Customer Reviews

77 Shadow Street

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(43)
2 star:		(61)
1 star:		(87)

 

 

Dean Koontz's 77 SHADOW STREET is not an easy book to describe. On the one hand, it's a fairly familiar haunted house tale in which generations of residents at a posh Victorian mansion are sucked into a terrible nightmare. On the other hand, it's Koontz's little jab at the modern world, which he sees as disintegrating around us, leaving us unprepared to combat the ultimate forces of evil. The house itself, once called Belle Vista and now the Pendleton, happens to have been constructed on something Koontz calls a "space-time trapdoor," which opens every 38 years to suck in the hapless people unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. This can be scary, if a bit derivative (you'll be reminded of THE SHINING, 1408, THE MIST, and even the TV series AMERICAN HORROR STORY). There's an evil presence called "One" (who wants ultimate dominion), and another called "Witness" (who will help him achieve it). There are creepy creatures galore, and a few really grotesque happenings. But somehow the novel didn't work for me.

The biggest problem with 77 SHADOW STREET is the way Koontz tells his story. There is a huge cast of characters, which are introduced slowly over the first half of the book through a series of vignettes told from differing perspectives. At first it's difficult to keep track of all of them; it's also difficult to get very attached to any of them. Devon Murphy is a security guard still mourning the loss of his mother, Bailey Hawkes is an ex-marine investment counselor, Silas Kinsley is a retired litigation attorney who finds himself researching the history of the Pendleton, Twyla Trahern is a country music composer with a precocious 8-year-old son, Mikey Dime is a hit man with psychopathic tendencies, the Cupp sisters are octogenarian cake-bakers, Sparkle Sykes is writer with an autistic daughter - the list honestly goes on and on (and I haven't even mentioned the characters from past generations of Pendleton residents). It's not that these characters aren't interesting - some of them are. It's just that there are so many of them, and the story jumps from one to the other in little mini-chapters which never allow the reader to become really invested in any of them. This makes it hard to care all that much what happens to them when things go crazy at horror house.

Additionally, there is an amazing lack of dialogue in this novel. For almost the entire first half, Koontz's many characters are isolated from each other, each in his/her own apartment. The story unfolds from their many perspectives, with Koontz telling us what's happening, describing events, even summarizing conversations that we never actually get to hear. It's an odd way of telling a story, especially with so many characters involved. It leaves us, as readers, distanced from the core of the action, and kept separated from the characters we're supposed to root for.

Ultimately, Koontz's story is interesting, and I can't say the book isn't worth reading. I grew tired of it, however, which isn't what I expected from a Dean Koontz thriller. And by the end, I wasn't invested enough in any of the characters to really care why all this was happening and what we were supposed to learn from it. "This world," one character says, "is a dark place, and hard." That much comes through very clearly in 77 SHADOW STREET. I was disappointed, however. Two stars for the novel; the additional one is for Mr. Koontz, whose books I have loved for decades. I will always be a fan.

The Pendleton is a grand old house built atop Shadow Hill, the highest point in the city. It was built by a tycoon in the late 1800s and from the start the families that lived there came to unspeakable ends. Sometimes the bodies were found; sometimes not.

When our story opens the Pendleton has been divided into luxury apartments and has filled its rooms with a cross section of humanity. There is a songwriter and her precocious son, unmarried sisters and their housekeeper, an inebriated former senator who has fallen from grace, a snarky concierge, a Barney Fife rent-a-cop security guard, an ex-Marine and a retired attorney who is intent on uncovering the sordid past of this piece of real estate.

We're grabbed in the first couple of chapters by an elevator that plummets 30 levels below the basement, the Pendleton's former lowest level and then by a sinister black globule that pursues a resident swimming in the basement pool in the early morning illuminated only by the undulating underwater lights. It seems the period of grace has ended and "The One" is back.

This book is Dean Koontz at his classic "hold your breath and clutch your heart" best. A few of his recent offerings have been a bit disappointing but Dean is back on the Crazy Train with this offering. 77 Shadow Street will keep you up at night but isn't that why we read Dean Koontz?

I WANT to like books that I buy. I realize that it takes authors a great deal of time and effort to bring a book to fruition, and I feel horrible when I leave a negative review. Unfortunately, I'm about to feel horrible.

I've been a faithful Koontz fan for ages...Odd Thomas is one of my all-time favorite characters. And having read Dean Koontz for so long, I've come to think of his books ("Odd Thomas" and "Frankenstein" aside -- those are special) along the lines of, "If you've read one, you've read them all." He thinks of so many different ways to tell "good versus evil" stories, that even though the premise was the same in most of his books, they were still entertaining. However, not only was this book not, "Odd Thomas" or "Frankenstein," but it was also not like anything else I've ever read by this author. In fact, as I was reading this book, I wondered if Dean Koontz actually wrote it (the plethora of incomplete sentences was a big, unwelcome surprise).

The plot was far more science-fiction than horror or thriller. The storyline was weird. The suspense was lukewarm. Character development was pretty much nil. The ending was anticlimactic. I'm sorry to say that much of this book was REDUNDANT and BORING; I eventually got to the point where I just wanted to get reading it over with. It was during this time that I read only the first sentence of each paragraph for many of the chapters, and guess what? I DIDN'T MISS ANYTHING.

