories, formulaic preaching (The goodness of dogs and the evil of bioethics)
To kick off this brillian review, I'll start with the characters - they are of course scripted, which makes them unrealistic and idiotic and renders the reader unable to feel anything for them - do you care for a bunch of dolls running around ?
There's a girl, Leilani Klonk(yes, yes). Leilani is a 9 year old precocious kid who wears a leg brace and speaks like a 60 year old college professor and practices humor in her spare time. A Polyanna from hell, Leilani shows Koontz's greatest weakness as a writer - inability to create realistic kids. He can't write kids so he just makes them precocious prodigies who talk like Yale graduates. And they're witty. Always. As much as I like Koontz, he's not a funny guy. His jokes are always fake and lame, and when he puts them into the mouths of the dolls whose strings he holds its awful. I'm sure he's a great person, but by saturating his novels with these lame attempts at wit and clever ripostes he doesn't gain anything but a "YAWN" from the reader.
Now the antagonist. Preston Maddoc is a fortysomething scientist who's popular and thus able to commit any crime in the vein of bioethics(yeah baby!). Basically he kills people and believes in aliens. Opposed to Leilani, Preston has the mind of a 3 year old boy and gives people names like "Shitface" or "Slut Queen". I don't know if he was supposed to be a comic character - I certainly though of him that way. And he even gets a nickname - "Dr. Doom". LOL!
The rest of the characters are cardboards employed to play their parts - an seemingly alcoholic woman, who's pretty despite her drinking, the everpresent wise grandmother character who here portrays an aunt, abusive, drug crazy mother (she's actually quite funny) and a "not quite right" boy who is of course more right than all other human waste that dares to disagree with mr. K.
Oh, and there's an PI with a mysterious past and a dead sister.
The writing is horrible. Sparing the idiotic dialogue I'll give you an example of descriptive work, a thing for which I used to admire Koontz.
"In matching Chinese-red silk pajamas with billowy bell-bottom sleeves and pants, standing tall on platform sandals that glitter with midnight-blue rhinestones, their fingernails and toenails no longer azure-blue but crimson, their glossy golden hair swept up in chignons with long spiral curls framing their faces, they glide and turn and twist around the cramped galley with an uncanny awareness of each other's position at all times, exhibiting choreography that might please Busby Berkeley as they whip up a feast of Mandarin and Szechwan specialties."
There are whole pages of stuff like that, which made me wonder - did someone actually edit this book ? Or did Dean kick out his editor after he became a bestselling author ?
He writes like a sophomore English student who just discovered the vast, beautiful land of metaphors and similes. Ugh.
Koontz throws stabs at everyone he doesn't like in his books. Here are some examples:
-The Academics: aside from making the main villain a scientist, he writes moralizing passages like this little story about the partents of two girls:
"Their father, Sidney Spelkenfelter, is a professor of Greek and Roman history at a private college, and his wife, Imogene, teaches art history. Sidney and Imogene are kind and loving parents, but they are also, says Cass, "as naive as goldfish who think the world ends at the bowl." Because their parents were academics, too, Sidney and Imogene have resided ever in tenured security, explaining life to others but living a pale version of it.
Co-valedictorians of their high-school class, Cass and Polly skipped college in favor of Las Vegas. Within a month, they were the centerpiece featheredand- sequined nudes in a major hotel's showroom extravaganza with a cast of seventy-four dancers, twelve showgirls, nine specialty acts, two elephants, four chimps, six dogs, and a python."
Yeah...ditch school and go to Las Vegas to be a whore. But what when the youth will fade ? Won't you feel a bit stupid for knowing little more than how to wear a plume ?
-The Hollywood: Koontz hates Hollywood. If he ever speaks kindly about movies, they're always oldies like Casablanca and Gone with The Wind. I don't want to diminish the value of these masterpieces, but did he really miss ALL the good movies thac came out after the forties have ended ? Not to mention NOT HOLLYWOOD films ? Films that were made OUTSIDE America ? Japanese cinema ? European Cinema ? It's idiotic but here goes:
"During the three years she'd been married to Don Flackberg-film producer, younger brother of Julian-Cass moved in the highest levels of Hollywood society, where she had eventually calculated that of the entire pool of successful actors, directors, studio executives, and producers, 6.5 percent were sane and good, 4.5 percent were sane and evil, and 89 percent were insane and evil."
However:
"(...)high-rise buildings in several major cities, and defending their honor at
chichi Hollywood parties attended by, in Polly's words, "rodent hordes of grasping, horny, drug-crazed, dimwitted, sleazebag movie stars and famous directors."
"Some of them were nice," Cass says.
Polly demurs: "With all respect and affection, Cassie, you would find someone to like even at a convention of cannibal Nazi kitten killers."
To Curtis, Cass says, "After we left Hollywood, I performed an exhaustive analysis of our experiences and determined that six and one-half percent of people in the film business are both sane and good. I will admit that the rest of them are evil, even if another four and one half percent are sane. But it's not fair to condemn the entire community, even if the vast majority of them are mad swine."
THANK'S FOR ENLIGHTENING ME !
Last but not least, the spirituality. Since the late 90's, Koontz always throws in some of his quasi New-Age/Neo-Chrisitan beliefs. Frankly speaking, he's a poor philosopher who offers no rewarding and NEW thoughts but repeats the same shit over and over again. What is behind One Door Away from Heaven ?
"If your heart is closed, then you will find behind that door nothing to light your way. But if your heart is open, you will find behind that door people who, like you, are searching, and you will find the right door together with them. None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another's salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light."
Think this was bad ? Read this.
"For those who despair that their lives are without meaning and without purpose, for those who dwell in a loneliness so terrible that it has withered their hearts, for those who hate because they have no recognition of the destiny they share with all humanity, for those who would squander their lives in self-pity and in self-destruction because they have lost the saving wisdom with which they were born, for all these and many more, hope waits in the dreams of a dog, where the sacred nature of life may be clearly experienced without the all but blinding filter of human need, desire, greed, envy, and endless fear. And here, in dream woods and fields, along the shores of dream seas, with a profound awareness of the playful Presence abiding in all things,
Curtis is able to prove to Leilani what she has thus far only dared to hope is true: that although her mother never loved her, there is One who always has."
So you can't find solace in a plant, hobby, a pet mouse, a car, or (blasphemy) yourself ? I know that GOD is DOG backwards but basing your life on that reversal is a little stupid.
By the way, you know that dogs eat their own waste ? In Koontz novels they write on keyboards though (yeah...and here you thought it was a normal pup!) so a dog ICQ is propably being developed...somewhere. Just in case.
His take on bioethics is also very ignorant. Basically, anyone who disagrees with him is a monster who kills people. Consideration of terminally ill patients, who after exhausting all the options might want (OH NO) to end their sufferings are entirely absent. What about them, Dean ? Don't they deserve to have a choice ? Or are they axe murderers like Dr. Doom ?
How it ends ? The "not quite right" boy turns out to be an alien (really) who can conveniently open locked doors and kill the main adversary, which is exactly what he does. LOL. Sappiness and pathos ensues.
In short: Avoid this book. Pointless, idiotic and poorly written.
This is basically a 700 page long borefest - formulaic characters, formulaic stories, formulaic preaching (The goodness of dogs and the evil of bioethics)
To kick off this brillian review, I'll start with the characters - they are of course scripted, which makes them unrealistic and idiotic and renders the reader unable to feel anything for them - do you care for a bunch of dolls running around ?
There's a girl, Leilani Klonk(yes, yes). Leilani is a 9 year old precocious kid who wears a leg brace and speaks like a 60 year old college professor and practices humor in her spare time. A Polyanna from hell, Leilani shows Koontz's greatest weakness as a writer - inability to create realistic kids. He can't write kids so he just makes them precocious prodigies who talk like Yale graduates. And they're witty. Always. As much as I like Koontz, he's not a funny guy. His jokes are always fake and lame, and when he puts them into the mouths of the dolls whose strings he holds its awful. I'm sure he's a great person, but by saturating his novels with these lame attempts at wit and clever ripostes he doesn't gain anything but a "YAWN" from the reader.
Now the antagonist. Preston Maddoc is a fortysomething scientist who's popular and thus able to commit any crime in the vein of bioethics(yeah baby!). Basically he kills people and believes in aliens. Opposed to Leilani, Preston has the mind of a 3 year old boy and gives people names like "Shitface" or "Slut Queen". I don't know if he was supposed to be a comic character - I certainly though of him that way. And he even gets a nickname - "Dr. Doom". LOL!
The rest of the characters are cardboards employed to play their parts - an seemingly alcoholic woman, who's pretty despite her drinking, the everpresent wise grandmother character who here portrays an aunt, abusive, drug crazy mother (she's actually quite funny) and a "not quite right" boy who is of course more right than all other human waste that dares to disagree with mr. K.
Oh, and there's an PI with a mysterious past and a dead sister.
The writing is horrible. Sparing the idiotic dialogue I'll give you an example of descriptive work, a thing for which I used to admire Koontz.
"In matching Chinese-red silk pajamas with billowy bell-bottom sleeves and pants, standing tall on platform sandals that glitter with midnight-blue rhinestones, their fingernails and toenails no longer azure-blue but crimson, their glossy golden hair swept up in chignons with long spiral curls framing their faces, they glide and turn and twist around the cramped galley with an uncanny awareness of each other's position at all times, exhibiting choreography that might please Busby Berkeley as they whip up a feast of Mandarin and Szechwan specialties."
There are whole pages of stuff like that, which made me wonder - did someone actually edit this book ? Or did Dean kick out his editor after he became a bestselling author ?
He writes like a sophomore English student who just discovered the vast, beautiful land of metaphors and similes. Ugh.
Koontz throws stabs at everyone he doesn't like in his books. Here are some examples:
-The Academics: aside from making the main villain a scientist, he writes moralizing passages like this little story about the partents of two girls:
"Their father, Sidney Spelkenfelter, is a professor of Greek and Roman history at a private college, and his wife, Imogene, teaches art history. Sidney and Imogene are kind and loving parents, but they are also, says Cass, "as naive as goldfish who think the world ends at the bowl." Because their parents were academics, too, Sidney and Imogene have resided ever in tenured security, explaining life to others but living a pale version of it.
Co-valedictorians of their high-school class, Cass and Polly skipped college in favor of Las Vegas. Within a month, they were the centerpiece featheredand- sequined nudes in a major hotel's showroom extravaganza with a cast of seventy-four dancers, twelve showgirls, nine specialty acts, two elephants, four chimps, six dogs, and a python."
Yeah...ditch school and go to Las Vegas to be a whore. But what when the youth will fade ? Won't you feel a bit stupid for knowing little more than how to wear a plume ?
-The Hollywood: Koontz hates Hollywood. If he ever speaks kindly about movies, they're always oldies like Casablanca and Gone with The Wind. I don't want to diminish the value of these masterpieces, but did he really miss ALL the good movies thac came out after the forties have ended ? Not to mention NOT HOLLYWOOD films ? Films that were made OUTSIDE America ? Japanese cinema ? European Cinema ? It's idiotic but here goes:
"During the three years she'd been married to Don Flackberg-film producer, younger brother of Julian-Cass moved in the highest levels of Hollywood society, where she had eventually calculated that of the entire pool of successful actors, directors, studio executives, and producers, 6.5 percent were sane and good, 4.5 percent were sane and evil, and 89 percent were insane and evil."
