I just maybe ugly laughed at one point last night or this morning (it was around 1 am) and I started to wonder if Koontz wanted to go up against King for most characters vis a vis, “The Stand.” For those who are wondering, “The Stand’ was published in 1978 and I recall as a kid not even trying to get through that brick. And let’s not get into all of the secondary and tertiary characters. Koontz focuses on these people at first (6 strangers) and then adds in more people. There are other people that were brought up later in the book and I refuse to go back and look their names up. Jack Twist whose name made me laugh a lot who is a retired Army Ranger but is now a thief (don’t ask me, I didn’t write this) and Stefan another priest. Ernie who is a retired Marine who runs a motel with his wife Faye. So off the top of my head, these are the only characters I can remember. And what happened during that period will be a revelation. Once the strangers start to connect the dots they realize that all of them seem to be missing a period of time. Some of these people go into fugue states, others are scared of the dark, of black gloves (no really) and all of them are starting to feel strange. Anyway, back to the book, “Strangers” follows a lot of people across the United States over a period of a few weeks who seem to be hiding from someone or something. I stopped counting once we got up to five separate story-lines.

This book fits so many squares for Halloween bingo, but I refuse to recommend you all read this. He had 700 pages to say it, and I was just done. I didn’t care what Koontz had to say about this book at this point. I skipped over the Afterword because (swear word) you that’s why. I can’t recall him writing a woman with a job in his last couple of books that wasn’t an artist or doctor. We can see the “Perfect Woman” that shows up in his books again and again, though this one is short and a doctor. This book also indulges in all of Koontz’s many writing weaknesses through the years, we can see his beginning fascination with military men or women who know how to shoot guns. However, as someone who grew up watching B level monster movies, this is just no comparison at all. I think since this was written in 1986 it made sense to Koontz to write it the way that he did.

When we finally get to the whole conspiracy aspect of this I laughed.

And it has too many characters and not enough plot. This has to be one of my least favorite reads of 2019.

False memory dean koontz summary