From the Corner of His Eye

It's a confident author who writes a novel quite as arm-strainingly long as this, but Koontz's devoted following will devour the 800-odd pages of this one without hesitation. The author is particularly adroit at reaching into our darkest dreams and fears, and that skill is put to impressive use here. Bartholomew Lampion has been blinded at an early age when surgeons are obliged to remove his eyes to save him from a fast-spreading cancer. Although eyeless, Barty regains his sight when he is 13. But it is no healer who has brought about this amazing restoration: the reasons are strange and supernatural - not least the importance of Barty's dedicated wish to make his mother proud of him before she dies. And the first time she died was the day Barty was born, January 6th 1965. As the foregoing conveys, this is a strange phantasmagoria indeed, and quite unlike anything that Koontz's contemporaries (such as Stephen King) are achieving in the field. Rather like his colleague James Herbert, Koontz appears to have made an effort to add literary skills to his keen storytelling abilities, and it has been instructive to watch him get better and better as a writer, to the degree that his early books appear to be written by a different author now. Despite the difficulty of conveying carefully drawn characters in a narrative where fantastic events and/or terror are the name of the game, the author is able to pull that off in a highly impressive fashion. The other achievement of the book is that despite its concatenation of effects, it never once seems overloaded and moves inexorably through its considerable length to a truly effective conclusion. (Kirkus UK)