However:
"(...)high-rise buildings in several major cities, and defending their honor at
chichi Hollywood parties attended by, in Polly's words, "rodent hordes of grasping, horny, drug-crazed, dimwitted, sleazebag movie stars and famous directors."
"Some of them were nice," Cass says.
Polly demurs: "With all respect and affection, Cassie, you would find someone to like even at a convention of cannibal Nazi kitten killers."
To Curtis, Cass says, "After we left Hollywood, I performed an exhaustive analysis of our experiences and determined that six and one-half percent of people in the film business are both sane and good. I will admit that the rest of them are evil, even if another four and one half percent are sane. But it's not fair to condemn the entire community, even if the vast majority of them are mad swine."
THANK'S FOR ENLIGHTENING ME !
Last but not least, the spirituality. Since the late 90's, Koontz always throws in some of his quasi New-Age/Neo-Chrisitan beliefs. Frankly speaking, he's a poor philosopher who offers no rewarding and NEW thoughts but repeats the same shit over and over again. What is behind One Door Away from Heaven ?
"If your heart is closed, then you will find behind that door nothing to light your way. But if your heart is open, you will find behind that door people who, like you, are searching, and you will find the right door together with them. None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another's salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light."
Think this was bad ? Read this.
"For those who despair that their lives are without meaning and without purpose, for those who dwell in a loneliness so terrible that it has withered their hearts, for those who hate because they have no recognition of the destiny they share with all humanity, for those who would squander their lives in self-pity and in self-destruction because they have lost the saving wisdom with which they were born, for all these and many more, hope waits in the dreams of a dog, where the sacred nature of life may be clearly experienced without the all but blinding filter of human need, desire, greed, envy, and endless fear. And here, in dream woods and fields, along the shores of dream seas, with a profound awareness of the playful Presence abiding in all things,
Curtis is able to prove to Leilani what she has thus far only dared to hope is true: that although her mother never loved her, there is One who always has."
So you can't find solace in a plant, hobby, a pet mouse, a car, or (blasphemy) yourself ? I know that GOD is DOG backwards but basing your life on that reversal is a little stupid.
By the way, you know that dogs eat their own waste ? In Koontz novels they write on keyboards though (yeah...and here you thought it was a normal pup!) so a dog ICQ is propably being developed...somewhere. Just in case.
His take on bioethics is also very ignorant. Basically, anyone who disagrees with him is a monster who kills people. Consideration of terminally ill patients, who after exhausting all the options might want (OH NO) to end their sufferings are entirely absent. What about them, Dean ? Don't they deserve to have a choice ? Or are they axe murderers like Dr. Doom ?
How it ends ? The "not quite right" boy turns out to be an alien (really) who can conveniently open locked doors and kill the main adversary, which is exactly what he does. LOL. Sappiness and pathos ensues.
In short: Avoid this book. Pointless, idiotic and poorly written.
July 25, 2024
Wow! I have a lot of old paperbacks in this bin. Yet another lazy girl re-read.
December 13, 2015
I have the phrase "One Door Away from Heaven" tattooed on my left arm.
As a mutant myself and sharing a birthday with the main character, this story means a lot to me. One Door Away From Heaven is in my TOP FIVE of favorite books by Dean Koontz. I would say FRIENDSHIP is the dominant theme in this novel - the kindness, understanding, acceptance and help of genuine friends.
A Few of Many, Favorite Quotes:
The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can't mend fractured hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.
"It's the truth. I couldn't make up anything as weird as what is."
"Sometimes names are destiny."
"Change isn't easy, Micky. Changing the way you live means changing how you think. Changing how you think means changing what you believe about life."
Nevertheless, for reasons that she could not understand, every aspect of this day - the spangled sunshine, the heat, the rumble of the distant freeway traffic, the fragrances of cut grass and sweat-soured coconut oil, three yellow butterflies as bright as gift-box bows - suddenly seemed full of meaning, mystery, and moment.
As a mutant myself and sharing a birthday with the main character, this story means a lot to me. One Door Away From Heaven is in my TOP FIVE of favorite books by Dean Koontz. I would say FRIENDSHIP is the dominant theme in this novel - the kindness, understanding, acceptance and help of genuine friends.
A Few of Many, Favorite Quotes:
The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can't mend fractured hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.
"It's the truth. I couldn't make up anything as weird as what is."
"Sometimes names are destiny."
"Change isn't easy, Micky. Changing the way you live means changing how you think. Changing how you think means changing what you believe about life."
Nevertheless, for reasons that she could not understand, every aspect of this day - the spangled sunshine, the heat, the rumble of the distant freeway traffic, the fragrances of cut grass and sweat-soured coconut oil, three yellow butterflies as bright as gift-box bows - suddenly seemed full of meaning, mystery, and moment.
October 18, 2009
I've been thoroughly enjoying Koontz of late, and "One Door Away from Heaven" is no exception. I liked it best of any of the books outside of the Odd Thomas series.
In "One Door," a variety of unlikely characters are brought together to rescue a disabled 9 year old girl with highly disfunctional parents and an even odder 10 year old boy with some interesting...powers. Central to the plot is the subject of "bioethics," or rather "bio-non-ethics" as it ought to be called. This increasingly influential and strongly Darwinian school of thought defines everyone in terms of either their usefulness or their "quality of life" and taken to its logical extreme is perfectly fine with killing off anyone who doesn't fit the criteria - beginning, end, or even middle of life - so as to increase the "net level of happieness" in the world. Scary stuff. Anyway, the bad guy is a disciple of this school.
As I neared the end of the book I started to wonder anew whether Koontz himself is a follower of any orthodox branch of Christianity. Later research suggested he may be Catholic, which I can buy given his writing. Certainly his worldview is largely Christian: his characters are not afraid of absolutes, take for granted the presence of a Creator, and have no doubts about the existence of both good and evil. It's a refreshing world to read in after a little too much secular-humanist Sci-Fi.
In "One Door," a variety of unlikely characters are brought together to rescue a disabled 9 year old girl with highly disfunctional parents and an even odder 10 year old boy with some interesting...powers. Central to the plot is the subject of "bioethics," or rather "bio-non-ethics" as it ought to be called. This increasingly influential and strongly Darwinian school of thought defines everyone in terms of either their usefulness or their "quality of life" and taken to its logical extreme is perfectly fine with killing off anyone who doesn't fit the criteria - beginning, end, or even middle of life - so as to increase the "net level of happieness" in the world. Scary stuff. Anyway, the bad guy is a disciple of this school.
As I neared the end of the book I started to wonder anew whether Koontz himself is a follower of any orthodox branch of Christianity. Later research suggested he may be Catholic, which I can buy given his writing. Certainly his worldview is largely Christian: his characters are not afraid of absolutes, take for granted the presence of a Creator, and have no doubts about the existence of both good and evil. It's a refreshing world to read in after a little too much secular-humanist Sci-Fi.
October 20, 2020
I really enjoyed this book. I hadn't heard about it or planned to read it, but my wife knows I like Dean Koontz, so she downloaded it on Kindle. It's not as creepy as some of Koontz's stuff, and that's a good thing. I loved all the characters. It has a socially awkward alien boy and his dog that are being chased by the FBI and other aliens (scalawags and worse scalawags). There's a nine year old girl with a drug addict mom and a murderous step-father. There's a young woman who has made a lot of bad choices in life and is trying to turn it around and her aunt who was shot in the head once and tells old movie plots as the story of her life. There's a private investigator who has also made some bad choices and finally there are the amazon former Vegas showgirl twins who are great cooks and handy with firearms. In the end it's a feel good story and I love how Koontz brought all the characters together. It makes me want to get a dog.
July 10, 2018
This book is a freaking door stopper. I read this the first time on a very long flight and since my other books were packed in my luggage I plugged on through this. I think maybe I went hard shrug about it all and said well that's just three stars. Reading it now years later I have no idea how I muddled through this the first time. This book is peak sanctimony Koontz. There's a damn dog and then even more dogs. Koontz does that weird thing he did for a while where he had people with disabilities either physical or mental into super special people which felt wrong in a way. I don't know if you can call it pandering or what, it just felt off and not sincere. There are like four plots in this one (if you can call them that) and a question again about religion versus science, but with no real horror elements.
"One Door Away from Heaven" is about Michelina (Micky) Bellsong a woman with a mysterious past who does what she can to save a young girl she meets. Seriously though, why do most of Koontz's characters have a mysterious past? It takes a while to figure out what happened to Micky, but one can hazard a guess. There is not much there there with Micky. Sorry, not sorry. The other characters read as paper thin too. Micky meets a young girl named Leilani who tells her her life story and at least something comes across to Micky, that the young girl is going to be killed by her stepfather. Micky has a drinking problem, but is still beautiful (I think that is said repeatedly). When she realizes that Leilani is really in danger, she does what she can by following her to keep her safe.
Leilani is a 9 year old precocious child who talks like Einstein. She has a physical disability, but shines (according to another character). I can't even with that since it started to make me think of "The Shining" and Stephen King. I think I have said this before, Koontz cannot write children. He writes them as little Buddhas and it's old. I give King some grief when he writes something that is not 100 percent amazing (still feeling salty about 11/22/63) but the man can and always has been able to write kids.
We also have a PI named Noah who is out to help Micky with her tracking down Leilani.
There is a mysterious boy named Curtis who I hope you like reading him talking about a playful presence a lot. He sucks and I cannot with him. The reveal about Curtis wasn't much of a reveal since I was going for he is really an android for most of the book.
The bad guy seems like he should be going around screeching about cooties most of the time. Preston Maddoc is a scientist (EVIL) who is very popular in the scientific world pushing out his belief in bioethics. He believes in aliens (which don't even get me started) and that those who are not perfect should be murdered. Too bad he is Leilani's stepfather. I think Koontz could have gone at this more subtle. If Koontz wanted to have a real discussion about bioethics as it relates to the poor and people who are not white, have at it. But he turned this into all bioethics is evil/wrong.
There are other characters in this one that I cannot even get into right now. One was Micky's aunt Geneva that also made me roll my eyes. For most of the book everyone doesn't meet up and then Koontz throws them all together in a way that doesn't even make any sense.
The writing didn't work. I think because for some reason Koontz wrote some characters in past tense and others in present tense. It was hard work to even get through this because that drove me up the freaking wall. This one also reminded me a bit about "Intensity" which had another woman who put herself in harm's way to save a young girl.
The flow was awful and every time someone spoke it took like ten pages to make it end. Suffice it to say that the book is just about apparently people spreading the word and there are aliens. That's all I got.
And the book ends with people talking about a riddle and here is the answer which was too much even for me.
My eyes finally stopped rolling. That whole thing went on forever. I don't think that Koontz gets how preachy his books come across and how off-putting it is to read some of his works. I think this was Koontz's way of flipping off his critics cause he manages to tie dogs into being connected to God even more in this one that just made me shake my head.
