A young doctor brings her fourteen-year-old sister home to Snowfield, California and finds the small town ravaged by an unexplainable event. Hundreds missing, dozens dead, with mysterious discoveries around every corner: tables set for dinner, music playing, pots still cooking on the stove, and sometimes bodies. Bodies that show no signs of disease, contamination, or struggle – cause of death undeterminable. Authorities from a nearby city and a secret, government task force arrive and team with the two young women to identify and seek out the culprit. In their journey for truth they find more than they bargained for.

Koontz does an exceptional job detailing scenes and creating vivid, hard-hitting action sequences. He paints startling imagery that will stay with the reader long after he or she closes the book.

The author also pays close attention in pacing the flow of the story. By never spending too much time with one character and building each scene to a sufficient climax before swapping the story's point of view, he holds the reader's attention while maintaining suspense throughout the book. The final fifty pages were by far the best of the novel.

The major weakness of this book lies in the dialogue and actions of its main characters. Forced, unbelievable lines, thoughts, and decisions give the impression that Koontz had the framework of the plot and setting in mind and was intent on adhering to it no matter what the cost – even when his characters demanded otherwise. Like puppets on strings, Koontz’s key players often behaved in ways that defied common sense and intuition, contradicting the extraordinary circumstances of the events rather than flowing with them. I cringed countless times as Lisa, the precocious fourteen-year-old, proved to be the smartest of the highly-trained entourage while hardly batting an eye at decimated corpses and ghastly body snatchers. The attraction between Jenny, the doctor, and Bryce, the sheriff, was predictable, flat, and painful to watch, as it blossomed in a day’s time with utter chaos, gore, and doom abounding.

Koontz also relies too heavily on passive voice at times in this novel. As an author obviously capable of powerful, riveting passages, this tendency to drift into passivity was certainly due more to laziness than ineptitude.

Read another of Koontz’s works, even though this one left me disappointed. Phantoms is only my first encounter with this author, and, considering his popularity and prolificacy, I am hopeful that future tales will be more to my liking.

For the casual reader, moviegoer, or fan of Koontz, this book is worth your time. With plenty of suspense, hair-raising scenes, and a well-paced plot, Phantoms will have you turning pages during the day and tossing and turning in your sheets at night.

As a writer who takes every word, sentence, and paragraph he writes seriously, this book frustrated me. Koontz’s brilliance shines through in several memorable scenes and interactions, but, in all, the final product feels rushed, stilted, and neglected by its creator. A linear, formulaic plot that, with few exceptions, plods from point A to point B left me wanting more. From the beginning, I felt I knew more than the characters, and, as the story unfolded, I became increasingly irritated that I seemed the only one (with possibly the exception of that clever little girl) who knew what was happening and, worse yet, what was going to happen next.

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Created Dec 04, 2004 at 8:42pm • Submit your own review...