GOING HOME IN THE DARK
Dean Koontz (deankoontz.com)
Thomas & Mercer (amazon.com)
£19.99
Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop
Rebecca, Ernie, Bobby and Spencer have always been the “four amigos”, ever since bonding as outcasts, four nerdy teens against the rest of the school, the town, the world. When they grow, Rebecca, Bobby and Spencer leave Maple Grove to pursue their own dreams, which they achieve – Rebecca is now a famous actress, having found fame as a scream queen in a series of movies with an antagonist named Judyface; Bobby a successful author; Spencer an artist who does all of his work in a fugue state. Only Ernie stayed in the perfect little town in which they grew up, finding fame as a songwriter who made his fortune writing such country music classics as “She Stole My Heart and My Visa Card”. But now Ernie is in a coma, and his friends race back home to be with him. They seem to remember people in Maple Grove slipping into comas all the time, comas from which they always awoke. Maybe. As they return home, memories begin to flood back, and they remember a strange man, a giant, murderous beast who worked for Pastor Larry, about whom suspicions slowly return. Can the friends save Ernie from his coma, and save the town from the mysterious institute that seems to be behind everything that’s happening in the town?
As Dean Koontz’s latest novel opens, we encounter some very familiar beats: a bunch of adults living their own lives suddenly get called back to the town where they grew up by the one member of their group who stayed in that town; long-buried memories that begin to resurface when they return; a strange, supernatural creature that seems to lurk at the edges of their consciousness until it suddenly appears in the flesh? It feels like a long-overdue riff on King’s It, of course, but while the setup may feel familiar, Koontz’s story goes in an entirely different direction once he gets into the meat of the tale. It becomes immediately apparent to the reader, if not the central characters who bring us there, that something is not quite right in Maple Grove. And that something, thankfully, isn’t an ancient evil being dressed up as a clown. Yes, there are beings of Lovecraftian proportions here, but the immediate danger seems to be the mysterious Keppelwhite Institute, which looms over the town’s hospital; and Ernie’s mother, Professor Britta Hernishen, who has never liked her son’s friends, and who doesn’t seem to be warming to them now that they’re grown. Enter Wayne Louis Hornfly, and the terror is complete; a phantom that lurks at the edges of memory, and who now appears before them in the flesh, larger than life and twice as scary.
Take Koontz’s last four novels, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any similarities between any two of them. You’d be hard-pressed, if you didn’t know better, to say for sure whether any two of them were written by the same person. Like some kind of literary chameleon, Koontz writes what he likes, and in a voice that suits the tale he wants to tell. But two things remain front and centre in his books: the characters to whom we are introduced, and the world in which we find ourselves. The story is important, obviously, but these are very much character-driven world-building exercises and the plot feels almost like an excuse to introduce us to these people and places, rather than the endgame itself. The four friends at the centre of this story are extremely well-rounded, and the flashbacks we get to their teenage years help to fill in a lot of backstory. Each of them has grown up with at least one absent parent, some for reasons much less mundane than others:
Spencer Truedove was at that time already living alone while his mother was looking for the self she had once been and his father was cohabiting with Venus Profiera in the rectory of the Church of the Sacred Erogenous Revelation.
Even Ernie, despite being in a coma, has a part to play in the slow unfolding of the story, and the meting out of details. The friends’ first act on arriving in town is stealing Ernie’s comatose body from the hospital and hiding it from his mother and the medical examiner, for fear that he will be autopsied and will then definitely be dead. There is a lot of strangeness in Going Home in the Dark, and it all centres around the small, seemingly-perfect town of Maple Grove, but the seeming perfection is little more than a facade:
As lovely as it appeared to be, Maple Grove wasn’t what it seemed to be. Maple Grove was Stepford; it was ‘Salem’s Lot; it was serene Santa Mira where giant seedpods from another world were full of weird gooey stuff that was being shaped into replicas of the human citizens.
Throughout the novel, the omnipresent narrator – are they the rumoured fifth amigo? They claim not to be, but no-one can be sure – breaks the fourth wall, addressing the reader directly with information that we need that the characters do not possess, or more often to pick up on points of grammar or language that may change the meaning of a sentence we’ve just read, or throws some red herrings into the mix as they discuss things like foreshadowing. I’ve mentioned King’s It and there are many similarities, but imagine It as written by Lemony Snicket, and you’ll have some idea of what to expect from this latest Koontz outing. It’s a novel that is heavy in style, and I suspect a lot of people will get annoyed with it, but there is still plenty of substance, and Koontz finds a great balance between the two, never sacrificing one for the other and injecting what is, ultimately, a Lovecraftian horror story with a large dose of humour. Going Home in the Dark is genuinely funny, even when it’s making your skin crawl.
I’ve talked about Dean Koontz’s late career resurgence before, and Going Home in the Dark is an excellent example of why Koontz is an excellent author. He has proven over the past few years that he can turn his hand to a number of different styles, some more serious, some darker, some funnier, but all share the same characteristics: his characters are well-rounded and completely relatable; his worlds are solid and believable, even when they don’t always behave as we would expect them to; and, regardless of the “voice”, he always manages to reel the reader in and make them invest in the story. Even with this comedic approach, there’s still more than enough suspense to keep us reading, to keep us coming back for more because we have to know how it all shakes out. Going Home in the Dark is a more playful Koontz than we might expect, but this is an author flexing every literary muscle, reaching outside of his comfort zone, and still producing one of the best books you’ll read this year.