"One Door Away from Heaven" is about Michelina (Micky) Bellsong a woman with a mysterious past who does what she can to save a young girl she meets. Seriously though, why do most of Koontz's characters have a mysterious past? It takes a while to figure out what happened to Micky, but one can hazard a guess. There is not much there there with Micky. Sorry, not sorry. The other characters read as paper thin too. Micky meets a young girl named Leilani who tells her her life story and at least something comes across to Micky, that the young girl is going to be killed by her stepfather. Micky has a drinking problem, but is still beautiful (I think that is said repeatedly). When she realizes that Leilani is really in danger, she does what she can by following her to keep her safe.
Leilani is a 9 year old precocious child who talks like Einstein. She has a physical disability, but shines (according to another character). I can't even with that since it started to make me think of "The Shining" and Stephen King. I think I have said this before, Koontz cannot write children. He writes them as little Buddhas and it's old. I give King some grief when he writes something that is not 100 percent amazing (still feeling salty about 11/22/63) but the man can and always has been able to write kids.
We also have a PI named Noah who is out to help Micky with her tracking down Leilani.
There is a mysterious boy named Curtis who I hope you like reading him talking about a playful presence a lot. He sucks and I cannot with him. The reveal about Curtis wasn't much of a reveal since I was going for he is really an android for most of the book.
The bad guy seems like he should be going around screeching about cooties most of the time. Preston Maddoc is a scientist (EVIL) who is very popular in the scientific world pushing out his belief in bioethics. He believes in aliens (which don't even get me started) and that those who are not perfect should be murdered. Too bad he is Leilani's stepfather. I think Koontz could have gone at this more subtle. If Koontz wanted to have a real discussion about bioethics as it relates to the poor and people who are not white, have at it. But he turned this into all bioethics is evil/wrong.
There are other characters in this one that I cannot even get into right now. One was Micky's aunt Geneva that also made me roll my eyes. For most of the book everyone doesn't meet up and then Koontz throws them all together in a way that doesn't even make any sense.
The writing didn't work. I think because for some reason Koontz wrote some characters in past tense and others in present tense. It was hard work to even get through this because that drove me up the freaking wall. This one also reminded me a bit about "Intensity" which had another woman who put herself in harm's way to save a young girl.
The flow was awful and every time someone spoke it took like ten pages to make it end. Suffice it to say that the book is just about apparently people spreading the word and there are aliens. That's all I got.
And the book ends with people talking about a riddle and here is the answer which was too much even for me.
"If your heart is closed, then you will find behind that door nothing to light your way. But if your heart is open, you will find behind that door people who, like you, are searching, and you will find the right door together with them. None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another's salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light."
"For those who despair that their lives are without meaning and without purpose, for those who dwell in a loneliness so terrible that it has withered their hearts, for those who hate because they have no recognition of the destiny they share with all humanity, for those who would squander their lives in self-pity and in self-destruction because they have lost the saving wisdom with which they were born, for all these and many more, hope waits in the dreams of a dog, where the sacred nature of life may be clearly experienced without the all but blinding filter of human need, desire, greed, envy, and endless fear. And here, in dream woods and fields, along the shores of dream seas, with a profound awareness of the playful Presence abiding in all things, Curtis is able to prove to Leilani what she has thus far only dared to hope is true: that although her mother never loved her, there is One who always has."
My eyes finally stopped rolling. That whole thing went on forever. I don't think that Koontz gets how preachy his books come across and how off-putting it is to read some of his works. I think this was Koontz's way of flipping off his critics cause he manages to tie dogs into being connected to God even more in this one that just made me shake my head.
May 31, 2012
I remember exactly where I was when I read this one. I was in the federal transfer center at Oklahoma City. This is where they temporarily keep prisoners when they are moving from one prison to another. They only have two carts of books for about 150 inmates. THat's about how many are in each pod. On top of that, most prisoners—myself included—keep books from these two carts in their rooms so they're available when we finish the book we're currently reading. So new books show up on the cart when a prisoner leaves and the four or five books that he was hoarding make it to the carts. One day during breakfast, I glanced at the cart and saw a Koontz book on there that looked brand new. It was a thick one too. That's how I usually rated my books then. The thicker, the better. Well, I picked it up and moved it to my collection at my cell, then got back in the breakfast line. The next day I started reading it and I had to look at the cover again to make sure I was reading Koontz. This book blew me away. The girl with her physical problems, the alien boy who took everything literally, the antagonist, and all the other characters got to me. The story-telling was awesome. The other inmates thought I was anti-social because I just read all the time. Well, that part is kinda true. Anyway, this book is great and I highly recommend it to anyone.
July 22, 2020
One of Koontz's better stories. 3 1/2 - 4 stars.
Though he continues to elaborate on things that don't need explanation. These grossly exaggerated explanations make a 300 page story 700 pages. So expect to feel a little frustration when reading. :-D
Though he continues to elaborate on things that don't need explanation. These grossly exaggerated explanations make a 300 page story 700 pages. So expect to feel a little frustration when reading. :-D
May 14, 2022
This is one of Koontz's longest and most leisurely novels, with mush philosophizing about religion and the nature of good and evil and other such weighty subjects. All of his most familiar character tropes are on full display, and the nuanced and shifting narrative style makes it a good pick for those who are already fans of his works. It's not among his most memorable books for me- the details shift and blur in my memory- but I enjoyed sitting and soaking it all in while it lasted. My non-spoilery thought is that it's a good, hopeful mash-up of suspense, humor, and intrigue, but requires patience.
Read
March 6, 2016DNF at 44 %. That's a bit long to read and realize nothing much has happened and that you stopped wishing that something would...
So, quite close to half of this rather long book, we are told three different stories with no converging in sight. None of these stories are going anywhere and quite a few of the chapters I've managed through could have been dropped with very little missed. Or replaced by a couple of sentences, then nothing at all would have been lost. We have an extremely precocious young girl who makes Rory of Gilmore Girl's fame seem tongue-tied, a 'special', highly intelligent boy that is chased for some reason. He seems to be extremely well-versed in the ways of the world, except for some basic simple concepts that have passed him by completely - which sets the field for many fun and/or dramatic situations. He also meets and befriends a very loyal dog. Edward Lorn, my buddy reading awesome buddy, tells me that this is so trademark later years Koonz so it's kind of sad. I can relate, I have no further interest in these characters than half a book. The character who ruined my last attempt (and made this book stay untouched on a second row in my bookshelf for years); the extremely good-and-not-afraid-to-come-out-and-say-so hero (I met him in Seize the Night) had mercifully enough not showed his sincere and somber face up until this page count, though. Anyway, I started to realize I did not care at all finding out what was going to happen (if anything was, eventually) and so another one for the DNF shelf.
I'm convinced that Koontz did write great books once (I have read Phantoms a large number of times and Strangers almost as many. Midnight I remember as good too. I cannot think my taste has changed so much, so I presume to like these still). A quick review seems to point at the books to read are published in the 80's, but Edward warns me, I may hit a landmine here as well. So, for any future DK-adventures I'll be sure to follow this basic strategy:
Published 198x - Proceed with caution
Published 199x - Be afraid - be very, very afraid
Published in this millennia - Not for love nor money
So, quite close to half of this rather long book, we are told three different stories with no converging in sight. None of these stories are going anywhere and quite a few of the chapters I've managed through could have been dropped with very little missed. Or replaced by a couple of sentences, then nothing at all would have been lost. We have an extremely precocious young girl who makes Rory of Gilmore Girl's fame seem tongue-tied, a 'special', highly intelligent boy that is chased for some reason. He seems to be extremely well-versed in the ways of the world, except for some basic simple concepts that have passed him by completely - which sets the field for many fun and/or dramatic situations. He also meets and befriends a very loyal dog. Edward Lorn, my buddy reading awesome buddy, tells me that this is so trademark later years Koonz so it's kind of sad. I can relate, I have no further interest in these characters than half a book. The character who ruined my last attempt (and made this book stay untouched on a second row in my bookshelf for years); the extremely good-and-not-afraid-to-come-out-and-say-so hero (I met him in Seize the Night) had mercifully enough not showed his sincere and somber face up until this page count, though. Anyway, I started to realize I did not care at all finding out what was going to happen (if anything was, eventually) and so another one for the DNF shelf.
I'm convinced that Koontz did write great books once (I have read Phantoms a large number of times and Strangers almost as many. Midnight I remember as good too. I cannot think my taste has changed so much, so I presume to like these still). A quick review seems to point at the books to read are published in the 80's, but Edward warns me, I may hit a landmine here as well. So, for any future DK-adventures I'll be sure to follow this basic strategy:
Published 198x - Proceed with caution
Published 199x - Be afraid - be very, very afraid
Published in this millennia - Not for love nor money
April 6, 2020
A quirky tale of connection.
I have the phrase "One Door Away from Heaven" tattooed on my left arm.
As a mutant myself and sharing a birthday with the main character, this story means a lot to me. One Door Away From Heaven is in my TOP FIVE of favorite books by Dean Koontz. I would say FRIENDSHIP is the dominant theme in this novel - the kindness, understanding, acceptance and help of genuine friends.
Favorite Passages:
The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can't mend fractured hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.
________
"It's the truth. I couldn't make up anything as weird as what is."
____
"Sometimes names are destiny."
____
"Change isn't easy, Micky. Changing the way you live means changing how you think. Changing how you think means changing what you believe about life."
____
Nevertheless, for reasons that she could not understand, every aspect of this day - the spangled sunshine, the heat, the rumble of the distant freeway traffic, the fragrances of cut grass and sweat-soured coconut oil, three yellow butterflies as bright as gift-box bows - suddenly seemed full of meaning, mystery, and moment.
____
. . . she had the curious and unsettling sensation of movement within, of a turning in her heart and mind, toward a new point on the compass.
____
"You'll have to forgive me, Leilani. I've had these memory problems now and then, ever since I was shot in the head. A few wires go scrambled up here" - she tapped her right temple - " and sometimes old movies seem as real to me as my own past."
____
"Old Sinsemilla fancies herself an artist with a camera, and she has this artistic compulsion to take pictures of road kill when we're traveling. At dinner sometimes she likes to talk about what she saw squashed on the highway that day."
____
For an instant, in the girl's lustrous blue eyes, behind the twin mirror images of the window and its burden of smoldering summer-evening light, behind the smoky reflections of the layered kitchen shadows, something seemed to turn with horrid laziness, like a body twisting slowly, slowly back and forth at the end of a hangman's noose. Leilani looked away almost at once, and yet on the strength of a single Budweiser, Micky imagined that she had glimpsed a soul suspended over an abyss.
____
Like a sylph she had come; and after she turned the corner at the far end of the hallway, disappearing into the elevator alcove, the path that she had followed seemed to be charged with some supernatural energy, as the aura of an elemental spirit might linger after its visitation.
____
"At least my real dad isn't a murderer like my current pseudofather - or as far as I know, he isn't. Is your dad a murderer?"
____
In spite of the girl's jocular tone, her words were wasps and the truth in them appeared to sting her, sharp as venom.
____
Sometime during the two days she'd known Leilani , Micky arrived, as though by whirlwind, in a strange territory. She'd been journeying through a land of mirrors that initially appeared to be as baffling as unreal as a funhouse, and yet repeatedly she had encountered reflections of herself so excruciatingly precise in their details and of such explicit depth that she turned away from them in revulsion or in anger, or in fear. The clear-eyed, steel-supported girl, larky and lurching, seemed at first to be a fabulist whose flamboyant fantasies rivaled Dorothy's dreams of Oz; however, Micky could get no glimpse of yellow bricks on this road, and here, now, in the lingering sour scent of warm beer, in this small kitchen where only a trinity of candle flames held back the insistent sinuous shadows, with the sudden sound of a toilet flushing elsewhere in the trailer, she was stricken by the terrible perception that under Leilani's mismatched feet had never been anything other then the rough track of reality.