I guess the only part of this book that I actually did like was the advertisement for the new Odd Thomas book at the end.

Someone used the word "plodding" to describe this novel. That's one way to put it. Koontz has always been given to overuse of description, but this book was a nightmare. If little dialogue and action with lots of description is your thing, this is the book for you. If you hate getting bogged down in details of how something looks or pulsates or sounds, etc., where every paragraph is a challenge to your patience, steer clear and wait for the next Odd Thomas.

Not like the Dean Koonz thrillers of the past. Couldn't finish the book. Difficult to keep characters straight and I really didn't
care about them.

I thought "yay!" a new Koontz book! I started reading it and thought "wow, this is off to a slow start....but I will give it a chance". I kept reading and thought "this is terribly boring and confusing.....but I will keep giving it a chance". I kept reading and started to think "this is one of the worst books I have ever read.....but I'll keep reading. Surely it will have an awesome ending!" I read to the end and thought "why did he even bother to write this and who told him it was good enough to publish?"

A disappointing book all the way around. Don't waste your money. If you really want to read it, get it from your library. Then when you decided to kick it to the curb you won't feel guilty.

Giving up after 100 pages. Ordinarily I devour Dean Koontz's books but this is a confusing mess. I have formed no attachment to any of the characters nor do I care what happens to any of them. Time to call it quits. What has happpened to the Koontz of old? So sad.

sadly... yes, there are a few mention of dogs. Like you thought in a return to out and out insanity Dean could forget that labradors and golden retrievers are the best kind of people. Also Dean can't seem to get past the idea that a gun will solve every kind of problem. Even the all knowing, all powerful ONE seems surprised that this group of visitors may present a problem because they are armed.
We have a vast cast of characters. All of them simply awful, dull people. And Dean highlights his own descriptive inabilities when it comes to the autistic character. We get her point of view up until the 'transformation'... then we don't know what she thinks. It seems to me he found this too hard so dropped her from the featured players list. Instead we get mostly young Winny, who's description is constantly reinforced every few sentences. But even then, three pages of a characters perspective is devoted to describing the various fungi.... fungus is weird, sure... but a few hundred pages isn't scary.
And Dean, you might want to run across to Toppers and bring Mac and Shelly home. You left them in the restaurant.

Ok, unputdownable may not be a word. But you'll join me in lobbying to have it added to the dictionary after you read this book. By far the best of Dean Koontz ever,and I have read them all. As always, the story is riveting, the characters finely drawn and the story nothing short of compelling and downright frightening.

I hate reviewers who give away too much of the story, so suffice to say that something is not right at this upscale and gorgeous building. You'll feel the terror and confusion of the tenants and workers at the building, and the ominous words of the entity are breathtaking. I literally felt like I could not read this fast enough, and thought about it every time I had to stop reading for even a moment. A whole new level of horror from the master!

I can only describe this endeavor as three INCOMPLETE books for the price of one. The three were confusingly mashed together with his obligatory overly descriptive details of fungus, evil forests, and shadowy creatures.

Book one is Koontz's political and ideological beliefs. Several of his characters have nothing to do with the plot of his book. They are just occupants of the building he uses to express his beliefs (some of them aren't even home). From his ramblings we learn corporations, republicans, guns, money and possessions are good. Scientists and the one world order (huh?) are bad. Windmill power kills birds. Global warming, dead frogs, and dead bees are all lies. People who give money to the poor are weak.

Book two is the evil that takes place at the Pendleton every 38 years. It begins with the evil senator being taken down 31 floors to an unknown destination. This wasn't foreshadowing. None of this is mentioned again until p. 400 where we find the senator in a cocoon. Pages 1 to 305 are all about investigating what happens every 38 yrs, fungus, time travel to the past and dead from this same past. Several pendleton occupants are turned into monsters by fungal spores or shadow creatures.

Now Koontz is stuck. He's got monsters, fungus, past pendleton dwellers. He's got nothing.

After a week of watching The terminator and resident evil, he has the answer. In the future the world is destroyed by nanomachines which are directed by an evil AI via bluetooth. The building and its occupants are hurtled into the future and so begins the third book when the book is 2/3s of the way done.

**Spoiler Alert**
The third book begins with our hero, Bailey Hawks, shooting an infected resident in the head(evil zombie kill of the day). As the disintegrating brain matter runs away under its own power, Dr. Ignis Kirby declares 'it must be nanomachines, see no blood, see small, see moves under its own power'. (Well as a former research scientist I can tell you that nanomachines can't just be readily identified this way, but hey just saying.) The Pendleton occupants wander around looking at more monsters and scary scenery. Then a guy from the future comes forward, Witness, and we learn that some evil scientific genius decided to use nanomachines to end the world. The evil genius worked with Dr. Kirby, the nanomachine inventor, and while Kirby didn't have anything to do with ending the world, he didn't do anything to stop it.

Kirby declares that he will never let this happen now that he knows the truth. Hawks shoots Kirby because obviously he was evil. Kirby invented the machines and lived in the building that was stuck in the place where the space time continuum was bleeding through from the past and the future. This must have been caused by a great evil, and it must have made Kirby evil. Kirby needed to be shot. Koontz should have followed this line of reasoning and just shot the whole building much earlier.