“Ticktock” by Dean Koontz

A different kind of Koontz. -- 3 Stars

After reading Andrews’s “Araknid,” I was also ready for some Dean R. Koontz!  I picked up on of his older ones at my local library, but it wasn’t QUITE what I was expecting.

The story follows Tommy Phan, an Asian American who wants to be ALL American, much to his Asian mother’s disappointment. Upon returning home one evening, he finds a weird little rag doll waiting for him. But the doll turns out to be a disguise for something much more disturbing.

Koontz is mainly known for his horror/thriller novels, and that’s what I thought “Ticktock” was, at first.  It brought to mind an old TV movie called “Trilogy of Terror,” in which Karen Black gets tormented by a little African doll chasing her around her apartment.  But as the story unfolds, it gets weirder and weirder, bizarre even by Koontz’s standards, and he’s no stranger to the supernatural.

I was growing more and more disappointed in “Ticktock,” wondering what in the world Koontz had been smoking when he wrote it, when I finally GOT IT in the third act: “Ticktock” is not so much a horror novel, but a sort of send up of horror novels.  Things got sillier and sillier, but now that I had reframed my expectations, I didn’t mind as much.

Sure enough, Koontz goes on to admit that he wanted a break from his usual, darker stuff and used this as an attempt at a “screwball comedy.”  I’m not completely sure that he succeeded, which is why I’m giving the book 3 stars (which is still better than the 2 stars I had in mind for a while there).  In my opinion, if Koontz wanted to write a horror/COMEDY book, it might have been better off making things kooky right from the start, instead of slowly switching from horror to comedy along the way.

So, if you are interested in a horror/comedy tale, like maybe “Shawn of the Dead” or “Cabin in the Woods,” this one’s not bad.  If you go into it KNOWING that’s what you’re going to get, you might enjoy it more than I did.