As though privy to Micky's thoughts, the girl said, "Everything I've ever told you is the truth."
Outside a shriek.
Micky looked to the open window, where the last murky glow of the drowning twilight radiated weak purple beams through black tides of incoming night.
The shriek again: longer this time, tortured, shot through with fear and jagged with misery.
"Old Sinsemilla," said Leilani.
________
A coincidence, however, is frequently a glimpse of a pattern otherwise hidden. His heart tells him indisputably what his mind resists: This is no random event, but part of the elaborate design in a tapestry, and at the center of the design is he himself, caught and murdered.
____
Micky said, "It's hard to make up anything as weird as what is."
____
"Go, go, go!" Curtis urges, because the night has grown strange, and is now a great black beast with a million searching eyes. Motion is commotion, and distraction buys time, and time - not mere distance - is the key to escape, to freedom, and to being Curtis Hammond. "Go, go, go!"
____
By the time that Leilani rose from the kitchen table to leave Geneva's trailer, she was ashamed of herself, and honest enough to admit to the shame, though dishonest enough to try to avoid facing up to the true cause of it.
____
The wall clock glowed, but it displayed the wrong time.
In spite of the slender red hand sweeping sixty moments per minute form the clock face, the flow of time seemed to have been dammed into a still pool. Saturated by silence, the house brimmed also with an unnerving expectancy, as though some bulwark were about to crack, permitting a violent flood to sweep everything away.
____
In the closet: no Mom, no puke, no blood, no hidden passageway leading to a magical kingdom where everyone was beautiful and rich and happy. Leilani didn't actually search for the passageway, but based on past experience, she made the logical assumption that it wasn't there; as a much younger girl, she had often expected to find a secret door to fantastic other lands, but she had been routinely disappointed, so she had decided that if any such door existed, it would have to find her. Besides, if this closet were the equivalent of a bus station between California and a glorious domain of fun-loving wizards, surely there would be crumpled wrappers from weird and unknown brands candy discarded by traveling trolls or at least a pile of elf droppings, but the closet held nothing more exotic than one dead cockroach.
____
Sinsemilla liked to sit alone in the dark, sometimes trying to communicate with the spirit world, sometimes just talking to herself.
Leilani listened intently. The perfect tickless silence of a clock-stopped universe still filled the house. Bleeding, of course, is a quiet process.
In spite of a free-spirited tendency to be unrestrained in all things, Sinsemilla had thus far restricted her artistic scalpel work to her left arm. A six-inch-long, two-inch-wide snowflake pattern carefully connected scars, as intricate as lacework, decorated or disfigured her forearm, depending on your taste in these matters. The smooth, almost shiny, scar tissue glowed whiter than the surrounding skin, an impressive tone-on-tone design, although the contrast became more pronounced when she tanned.
____
Intergalactic spacecraft, alien abductions, an extraterrestrial base hidden on the dark side of the moon, supersecret human and alien crossbreeding programs, saucer-eyed gray aliens who can walk through walls and levitate and play concert-quality clarinet with their butts . . .
____
Some serpents were more frightening than others: the specimens that didn't come in ventilated pet-shop boxes, that never slithered through any field or forest, serpents invisible that inhabited the deeper regions of your mind. Until now, she hadn't been aware that she herself provided a nest for such potent snakes of fear and anger, or that her heart could be inflamed and set racing by their sudden bite, so quickly reducing her to these spasms, these half-mad headlong frenzies, out of control.
Like a gargoyle above, Sinsemilla leaned over the footboard of the bed, her face shadowed but her head haloed by red lamplight, glittery-eyed with excitement. "Thingy, him a hard-ass stubborn little crawly boy."
___
Tears always punctuated the conclusions of her bedtime stories. When she told fairy tales, the classic yarns on which they were based could be recognized, although she fractured the narratives so badly that they made no sense. Snow White was likely to wind up dwarfless in a carriage that turned into a pumpkin pulled by dragons; and poor Cinderella might dance herself to death in a pair of red shoes while baking blackbirds in a pie for Rumpelstiltskin. Loss and calamity were the lessons of her stories. Sinsemilla's versions of Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm were deeply disturbing, but sometimes she recounted instead her true-life adventures before Lukipela and Leilani were born, which had more hair-raising effect than any tales ever written about ogres, trolls, and goblins.
So goodbye to Scooby, goodbye to Buzz, to Donald in his sailor suit - and hello, Darkness, my old friend.
___
Leilani much preferred Sinsemilla's screwed-up fairly tales to Preson's familiar soft-spoken rant, even if, when Beauty and the Beast came to the rescue of Goldilocks, Beauty was torn to pieces by the bears, and the Beast's dark side was thrilled by the bears' savagery, motivating him to slaughter Goldilocks and to eat her kidneys, and even if the bears and the maddened Beast then joined forces with the Big Bad Wolf and launched a brutal attack on the home of three very unfortunate little pigs.
___
"That there your dog?"
"Yes, sir."
"He be vicious?"
She be not, sir."
"Say what?"
"Say she, sir."
"You stupid or somethin'?"
"Somethin', I guess."
____
The sooner he gets out of Utah, the better.
____
"Boy, you 'member way to hell back there at the pump, when I asked was you stupid or somethin'?"
"Yes, sir, I remember."
"An' you 'member what you said?"
"Yes, sir, I said I guessed I was somethin'."
"Ever a fool was to ask you that question again, boy, you'd be better advised to tell 'em stupid!" Pounding the steering wheel again, he's off on another rant. "Shove a bottle rocket in my butt an' call me Yankee Doodle!"
____
What a wonderfully unpredictable world it is, Micky, when being shot in the head can have an upside. In spite of an embarrassing moment of confusion now and then, it's delightful to have so many glamorous and romantic memories to draw upon in my old age! I'm not recommending brain damage, mind you, but without my quirky little short circuit, I would never have loved and been loved by Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart, and I'd certainly never have had that wonderful experience in Ireland with John Wayne!
____
"Well, we rarely have cola in the fridge. Old Sinsemilla says caffeine inhibits development of your natural telepathic ability."
"Then you must be a terrific little mind reader."
"Scarily good. . . "
____
"Leilani, would you like a big fat sugar cookie?"
"Yes, thank you."
"So would I. Very much. Unfortunately we don't have any. Some nice crisp cinnamon cookies would be good too. How about cinnamon cookies with vanilla Cokes?"
"You've talked me into it."
"We don't have any of those, either, I'm afraid." Geneva sipped her drink, pondered a moment. "Do you think chocolate-almond cookies would go with vanilla Cokes?
"I'm reluctant to have an opinion, Mrs. D."
"Really? Why's that, dear?"
"It seems pointless somehow."
"Too bad. Not to brag, but my chocolate-almond cookies are quite wonderful."
"Do you have any?"
"Six dozen."
"More than enough, thank you."
Geneva brought a plate of the treats to the table.
Leilani sampled a cookie. "Phenomenal. And they go with vanilla Cokes just fine. But these aren't almonds. They're pecans."
"Yes, I know. I don't particularly care for almonds, so when I make chocolate-almond cookies, I use pecans instead."
____
"Strictly speaking, it's not really a goiter. It's a tumor, and because it's benign, she won't have it removed. Clarissa doesn't trust doctors, and given her history with them, who can blame her? But she just lets it hang there, getting bigger. Even if they could cope with her age and weight, prison officials would worry about the goiter scaring the other inmates."
____
Carrying the shotgun, Polly went to the door, took a deep breath, as she'd always taken just before she had disembarked, nude, from the flying saucer and had descended the neon stairs in that Las Vegas extravaganza, and she stepped into a prairie night turned as strange as any land reached by rabbit hole.
____
"So if Gaea smiles on us, we'll have more than one miracle baby. Two, three, maybe a litter." She grinned mischievously and winked. "Maybe I'll just curl up on a blanket in the corner, like a true bitch, with all my little puppies squirming against me, so many tiny hungry mouths competing for just two tits."
____
"I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!"
"What does that even mean?" Leilani asked.
"It means - who else but your own mama is cool enough to bring a new human race into the world, a psychic humanity bonded to Gaea? I'll be the mother of the future, Lani, the new Eve."
____
Elsewhere, the California dream might still have a glowing tan; but here it had blistered, peeled, and faded.
____
"Your work is so exciting. If I could live my life again, I'd be a private investigator, too. You call yourselves dicks, don't you?"
"Maybe some do, ma'am," Noah Farrel said, "but I call myself a PI. Or used to."
___
The warm afternoon is gradually cooling as the clouds pour out of the west, roll down the rocky peaks, and, trapped between the mountains, condense into ever darker shades of gray.
The day smells of the sheltering pines, of the forest mast, of rain brewing.
Death-still, the air is also heavy with expectancy, as if in an instant, the eerily deep calm might whip itself into a raging tumult.
____
"My numbies. Need my numbies. Took some stuff already, but wasn't numbies. Weirded me. Must've been bad shit. Supposed to take me after Alice down the rabbit hole, but it weirded me into some snake hole instead."
"What numbies do you want? Where are they?"
Her mother pointed toward the built-in dresser. "Bottom drawer. Blue bottle. Numbies to chase the head snakes out."
Leilani found the pills. "How many do you want? One? Two? Ten?"
"One numbie now. One for later. Later's gonna come. Mommy's got a bad day goin', Lani. Snaky day goin' here. You don't know trouble till you've been your mommy."
____
Curtis's mother always said that the better you know others, the better you will know yourself, and that in the fullest sharing of experience, we learn the wisdom of a world. More important still, from the sharing of experience, we learn that every life is unique and precious, that no one is expendable: and with this discovery, we acquire the humility that we must have to live our lives well, with grace, and with gratitude for the gift of breath.
I have the phrase "One Door Away from Heaven" tattooed on my left arm.
As a mutant myself and sharing a birthday with the main character, this story means a lot to me. One Door Away From Heaven is in my TOP FIVE of favorite books by Dean Koontz. I would say FRIENDSHIP is the dominant theme in this novel - the kindness, understanding, acceptance and help of genuine friends.
Favorite Passages:
The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can't mend fractured hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.
________
"It's the truth. I couldn't make up anything as weird as what is."
____
"Sometimes names are destiny."
____
"Change isn't easy, Micky. Changing the way you live means changing how you think. Changing how you think means changing what you believe about life."
____
Nevertheless, for reasons that she could not understand, every aspect of this day - the spangled sunshine, the heat, the rumble of the distant freeway traffic, the fragrances of cut grass and sweat-soured coconut oil, three yellow butterflies as bright as gift-box bows - suddenly seemed full of meaning, mystery, and moment.
____
. . . she had the curious and unsettling sensation of movement within, of a turning in her heart and mind, toward a new point on the compass.
____
"You'll have to forgive me, Leilani. I've had these memory problems now and then, ever since I was shot in the head. A few wires go scrambled up here" - she tapped her right temple - " and sometimes old movies seem as real to me as my own past."
