My wife found Watchers by Dean Koontz at a little free library and I got excited - a reread of something I think I read a few times when I was a teenager. Blast from the past! It’ll be fun to see how it holds up!
…and it doesn’t, really. It’s about a guy, Travis, who used to be Delta Force, but that never really comes into play. He’s just an alert dude who tens to make good decisions quickly. He makes some traps at the end and keeps guns all over the house. Then there’s Nora, a sheltered woman who thinks she’s ugly, but it turns out she’s super beautiful, and she and Travis are in love, and get married, and raise their son, Einstein, the super-intelligent dog. Yes. Einstein learns to read and understand human speech, spell words with Scrabble tiles, and basically becomes the friendliest furry friend of all time. He’s the result of a government program to breed intelligence, and his counterpart is genetically engineered to be a weapon. That’s The Outsider. They were raised together, and the Outsider hates the dog because the dog is favored and beautiful and the Outsider is ugly and hated. So TO wants to kill the dog. There’s also a hitman with delusions of immortality, but because the book is so sprawlingly unfocused we’re not sure until the end if he’s deluded or actually magical.
That’s the problem. It’s wildly all over the place. It veers from straight-ahead thriller as government agents try to stalk The Outsider and the dog, to wide-eyed fantasy as Travis and Nora explore Einstein’s capabilities, to a few horror scenes as The Outsider stalks and kills, and then there’s numerous just…diversions into weirdness. Particularly in the 2nd half as they go on the run, the pace just falls into a hole with explanatory distractions. Travis knows how to get fake IDs from an SF mobster who works from a basement in a Tenderloin strip club (yep, a strip club - we see it all through Nora’s eyes, letting her be aghast at the looseness of the dancers—and even propositioned by one of them, so we get titillation and a moralistic slant!). Einstein gets sick and we have almost 50 pages of them holing up with a vet, helping out, and musing on how awesome dogs are. It really feels like we’re along for the ride as Koontz follows his obsessions, and unfortunately he’s not much of a writer and can’t illustrate or explain in some pretty hacky ways. A lot of his writing, in fact, is about the nuts and bolts of how people move through a particular challenge—Nora’s elderly lawyer evading government agents to try to contact her, the hitman Vince navigating the particulars of approaching a target for a hit, Travis working out how to communicate with Einstein—and while in many books this is the meat of my interest, it feels like Koontz follows too many things too closely. He gets absorbed with cleverness and minutia, forgetting to tell a story. It’s almost like talking to a deeply nerdy engineer type, who’s interested more in deep particulars than in following the thread of a conversation.
He’s also very sentimental and romantic throughout, and while it works a few times, the feeling is jarring next to some pretty brutal descriptions of the Outsider’s victims. The most affecting idea in the whole book is that the Outsider resents the dog and wishes for love itself, but is too much a weapon of war to find a path outside of violence. It’s final moments are touching and horrifying, even if the climax as a whole feels rushed and unsatisfying.
I think a lot of this stuff would work if I was 15 degrees more into whatever Koontz’s thing is, but without a certain credulity and willingness to go into his world, much of Watchers feels hacky and overwritten.
I want to read a few other old Koontz favorites, Midnight and Dragon Tears, to see how they hold up and relive some of the strange plot elements they each have—Midnight in particular is my template for ‘crazy shit goes down in an isolated town b/c of government tests’, a premise that still appeals hugely. But I don’t have high hopes for them holding up, not after this. Glad I read it, though I skimmed chunks that just went on and on and on; it’s fun to tour through something I used to love.