THE FACE

Koontz flexes his muscles and sets forth like a demigod to create his most strongly anchored novel since 1995’s Intensity, a work sheathed with darkness and wreathed with wiry metaphor.

Ethan Truman, 37, a widower and retired homicide detective, has been hired as head of security for huge Palazzo Rospo, a mansion owned by Hollywood’s greatest star, Channing Manheim, a seductively empty actor nicknamed The Face. He’s often not home, and the roost is ruled by his brilliant ten-year-old son Fric (Aelfric), who gets $35 grand a year to redecorate his bedroom but gets ghostly phone calls as well. Koontz swoons through all the rooms of the manse, the first-class library of 35,000 volumes, the dustless wine cellar with 14,000 bottles that must be given a quarter turn every four months, the incredible phone system, whose every switch is blueprinted for the reader. Well, an anarchist teacher of modern fiction, Corky Laputa, has been sending The Face symbolic packages that suggest bad feelings: say, a fresh apple halved and stitched together with a blue doll’s eye hidden inside. Even Koontz himself may not know what this means while unrolling hundreds of pages of top-drawer suspense and masterly set design. Duncan “Dunnie” Whistler, an old buddy of Ethan’s and suitor of Ethan’s dead wife Hannah, drowns in a toilet but arises in the morgue, dresses, leaves, and buys Broadway roses for Hannah’s grave. During this long day’s journey, Ethan himself dies twice, once by gunfire, once crushed by a truck, and returns to life, weirdly hale. Then there’s Mr. Typhon, the swank storm god, who hires dead Dunnie as a hit man—to protect Ethan? At last, all astral questions focus on The Face and what might possibly be behind it.

High art? Mm, maybe, let’s wait and see—and does it matter anyway?