____
"Old Sinsemilla fancies herself an artist with a camera, and she has this artistic compulsion to take pictures of road kill when we're traveling. At dinner sometimes she likes to talk about what she saw squashed on the highway that day."
____
For an instant, in the girl's lustrous blue eyes, behind the twin mirror images of the window and its burden of smoldering summer-evening light, behind the smoky reflections of the layered kitchen shadows, something seemed to turn with horrid laziness, like a body twisting slowly, slowly back and forth at the end of a hangman's noose. Leilani looked away almost at once, and yet on the strength of a single Budweiser, Micky imagined that she had glimpsed a soul suspended over an abyss.
____
Like a sylph she had come; and after she turned the corner at the far end of the hallway, disappearing into the elevator alcove, the path that she had followed seemed to be charged with some supernatural energy, as the aura of an elemental spirit might linger after its visitation.
____
"At least my real dad isn't a murderer like my current pseudofather - or as far as I know, he isn't. Is your dad a murderer?"
____
In spite of the girl's jocular tone, her words were wasps and the truth in them appeared to sting her, sharp as venom.
____
Sometime during the two days she'd known Leilani , Micky arrived, as though by whirlwind, in a strange territory. She'd been journeying through a land of mirrors that initially appeared to be as baffling as unreal as a funhouse, and yet repeatedly she had encountered reflections of herself so excruciatingly precise in their details and of such explicit depth that she turned away from them in revulsion or in anger, or in fear. The clear-eyed, steel-supported girl, larky and lurching, seemed at first to be a fabulist whose flamboyant fantasies rivaled Dorothy's dreams of Oz; however, Micky could get no glimpse of yellow bricks on this road, and here, now, in the lingering sour scent of warm beer, in this small kitchen where only a trinity of candle flames held back the insistent sinuous shadows, with the sudden sound of a toilet flushing elsewhere in the trailer, she was stricken by the terrible perception that under Leilani's mismatched feet had never been anything other then the rough track of reality.
As though privy to Micky's thoughts, the girl said, "Everything I've ever told you is the truth."
Outside a shriek.
Micky looked to the open window, where the last murky glow of the drowning twilight radiated weak purple beams through black tides of incoming night.
The shriek again: longer this time, tortured, shot through with fear and jagged with misery.
"Old Sinsemilla," said Leilani.
________
A coincidence, however, is frequently a glimpse of a pattern otherwise hidden. His heart tells him indisputably what his mind resists: This is no random event, but part of the elaborate design in a tapestry, and at the center of the design is he himself, caught and murdered.
____
Micky said, "It's hard to make up anything as weird as what is."
____
"Go, go, go!" Curtis urges, because the night has grown strange, and is now a great black beast with a million searching eyes. Motion is commotion, and distraction buys time, and time - not mere distance - is the key to escape, to freedom, and to being Curtis Hammond. "Go, go, go!"
____
By the time that Leilani rose from the kitchen table to leave Geneva's trailer, she was ashamed of herself, and honest enough to admit to the shame, though dishonest enough to try to avoid facing up to the true cause of it.
____
The wall clock glowed, but it displayed the wrong time.
In spite of the slender red hand sweeping sixty moments per minute form the clock face, the flow of time seemed to have been dammed into a still pool. Saturated by silence, the house brimmed also with an unnerving expectancy, as though some bulwark were about to crack, permitting a violent flood to sweep everything away.
____
In the closet: no Mom, no puke, no blood, no hidden passageway leading to a magical kingdom where everyone was beautiful and rich and happy. Leilani didn't actually search for the passageway, but based on past experience, she made the logical assumption that it wasn't there; as a much younger girl, she had often expected to find a secret door to fantastic other lands, but she had been routinely disappointed, so she had decided that if any such door existed, it would have to find her. Besides, if this closet were the equivalent of a bus station between California and a glorious domain of fun-loving wizards, surely there would be crumpled wrappers from weird and unknown brands candy discarded by traveling trolls or at least a pile of elf droppings, but the closet held nothing more exotic than one dead cockroach.
____
Sinsemilla liked to sit alone in the dark, sometimes trying to communicate with the spirit world, sometimes just talking to herself.
Leilani listened intently. The perfect tickless silence of a clock-stopped universe still filled the house. Bleeding, of course, is a quiet process.
In spite of a free-spirited tendency to be unrestrained in all things, Sinsemilla had thus far restricted her artistic scalpel work to her left arm. A six-inch-long, two-inch-wide snowflake pattern carefully connected scars, as intricate as lacework, decorated or disfigured her forearm, depending on your taste in these matters. The smooth, almost shiny, scar tissue glowed whiter than the surrounding skin, an impressive tone-on-tone design, although the contrast became more pronounced when she tanned.
____
Intergalactic spacecraft, alien abductions, an extraterrestrial base hidden on the dark side of the moon, supersecret human and alien crossbreeding programs, saucer-eyed gray aliens who can walk through walls and levitate and play concert-quality clarinet with their butts . . .
____
Some serpents were more frightening than others: the specimens that didn't come in ventilated pet-shop boxes, that never slithered through any field or forest, serpents invisible that inhabited the deeper regions of your mind. Until now, she hadn't been aware that she herself provided a nest for such potent snakes of fear and anger, or that her heart could be inflamed and set racing by their sudden bite, so quickly reducing her to these spasms, these half-mad headlong frenzies, out of control.
Like a gargoyle above, Sinsemilla leaned over the footboard of the bed, her face shadowed but her head haloed by red lamplight, glittery-eyed with excitement. "Thingy, him a hard-ass stubborn little crawly boy."
___
Tears always punctuated the conclusions of her bedtime stories. When she told fairy tales, the classic yarns on which they were based could be recognized, although she fractured the narratives so badly that they made no sense. Snow White was likely to wind up dwarfless in a carriage that turned into a pumpkin pulled by dragons; and poor Cinderella might dance herself to death in a pair of red shoes while baking blackbirds in a pie for Rumpelstiltskin. Loss and calamity were the lessons of her stories. Sinsemilla's versions of Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm were deeply disturbing, but sometimes she recounted instead her true-life adventures before Lukipela and Leilani were born, which had more hair-raising effect than any tales ever written about ogres, trolls, and goblins.
So goodbye to Scooby, goodbye to Buzz, to Donald in his sailor suit - and hello, Darkness, my old friend.
___
Leilani much preferred Sinsemilla's screwed-up fairly tales to Preson's familiar soft-spoken rant, even if, when Beauty and the Beast came to the rescue of Goldilocks, Beauty was torn to pieces by the bears, and the Beast's dark side was thrilled by the bears' savagery, motivating him to slaughter Goldilocks and to eat her kidneys, and even if the bears and the maddened Beast then joined forces with the Big Bad Wolf and launched a brutal attack on the home of three very unfortunate little pigs.
___
"That there your dog?"
"Yes, sir."
"He be vicious?"
She be not, sir."
"Say what?"
"Say she, sir."
"You stupid or somethin'?"
"Somethin', I guess."
____
The sooner he gets out of Utah, the better.
____
"Boy, you 'member way to hell back there at the pump, when I asked was you stupid or somethin'?"
"Yes, sir, I remember."
"An' you 'member what you said?"
"Yes, sir, I said I guessed I was somethin'."
"Ever a fool was to ask you that question again, boy, you'd be better advised to tell 'em stupid!" Pounding the steering wheel again, he's off on another rant. "Shove a bottle rocket in my butt an' call me Yankee Doodle!"
____
What a wonderfully unpredictable world it is, Micky, when being shot in the head can have an upside. In spite of an embarrassing moment of confusion now and then, it's delightful to have so many glamorous and romantic memories to draw upon in my old age! I'm not recommending brain damage, mind you, but without my quirky little short circuit, I would never have loved and been loved by Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart, and I'd certainly never have had that wonderful experience in Ireland with John Wayne!
____
"Well, we rarely have cola in the fridge. Old Sinsemilla says caffeine inhibits development of your natural telepathic ability."
"Then you must be a terrific little mind reader."
"Scarily good. . . "
____
"Leilani, would you like a big fat sugar cookie?"
"Yes, thank you."
"So would I. Very much. Unfortunately we don't have any. Some nice crisp cinnamon cookies would be good too. How about cinnamon cookies with vanilla Cokes?"
"You've talked me into it."
"We don't have any of those, either, I'm afraid." Geneva sipped her drink, pondered a moment. "Do you think chocolate-almond cookies would go with vanilla Cokes?
"I'm reluctant to have an opinion, Mrs. D."
"Really? Why's that, dear?"
"It seems pointless somehow."
"Too bad. Not to brag, but my chocolate-almond cookies are quite wonderful."
"Do you have any?"
"Six dozen."
"More than enough, thank you."
Geneva brought a plate of the treats to the table.
Leilani sampled a cookie. "Phenomenal. And they go with vanilla Cokes just fine. But these aren't almonds. They're pecans."
"Yes, I know. I don't particularly care for almonds, so when I make chocolate-almond cookies, I use pecans instead."
____
"Strictly speaking, it's not really a goiter. It's a tumor, and because it's benign, she won't have it removed. Clarissa doesn't trust doctors, and given her history with them, who can blame her? But she just lets it hang there, getting bigger. Even if they could cope with her age and weight, prison officials would worry about the goiter scaring the other inmates."
____
Carrying the shotgun, Polly went to the door, took a deep breath, as she'd always taken just before she had disembarked, nude, from the flying saucer and had descended the neon stairs in that Las Vegas extravaganza, and she stepped into a prairie night turned as strange as any land reached by rabbit hole.
____
"So if Gaea smiles on us, we'll have more than one miracle baby. Two, three, maybe a litter." She grinned mischievously and winked. "Maybe I'll just curl up on a blanket in the corner, like a true bitch, with all my little puppies squirming against me, so many tiny hungry mouths competing for just two tits."
____
"I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!"
"What does that even mean?" Leilani asked.
"It means - who else but your own mama is cool enough to bring a new human race into the world, a psychic humanity bonded to Gaea? I'll be the mother of the future, Lani, the new Eve."
____
Elsewhere, the California dream might still have a glowing tan; but here it had blistered, peeled, and faded.
____
"Your work is so exciting. If I could live my life again, I'd be a private investigator, too. You call yourselves dicks, don't you?"
"Maybe some do, ma'am," Noah Farrel said, "but I call myself a PI. Or used to."
___
The warm afternoon is gradually cooling as the clouds pour out of the west, roll down the rocky peaks, and, trapped between the mountains, condense into ever darker shades of gray.
The day smells of the sheltering pines, of the forest mast, of rain brewing.
Death-still, the air is also heavy with expectancy, as if in an instant, the eerily deep calm might whip itself into a raging tumult.
____
"My numbies. Need my numbies. Took some stuff already, but wasn't numbies. Weirded me. Must've been bad shit. Supposed to take me after Alice down the rabbit hole, but it weirded me into some snake hole instead."
"What numbies do you want? Where are they?"
Her mother pointed toward the built-in dresser. "Bottom drawer. Blue bottle. Numbies to chase the head snakes out."
Leilani found the pills. "How many do you want? One? Two? Ten?"
"One numbie now. One for later. Later's gonna come. Mommy's got a bad day goin', Lani. Snaky day goin' here. You don't know trouble till you've been your mommy."
