"Phantasms" by Dean Koontz

 Strong start, so-so finish -- 4 stars

After reading “Pulse of the Earth” by Christopher Andrews, I actively sought another book by my other favorite author: Dean R. Koontz!

Rather than picking up his latest, I decided to again seek out one of his earlier hits, and that’s how I ended up reading “Phantasms.”

“Phantoms” opens with an eerie setup: Dr. Jenny Paige returns to her mountain home in the Sierras with her teenage sister Lisa in tow, as Lisa was recently orphaned by their mother’s death. But what should be a bustling ski village sits unnervingly still -- no pedestrians on sidewalks, no cars moving along streets. Once inside Jenny’s house, they discover the house keeper sprawled on the kitchen floor, her skin mottled with bruises, her body distended, though bearing no obvious wounds to explain her actual demise.

Jenny and Lisa trudge back into the silent town, stepping over severed limbs and mangled corpses until they discover a functional phone. The sheriff arrives from the neighboring county with deputies in tow, but the concrete cause of all this death still eludes them -- as do the whereabouts of half the town’s residents. And as night falls, an unseen presence stalks their search party, leaving behind only screams and viscera where human beings once stood.

Koontz has a knack for pulling readers into his plots, and his talent for crafting believable characters (though they can get repetitive across multiple books) shines in “Phantoms.” However, this time the story’s trajectory eventually lost some of its grip on me, veering into increasingly implausible territory that, frankly, bordered on the ridiculous. The narrative’s descent into theological musings -- contemplating God and Satan, the eternal struggle between light and darkness, humanity’s inherent nature -- felt unnecessary.

The cosmic battle between capital-G Good and capital-E Evil can be a tricky literary device. This philosophical detour in “Phantasms,” combined with a disappointingly saccharine conclusion, diminished my appreciation for the overall novel a bit.

What began as a thrilling premise ultimately faded into a somewhat unsatisfying resolution.