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Should I give Dean Koontz another chance?

Maybe I am being too hard on the piece of derivative trash that is Koontz's Phantoms, but it was so bad � and so memorably bad � that I’ve never read another Koontz book. But I am probably being unfair.

After all, I often find myself reading the garbage put out by Harlan Coben, and is there really any difference? I don’t think so. Koontz is just older. In fact, I like to imagine Koontz as the seed spraying father of Harlan Coben, standing over the world of pulp fiction, dick in hand, saturating the fields of crapness like an inspirational sprinkler, and wherever his seed falls a bad writer pops up. Oops, there’s some Koontz seed on the “Coben field,� and there rises a new author, another pop hackosaurus with the storytelling skills of an illiterate mute with severe brain damage from falling out of bed. Harlan Coben, the author who, these days, most makes me want to poke out my book reading eyes (despite the fact that I keep going back for more).

But if I am willing to keep reading the bastard son, why not the father?

I dunno, but once upon a time I DID read Koontz, and it was awful. A friend of mine, a close friend, recommended Koontz because, he said, “He is awesome!� So I read him because I trusted and loved my friend, and our trust was broken forever. I fell out of love. Koontz destroyed our relationship. We’re not friends anymore.

Phantoms contains girls in peril, an Ancient Power -- the same one that killed off the dinosaurs � that’s back for more world changing ass-whooping, dumb cops and Bones McCoy style scientists (they of the “Hail Mary� science discoveries) to protect the girls in peril and make everything okay with a bacterial solution; it’s full of bad writing, bad characters, bad dialogue, and it gave birth to a badder than bad screen version starring Ben Affleck (has any actor ever made so many truly terrible movies? Does any other Academy Award Winner even come close?) Phantoms is, by any measure, pretty awful.

But I am probably being too hard on Koontz and Phantoms.

Still, I think of those other hackosaurs who’ve risen from Koontz’s seed, and I am pretty sure that my assessment is as fair and balanced as can be. I am a reasonable man, however; I am willing to admit I could be wrong. So I ask you Dean Koontz fans: “Am I wrong? Should I give him another chance? And, if so, which book should I read?�

I promise I will try it once. If I can do it for the son it’s the least I can do for the father. Maybe I’ve been wrong all these years. But I doubt it.