____
Curtis's mother always said that the better you know others, the better you will know yourself, and that in the fullest sharing of experience, we learn the wisdom of a world. More important still, from the sharing of experience, we learn that every life is unique and precious, that no one is expendable: and with this discovery, we acquire the humility that we must have to live our lives well, with grace, and with gratitude for the gift of breath.
June 5, 2012
This book made me feel all soft and squishy inside. As this wasn't normal, I figured something was horribly amiss with my internal workings, so I went and had a lie down. I dreamed about being attacked by thousands of liliputian puppies who swarmed all over me and licked and drooled over my face and panted their stinking street- carnivore breath all over me. They were covered in mud, feces and other unmentionables. It was a horrible experience.
Dean Koontz. What to say? He's obviously a family man. He loves dogs. Every sensible woman carries a gun or three in her purse. The good people of the world are unreservedly good, cleaned up their bad habits due to "hard love", and of course they also love dogs. The bad people probably watch exploitation movies, listen to heavy metal and love cats, and they go to or teach at liberal universities. I'm not even sure Koontz knows what bio-ethics really is, because he seems to believe the whole field is out to prove, as a concerted and well-honed body, that it is ok to kill disabled people; that it's ethical because you'd really be doing them a favour. I must confess to having not really enjoyed my university bio-ethics class and that I probably spent most of it talking to girls or reading novels, but I feel that he's indirectly doing my poor professor an injustice and that this really wasn't the gist at all. Maybe Koontz's bio-ethics teacher was Joseph Mengell? He has no excuse though; now a million shrill housewives and bored truck drivers will be going around yelling about bio-ethics, thinking that's really what it's all about and Mr. Koontz has got it pegged!
These mainstream "genre" books are funny. Inevitably I suspect the vast majority of their readers would not touch fantasy, science fiction or horror from some smaller press, and would scoff if you tried to discuss the plots of such books with them. "Unrealistic"!, "childish!", "space cadet stuff!", they might say. Well, let's try the JM Casey Version of the dust jacket blurb for this Koontz potboiler, then:
An adorable little nine-year-old girl with a leg brace and a genius IQ is being kept in a motor home with her drugged-up mum and her sinister professor boyfriend, named Dr. Doom. A cool lady of the late twenties persuasion and her nice auntie, who makes great apple pie, are going to be her surrogate parents, once they decide what a treasure she really is. But can they lead her away from Dr. Doom and the raving druggie? Meanwhile, an innocent and good extra-terrestrial shapeshifter is on the run from criminal and bad extra-terrestrial shapeshifters, and finds time to Love a Dog and befriend wacky Vegas showgirls with guns, and find out what it means to be human. Also also, what will happen to the alcoholic ex-cop and his braindead sister? Will he exact vengeance on the fan club of the evil bio-ethicists and their heinous creed? Read the book and find out! And Love Dogs!
Finally, the ending. Oh gosh, the ending. Somebody pulled the three dangling plot threads into some kind of pulsing knot with a dog tongue in the centre of it. It made a yapping noise and suddenly a lady who only appeared on page 30 or so showed up to give everyone a fat load of cash so they could start up some kind of squealy squishy dog-loving survivalist community. There's lots of rolling around and squealing and Praise the Lord-ing and Dog Damn it all, I can't believe this guy sells books. Oh, I guess I can, with a sigh.
P.S.: I really do like dogs, just not as much as Mr. Koontz does. I'm going to sit around with my blood-thirsty cat and watch Faces of Death now. Muahahahahaha.
Dean Koontz. What to say? He's obviously a family man. He loves dogs. Every sensible woman carries a gun or three in her purse. The good people of the world are unreservedly good, cleaned up their bad habits due to "hard love", and of course they also love dogs. The bad people probably watch exploitation movies, listen to heavy metal and love cats, and they go to or teach at liberal universities. I'm not even sure Koontz knows what bio-ethics really is, because he seems to believe the whole field is out to prove, as a concerted and well-honed body, that it is ok to kill disabled people; that it's ethical because you'd really be doing them a favour. I must confess to having not really enjoyed my university bio-ethics class and that I probably spent most of it talking to girls or reading novels, but I feel that he's indirectly doing my poor professor an injustice and that this really wasn't the gist at all. Maybe Koontz's bio-ethics teacher was Joseph Mengell? He has no excuse though; now a million shrill housewives and bored truck drivers will be going around yelling about bio-ethics, thinking that's really what it's all about and Mr. Koontz has got it pegged!
These mainstream "genre" books are funny. Inevitably I suspect the vast majority of their readers would not touch fantasy, science fiction or horror from some smaller press, and would scoff if you tried to discuss the plots of such books with them. "Unrealistic"!, "childish!", "space cadet stuff!", they might say. Well, let's try the JM Casey Version of the dust jacket blurb for this Koontz potboiler, then:
An adorable little nine-year-old girl with a leg brace and a genius IQ is being kept in a motor home with her drugged-up mum and her sinister professor boyfriend, named Dr. Doom. A cool lady of the late twenties persuasion and her nice auntie, who makes great apple pie, are going to be her surrogate parents, once they decide what a treasure she really is. But can they lead her away from Dr. Doom and the raving druggie? Meanwhile, an innocent and good extra-terrestrial shapeshifter is on the run from criminal and bad extra-terrestrial shapeshifters, and finds time to Love a Dog and befriend wacky Vegas showgirls with guns, and find out what it means to be human. Also also, what will happen to the alcoholic ex-cop and his braindead sister? Will he exact vengeance on the fan club of the evil bio-ethicists and their heinous creed? Read the book and find out! And Love Dogs!
Finally, the ending. Oh gosh, the ending. Somebody pulled the three dangling plot threads into some kind of pulsing knot with a dog tongue in the centre of it. It made a yapping noise and suddenly a lady who only appeared on page 30 or so showed up to give everyone a fat load of cash so they could start up some kind of squealy squishy dog-loving survivalist community. There's lots of rolling around and squealing and Praise the Lord-ing and Dog Damn it all, I can't believe this guy sells books. Oh, I guess I can, with a sigh.
P.S.: I really do like dogs, just not as much as Mr. Koontz does. I'm going to sit around with my blood-thirsty cat and watch Faces of Death now. Muahahahahaha.
June 13, 2010
I read this when I was in my early teens and loved anything vaguely horror/thriller-like. And I LOVED Dean Koontz. Until I read this book. I never realised before how much he is completely and utterly obsessed with dogs. If a character is ever cruel to one you can be sure that they won't be around long before some kind of terrible justice befalls them. I like dogs but he seriously takes it too far. That is the only thing I can say of interest about this book as it is long-winded, badly written and has one dimensional characters you couldn't care about even if you tried really hard. The most annoying thing is it has the EXACT same plot as at least two of his other novels, simply told from a different perspective. Sell out.
December 5, 2022
My last Koontz had been a bit of a disappointment compared to others. This one restored his status as a great writer. Interweaving stories of an alien boy and this thought bonded dog escaping the FBI and other aliens was a cracker. I still smile at the scene in which his dog is typing a distress message on a laptop…with a toothbrush.
Also the nine year old precocious girl Leilani and her murderous step father and stoned mother. Together with Mickey Birdsong and her Aunt. All coming together in the final denouement. Classic Koontz and a cracker of a 700 page read.
The last of the 4 second books picked up at the Mottisfont Nation Trust property.
Also the nine year old precocious girl Leilani and her murderous step father and stoned mother. Together with Mickey Birdsong and her Aunt. All coming together in the final denouement. Classic Koontz and a cracker of a 700 page read.
The last of the 4 second books picked up at the Mottisfont Nation Trust property.
February 9, 2022
Сигурен съм, че съм го писал и друг път, но няма значение. Кунц е имал доста проблемно детство, което го е мотивирало да завърши специална педагогика и да работи с проблемни деца. По-късно, обезверен и разочарован от непукизма на държавата зарязва тази си професия и започва да пише.
В тази книга доста умело успява да излее цялата горчилка на тежкия си житейски опит и наистина да ни накара да ни пука за героите му, въпреки типично повърхностното за автора обрисуване. И както всеки път, когато върти тази плоча, успява да вдъхне надежда на читателя си и да му докара една сладко-горчива усмивка.
Романът има три сюжетни линии, които се преплитат на финала, макар и не особено убедително, но така или иначе целта им е друга.
Имаме Мики, която се бори с депресията и алкохола и намира спасение в едно необикновено съседско момиченце, заради спасението на което ще ѝ се наложи да стане по-добър и отговорен човек.
Ноа е бивш полицай, сега частен детектив, който се грижи за обезобразената си и кататонична сестра. В един момент се замесва с неправилните хора и това води до травматизиращи събития.
Едно момче (нарочно няма да го именувам) и неговото куче са яростно преследвани, но не знаем от кого или по-точно какво. Картите се разкриват една по една на масата и историите се завързват.
Ако сте чели повече от две книги на Кунц, значи знаете рутината:
Супер умно куче – налично.
Любвеобилни голдън редривър-и – няколко.
Секси блондинка със суперменски умения – даже две.
Симпатична лелка – налична.
Страдащ от синдрома на Даун – наличен.
Герой с проблемно минало – наличен.
Референции към Дисни – доволно.
Сладникав финал – Облаци от захареен памууук (това се пее на мелодията на Локо).
Но книгата е хубава и звучи доста лично. А и е идеална за четене по време на работа, когато могат да те вдигнат всяка една минута да натовариш някое пале. Вдигам една звезда за номерата, които върти за заблуда на читателя. В един момент, за да не те подвежда пряко, Кунц успява да ти внуши грешната идея чрез думи и действия в различна сюжетна линия. Трябва да се пробва.
В тази книга доста умело успява да излее цялата горчилка на тежкия си житейски опит и наистина да ни накара да ни пука за героите му, въпреки типично повърхностното за автора обрисуване. И както всеки път, когато върти тази плоча, успява да вдъхне надежда на читателя си и да му докара една сладко-горчива усмивка.
Романът има три сюжетни линии, които се преплитат на финала, макар и не особено убедително, но така или иначе целта им е друга.
Имаме Мики, която се бори с депресията и алкохола и намира спасение в едно необикновено съседско момиченце, заради спасението на което ще ѝ се наложи да стане по-добър и отговорен човек.
Ноа е бивш полицай, сега частен детектив, който се грижи за обезобразената си и кататонична сестра. В един момент се замесва с неправилните хора и това води до травматизиращи събития.
Едно момче (нарочно няма да го именувам) и неговото куче са яростно преследвани, но не знаем от кого или по-точно какво. Картите се разкриват една по една на масата и историите се завързват.
Ако сте чели повече от две книги на Кунц, значи знаете рутината:
Супер умно куче – налично.
Любвеобилни голдън редривър-и – няколко.
Секси блондинка със суперменски умения – даже две.
Симпатична лелка – налична.
Страдащ от синдрома на Даун – наличен.
Герой с проблемно минало – наличен.
Референции към Дисни – доволно.
Сладникав финал – Облаци от захареен памууук (това се пее на мелодията на Локо).
Но книгата е хубава и звучи доста лично. А и е идеална за четене по време на работа, когато могат да те вдигнат всяка една минута да натовариш някое пале. Вдигам една звезда за номерата, които върти за заблуда на читателя. В един момент, за да не те подвежда пряко, Кунц успява да ти внуши грешната идея чрез думи и действия в различна сюжетна линия. Трябва да се пробва.
August 13, 2010
No other novel could follow “From the Corner of His Eye” better than “One Door Away From Heaven”. Second of three phrase-titled books, it’s also a transitional story, taking themes and styles from older Koontz novels, adding a religious undertone and introducing some techniques he’ll continue to apply for his high concept stories.
When recently arrived in the neighborhood Leilani Klonk tells her life story to Micky Bellsong, the latter at first shrugs it all off as an elaborate joke, but soon the seriousness of the situation hits her. When Leilani is basically kidnapped by her obsessive stepfather, Micky vows to rescue her. Meanwhile, a boy who isn’t who he seems to be is on the run for his life and will ultimately find his way to the girls.
Koontz combines two completely different stories and creates a very memorable volume. The Leilani/Micky story is an alternate version of the “Intensity” story, which is even spoofed a bit when Curtis discovers some dentures in an elderly couple’s motor home. Leilani is almost a carbon copy of Regina in “Hideaway”, even up to the disfigured hand and the leg brace; the physical similarity is uncanny.
The E.T. story of Curtis Hammond on the other hand is told in the present tense and from such an innocent perspective it’s responsible for a big part of this novel’s humor.
Almost like an afterthought, Koontz adds a male hero figure in the form of Noah Farrell, a righteous private investigator who comes to Micky’s aid in tracking down Preston Maddoc.
Which brings us to the villain in this piece. Koontz rarely provides an afterword to his novels, but in the case of this utilitarian bioethicist, he wants to make sure that we’re aware this villain hasn’t sprouted entirely from his imagination; people like Preston Maddoc really exist and finding out about them Koontz obviously took as a personal insult.
Maddoc remains a faceless villain for almost half the book, and only in the last third do we get to read chapters from his point of view. Maddoc is an educated man but quite possibly psychotic and perhaps schizophrenic as well, with weird obsessions and strange beliefs, with a thirst for killing and the crazy ability to make his actions seem rational and logical. He’s the symbol for a huge part of humanity firmly convinced that their way is the only way, people who see others as objects instead of human beings, parts of a huge machine that can simply be replaced when broken, and who would probably raise screaming hell were the roles reversed.
A truly despicable creature, Maddoc’s demise takes place because of his own mistakes, and in my opinion he leaves this world far too easily, without much effort from the heroes.
Switching back and forth between the characters, Koontz delivers one cliffhanger chapter ending after another, keeping the tension high. He also tries to recreate the effect in “From the Corner of His Eye” where characters who have nothing to do with each other, end up together for the story’s finale. Yet while Reverend Harrison’s sermon about the apostle Bartholomew was a link between the characters in “From the Corner of His Eye”, such a link doesn’t exist in “One Door Away From Heaven”, which makes it difficult not to look at it as one huge coincidence.
The characters in “One Door Away From Heaven” constantly refer to God. Curtis Hammond’s doggy companion also plays a big part. Koontz has used dogs as comedy sidekicks more than once, but here for the first time he grants them extraordinary powers, in that dogs are able to perceive the Maker’s Presence. Curtis the alien has the ability to connect psychically with dogs in such a way that he can also sense that Presence. And to take it one more step further, the boy also has the ability to make other people create such a bond as well, ending the novel with a group of people, each with a dog companion, who can see proof that that the world has been designed and created – a more esotherical version of what he will do in “Breathless”.
Koontz creates a great contrast between the lighthearted exchanges between Leilani, Micky and Aunt Geneva on the one hand and Curtis and his many encounters on the other, and the deeply disturbing dramatic events concerning Leilani’s mother, Maddoc’s philosophy, and Noah Farrell’s sister. When you think you’re sitting comfortably enjoying a fun story, Koontz turns the entire atmosphere upside down and you start to wonder about your own place in the world and how you behave towards others. While creating an urgency in the story which he’ll later apply to his high concept stories, Koontz still takes the time to develop the characters and elaborate on the situations in order to really make you think about everything you read.
When recently arrived in the neighborhood Leilani Klonk tells her life story to Micky Bellsong, the latter at first shrugs it all off as an elaborate joke, but soon the seriousness of the situation hits her. When Leilani is basically kidnapped by her obsessive stepfather, Micky vows to rescue her. Meanwhile, a boy who isn’t who he seems to be is on the run for his life and will ultimately find his way to the girls.
Koontz combines two completely different stories and creates a very memorable volume. The Leilani/Micky story is an alternate version of the “Intensity” story, which is even spoofed a bit when Curtis discovers some dentures in an elderly couple’s motor home. Leilani is almost a carbon copy of Regina in “Hideaway”, even up to the disfigured hand and the leg brace; the physical similarity is uncanny.
The E.T. story of Curtis Hammond on the other hand is told in the present tense and from such an innocent perspective it’s responsible for a big part of this novel’s humor.
Almost like an afterthought, Koontz adds a male hero figure in the form of Noah Farrell, a righteous private investigator who comes to Micky’s aid in tracking down Preston Maddoc.
Which brings us to the villain in this piece. Koontz rarely provides an afterword to his novels, but in the case of this utilitarian bioethicist, he wants to make sure that we’re aware this villain hasn’t sprouted entirely from his imagination; people like Preston Maddoc really exist and finding out about them Koontz obviously took as a personal insult.
Maddoc remains a faceless villain for almost half the book, and only in the last third do we get to read chapters from his point of view. Maddoc is an educated man but quite possibly psychotic and perhaps schizophrenic as well, with weird obsessions and strange beliefs, with a thirst for killing and the crazy ability to make his actions seem rational and logical. He’s the symbol for a huge part of humanity firmly convinced that their way is the only way, people who see others as objects instead of human beings, parts of a huge machine that can simply be replaced when broken, and who would probably raise screaming hell were the roles reversed.
A truly despicable creature, Maddoc’s demise takes place because of his own mistakes, and in my opinion he leaves this world far too easily, without much effort from the heroes.
Switching back and forth between the characters, Koontz delivers one cliffhanger chapter ending after another, keeping the tension high. He also tries to recreate the effect in “From the Corner of His Eye” where characters who have nothing to do with each other, end up together for the story’s finale. Yet while Reverend Harrison’s sermon about the apostle Bartholomew was a link between the characters in “From the Corner of His Eye”, such a link doesn’t exist in “One Door Away From Heaven”, which makes it difficult not to look at it as one huge coincidence.
The characters in “One Door Away From Heaven” constantly refer to God. Curtis Hammond’s doggy companion also plays a big part. Koontz has used dogs as comedy sidekicks more than once, but here for the first time he grants them extraordinary powers, in that dogs are able to perceive the Maker’s Presence. Curtis the alien has the ability to connect psychically with dogs in such a way that he can also sense that Presence. And to take it one more step further, the boy also has the ability to make other people create such a bond as well, ending the novel with a group of people, each with a dog companion, who can see proof that that the world has been designed and created – a more esotherical version of what he will do in “Breathless”.
Koontz creates a great contrast between the lighthearted exchanges between Leilani, Micky and Aunt Geneva on the one hand and Curtis and his many encounters on the other, and the deeply disturbing dramatic events concerning Leilani’s mother, Maddoc’s philosophy, and Noah Farrell’s sister. When you think you’re sitting comfortably enjoying a fun story, Koontz turns the entire atmosphere upside down and you start to wonder about your own place in the world and how you behave towards others. While creating an urgency in the story which he’ll later apply to his high concept stories, Koontz still takes the time to develop the characters and elaborate on the situations in order to really make you think about everything you read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 27, 2017
I really don't like Koontz. He tells way too much, while at the same time withholding information from the reader to make himself look clever.
The worst thing about this book, however, was that he felt he needed to browbeat the reader with his hatred of utilitarianism throughout. It was pretty clear to me he didn't even have a basic understanding of utilitarian philosophy, and he was classifying some nutcases under the banner as typical examples.
Among philosophical methods, utilitarianism is generally one of the most benign; in order for someone to come to the conclusion that the elderly, handicapped and chronically ill should be euthanized, a crazy number of conditions would first have to be met. There is a long form and a short form that utilitarians employ to make any decision, even one as mundane as choosing a place to have lunch. It's impractical more than anything else.
I will try to avoid Koontz in future. He can't seem to let his reader decide anything for himself. He tells the reader who is "evil" and who is "radiant" in just those terms, he goes on for PAGES about his little hobbyhorses, and honestly? I thought Stephen King couldn't end a book to save his life. Koontz just seems to look at his page count, mutter, "I better wrap this up!" and slam bang it to the finish.
The worst thing about this book, however, was that he felt he needed to browbeat the reader with his hatred of utilitarianism throughout. It was pretty clear to me he didn't even have a basic understanding of utilitarian philosophy, and he was classifying some nutcases under the banner as typical examples.
Among philosophical methods, utilitarianism is generally one of the most benign; in order for someone to come to the conclusion that the elderly, handicapped and chronically ill should be euthanized, a crazy number of conditions would first have to be met. There is a long form and a short form that utilitarians employ to make any decision, even one as mundane as choosing a place to have lunch. It's impractical more than anything else.
I will try to avoid Koontz in future. He can't seem to let his reader decide anything for himself. He tells the reader who is "evil" and who is "radiant" in just those terms, he goes on for PAGES about his little hobbyhorses, and honestly? I thought Stephen King couldn't end a book to save his life. Koontz just seems to look at his page count, mutter, "I better wrap this up!" and slam bang it to the finish.
May 29, 2014
The story is about a rescue...a rescue of two unrelated kids. While I DO enjoy Koontz's scene setting and character depictions, the story itself, hmm, not so much. Koontz CONSTANTLY interrupts the forward flow of the story to lecture his viewpoint and to TELL readers how his characters "feel." Constantly and continuously...right to the very end. When the story is reaching the height of action, the culmination of all prior events, (and you're certain, CERTAIN, he must be done intruding by now) the action is stopped and another lecture is delivered...about feelings, his and his characters. Criminey Dutch! How about my feelings? I bought the book to hear a story; if I wanted a lecture, I'd call my mom.
Wendy Joyce
Wendy Joyce
August 5, 2013
I wish I could give this book a negative rating. One star seems far more then it deserves. Terrible, terrible book. Made me finally realize how much I hate Dean Koontz as a writer. I've bought so many of his books at second hand stores, because I used to think he was good. Maybe there's a reason so many people give away his books. Seems like every book now has either dogs as a main storyline. Or his other plotline, A single man or woman who is rich, (or soon to become rich because of some blossoming, amazing talent). And who meets the most amazing person, but they are in some sort of trouble. Everything is perfect, it's love at first sight. If only the (CHOOSE THE APPROPRIATE VILLAIN FROM THE DEAN KOONTZ WRITING TOOLS) government, crazy cult, carnival, aliens, bad scientists, trained killer, guy with a bad mom, dog catchers, would leave them alone. That is basically the plot of at least half his books. Retire Dean. Please.
Last time I went to the second hand store, I kept reaching for all the koontz books, and had to remind myself. STOP!! HE SUCKS!!! Rather read a place mat at the chinese restaurant. Throwing away all my Dean Koontz books. Never reading one again. God, what a stupid book, with an even worse ending. I curse my inability to stop reading a book no matter how bad.
Last time I went to the second hand store, I kept reaching for all the koontz books, and had to remind myself. STOP!! HE SUCKS!!! Rather read a place mat at the chinese restaurant. Throwing away all my Dean Koontz books. Never reading one again. God, what a stupid book, with an even worse ending. I curse my inability to stop reading a book no matter how bad.
June 16, 2025
Dean Koontz has a gift for lyrical description that sometimes tumbles into purple prose. It should also be noted that the most original character in this novel, 9-year-old Leilani Klonk, sounds more like a precocious 14-year-old. In the end, though, neither criticism matters, because what Koontz has written succeeds on its own terms as a story of unexpected psychological depth.
A misnamed dog looms large in this story (anyone familiar with this author's work could have seen that coming), but so do a tormented private investigator, a kind-hearted ex-convict, a motherly aunt, a traveling psychopath, a perpetually stoned hippie chick, and beautiful blonde twins with guns.
Other writers would have fumbled a novel ambitious enough to draw on a cast that diverse, but Koontz wrote "One Door Away From Heaven" knowing exactly what he wanted to say about what it means to be human. Fortunately for the rest of us, his surehandedness yields both thought and entertainment. As a life-affirming broadside against utilitarian ethics and a suspense novel with extra-terrestrial overtones, "One Door Away from Heaven" wins loud huzzahs from this reader.
A misnamed dog looms large in this story (anyone familiar with this author's work could have seen that coming), but so do a tormented private investigator, a kind-hearted ex-convict, a motherly aunt, a traveling psychopath, a perpetually stoned hippie chick, and beautiful blonde twins with guns.
Other writers would have fumbled a novel ambitious enough to draw on a cast that diverse, but Koontz wrote "One Door Away From Heaven" knowing exactly what he wanted to say about what it means to be human. Fortunately for the rest of us, his surehandedness yields both thought and entertainment. As a life-affirming broadside against utilitarian ethics and a suspense novel with extra-terrestrial overtones, "One Door Away from Heaven" wins loud huzzahs from this reader.
December 26, 2012
The most slow moving, dull book I have ever read. Bogged down in boring description at times, the last Dean Koontz book I am likely to read.
July 18, 2022
This one had such a good premise but was drastically over written and drawn out. The end was anticlimactic and it was way too preachy. It should have been edited and cut down by 300+ pages.
September 29, 2023
Rereading for an upcoming episode of A Good Story is Hard to Find. Original review below.
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“Geneva, even if the girl isn’t making up all this stuff, even if she’s in real danger, you can’t take the law into your hands.”
“There’s lots of law these days,” she interrupted, “but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she’s the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything’s upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?”
This was a different woman from the one with whom he had been speaking a moment ago. Her green eyes were flinty now. Her sweet face hardened as he wouldn’t have thought possible.
“If Micky doesn’t do this,” she continued, “that sick b*****d will kill Leilani, and it’ll be as if she never existed, and no one but me and Micky will care what the world lost. You better believe it’ll be a loss, too, because this girl is the right stuff, she’s a shining soul. These days people make heroes out of actors, singers, power-mad politicians. How screwed up are things when that’s what hero has come to mean? I’d trade the whole self-important lot of ‘em for this girl. She’s got more steel in her spine and more true heart than a thousand of those so-called heroes. Have another cookie?"
UFOs, aliens, an empathetic dog, a crippled girl, and a host of supporting characters overcoming past traumas to reach out to others all are combined by Dean Koontz in a book that is the most compelling statement I have ever seen made about the right to life, no matter what one's condition. As always with his novels, few things are what they seem.Two basic plots run parallel before their heroes find themselves coming together to fight off a very evil villain. "What is one door away from heaven," is a question that one character has asked another since her childhood. The answer, along with the overall theme of the book, is enough to make us all examine our lives more carefully ... and be thankful that Koontz's writing reflects his beliefs so honestly. A favorite for rereading and that's what I'm doing now ... rereading!
================
“Geneva, even if the girl isn’t making up all this stuff, even if she’s in real danger, you can’t take the law into your hands.”
“There’s lots of law these days,” she interrupted, “but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she’s the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything’s upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?”
This was a different woman from the one with whom he had been speaking a moment ago. Her green eyes were flinty now. Her sweet face hardened as he wouldn’t have thought possible.
“If Micky doesn’t do this,” she continued, “that sick b*****d will kill Leilani, and it’ll be as if she never existed, and no one but me and Micky will care what the world lost. You better believe it’ll be a loss, too, because this girl is the right stuff, she’s a shining soul. These days people make heroes out of actors, singers, power-mad politicians. How screwed up are things when that’s what hero has come to mean? I’d trade the whole self-important lot of ‘em for this girl. She’s got more steel in her spine and more true heart than a thousand of those so-called heroes. Have another cookie?"
UFOs, aliens, an empathetic dog, a crippled girl, and a host of supporting characters overcoming past traumas to reach out to others all are combined by Dean Koontz in a book that is the most compelling statement I have ever seen made about the right to life, no matter what one's condition. As always with his novels, few things are what they seem.Two basic plots run parallel before their heroes find themselves coming together to fight off a very evil villain. "What is one door away from heaven," is a question that one character has asked another since her childhood. The answer, along with the overall theme of the book, is enough to make us all examine our lives more carefully ... and be thankful that Koontz's writing reflects his beliefs so honestly. A favorite for rereading and that's what I'm doing now ... rereading!
July 21, 2020
I will admit that as a long time Dean Koontz's reader, I thought I already read this book, however, it appears that I did not and I am mad at myself for not reading this earlier because I really enjoyed this book.
Leilani and Curtis were without a doubt my favorite two characters in this book. I loved them both so much and I wanted to pluck them out of the book and keep them safe. I cheered and clapped for the adult heroes of this story because they were truly amazing people even though there were not super heroes in the conventional sense, they were to me because their hearts, morals and compassion and they didn't hesitate to step in and help a child in need.
The topic of this book scared the shit out of me because I know it is a real thing and it freaks me out knowing that there are real people out there like this..
A little long but in all in all good book.
Leilani and Curtis were without a doubt my favorite two characters in this book. I loved them both so much and I wanted to pluck them out of the book and keep them safe. I cheered and clapped for the adult heroes of this story because they were truly amazing people even though there were not super heroes in the conventional sense, they were to me because their hearts, morals and compassion and they didn't hesitate to step in and help a child in need.
The topic of this book scared the shit out of me because I know it is a real thing and it freaks me out knowing that there are real people out there like this..
A little long but in all in all good book.
August 17, 2015
Truthfully, I can't remember how many times I have reread this book but this time definitely wowed me. Koontz is truly a master and this book was one of his most masterful. He gives his characters life and blends them together so well. He teaches lessons about life without actually teaching. I love the spirituality of this book without a single bit of religion or preachiness. Through his eyes I see the beauty in the simplicity of life. The main characters are neither wealthy nor necessarily "succesful" in their lives. All have suffered and have grown because of it. It's about being imperfect but being beautiful and sharing that beauty with the world.
August 2, 2012
I liked the characters in this book a lot, but it felt like the book was in slow motion for the first three quarters and then rushed for the last section. When things all came together it was so much, so fast, that you wondered if the characters would be able to remember each other's names, let alone know or trust each other. Also, it was pretty dark in parts for the emotional/literary payoff. Read if you are a fan, otherwise, I'd find something else.
Read
September 30, 2020I remember reading this book last year I'm not too sure if I finished it because I cannot find my notes, but I remember finding an only mildly interesting.
February 27, 2021
I haven't read a Koontz novel since 2012, but nothing has changed.
I walked away because I just couldn't put up with his formula anymore: there is always a dog (usually a golden retriver). There is always a woman in distress who is incapable of fixing her life without a man to help her. There is always a man looking to help a woman in distress. Yeesh. At least in this one, there was no mention of a Desert Eagle hand cannon (he must be past that phase.)
Mickey is a raging drunk who can't get over her childhood trauma without several glasses of vodka in the morning. The new family next door has a 9-year-old daughter with physical deformities and a mind like a jaded, seen-it-all, 50-year-old woman. Curtis, a 10-year-old boy, and his dog are racing across the country by any mode of transportation they can find... Koontz tries to be mysterious about Curtis, but those of us who've read his stuff before will see him for what he is right off the bat. As soon as I read Curtis' first chapter I predicted it, and the reveal halfway through the book came as absolutely no surprise.
How will these three seemingly unconnected storylines come together? Who cares. yawn
This book clocks in at 740 pages, and I've wasted too much time reading half this stinking thing already. But no more, Mr. Koontz! I only picked this one up because it was the oldest thing in my to-be-read's (added in Feb 2015), and I'm trying to do some housekeeping with the monstrosity that is my TBR pile. I gave it a more than an honest effort, but I'm just not enjoying this whatsoever. On to the next book!
I walked away because I just couldn't put up with his formula anymore: there is always a dog (usually a golden retriver). There is always a woman in distress who is incapable of fixing her life without a man to help her. There is always a man looking to help a woman in distress. Yeesh. At least in this one, there was no mention of a Desert Eagle hand cannon (he must be past that phase.)
Mickey is a raging drunk who can't get over her childhood trauma without several glasses of vodka in the morning. The new family next door has a 9-year-old daughter with physical deformities and a mind like a jaded, seen-it-all, 50-year-old woman. Curtis, a 10-year-old boy, and his dog are racing across the country by any mode of transportation they can find... Koontz tries to be mysterious about Curtis, but those of us who've read his stuff before will see him for what he is right off the bat. As soon as I read Curtis' first chapter I predicted it, and the reveal halfway through the book came as absolutely no surprise.
How will these three seemingly unconnected storylines come together? Who cares. yawn
This book clocks in at 740 pages, and I've wasted too much time reading half this stinking thing already. But no more, Mr. Koontz! I only picked this one up because it was the oldest thing in my to-be-read's (added in Feb 2015), and I'm trying to do some housekeeping with the monstrosity that is my TBR pile. I gave it a more than an honest effort, but I'm just not enjoying this whatsoever. On to the next book!
May 25, 2014
How to review a book by such a superb writer? Dean Koontz has taken three story lines of such divergent subjects to parallel lengths where they diverge at an ending that tells us that only through the goodness of everyone working together can life be worth living. It's at once a theists against the bioethics of perfection and a fast passed thriller. But to describe how he does this only seems to demean his work. He has a deformed 9 year old girl, living with her drug addled mother and her murdering bioethics father; two wounded women trying to make a better life for themselves; a burnt out detective; and a young "extra-terrestrial" boy and his dog. Put these together and you have a strangely wonderful thrilling story.
Koontz is probably the best writer than I know. He can take four beautiful sentences to describe someone's eyes, and rather than sounding wordy, every word feels necessary. I would say that this is my favorite Koontz book but then I read another one and that becomes my favorite. Just read this book. You won't be sorry. He makes very important points is convincingly beautiful stories.
I listened to this on audio and loved the narration!!
Koontz is probably the best writer than I know. He can take four beautiful sentences to describe someone's eyes, and rather than sounding wordy, every word feels necessary. I would say that this is my favorite Koontz book but then I read another one and that becomes my favorite. Just read this book. You won't be sorry. He makes very important points is convincingly beautiful stories.
I listened to this on audio and loved the narration!!
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