Customer Reviews

The Darkest Evening of the Year

5 star:		(82)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(46)
2 star:		(61)
1 star:		(62)

 

 

Length:: 3:19 Mins

Amy Redwing operates Golden Heart, a Golden Retriever rescue service, that brings her to the home of abused housewife and mother Janet Brockman. Amy and her close friend Brian McCarthy rescue Janet, her two kids, and their retriever Nicki from Janet's abusive husband. Immediately, Amy recognizes a seemingly supernatural connection with Nicki, the golden retriever.

And soon thereafter, Amy discovers that she is being followed.

The power of this novel lies in the genuine compassion that Dean Koontz exhibits through Amy and her love for and near obsession to rescue both people and dogs from abuse and neglect.

If there's a weakness to this novel it's that Amy can come across as unintentionally self-righteous and holier than thou.

Regardless, it's clear that Dean Koontz is a mature writer, and his desire to bring together the suspense-writing strengths of his early career with matters close to his heart are on full display in The Darkest Evening of the Year.

This novel contains a couple of plot twists that are really, really cool, and the textured layers of the characters, their multiple names and the depths of their backgrounds indicate that Koontz is onto something profound in this novel.... namely the existence of a soul and how that soul transmits through multiple lives.

This is a profound novel from a writer who has mastered the elements of suspense, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Stacey Cochran

Author of CLAWS available for 80 Cents

This novel is certainly dividing Koontz fans as evidenced by these reviews. I sense some of that might be attributed to the fact that "The Darkest Evening of the Year" seems bifurcated to me into a suspense thriller on the surface where a true morality play between good and evil occurs and a secondary storyline that focuses on educating the reader about the plight of abandoned and endangered dogs and the agencies and people who are dedicated to rescuing them. I suspect Koontz used this story to pay homage to his family's beloved Trixie (his own golden who recently died from cancer)and to assuage the pain of herloss...certainly his touching dedication written to his wife Gerda would lead to that conclusion if nothing else.

Amy Redwing rescues dogs and attempts to develop a relationship with Brian McCarthy while hiding a troubled past. Brian has unresolved baggage of his own and sometimes helps Amy in her rescues and is present when she bravely stands up to an abusive bully and, in the process, extricates the man's wife, children, and golden retriever, Nickie from the home.

Nickie and Amy become inseparable after a seemingly supernatural connection and Nickie becomes a major protagonist for the rest of the story with links to both Amy's and Brian's pasts. Just what or who is Nickie and does she have special powers (as have some dogs in previous Koontz novels)? How is she linked to Amy's past and Brian's future?

The suspense in the novel is keenly felt due mainly to Koontz's extreme characterizations. The good guys are almost one dimenionally good and, of course, are kind to and love dogs. The bad guys are unredeemedly evil and, inexplicably want dogs (especially Nickie) "killed good and hard". There is no middle ground here...and the love of dogs seems to be a clear demarcation between good and evil.

As usual, Koontz mixes some wonderful descriptions and phrases..."Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and for the mistakes we make because of those illusions"...with some over-the-top descriptions that make the reader smile in sophomoric glee.

There are unanswered plot lines in this novel that probably won't matter to the casual reader. Why did Brian get so obsessive about the eye sketches? Why did Vanessa inexplicably want Nickie killed good and hard? Why was Billy Pilgrim suddenly focused on golden retriever symbolism? And again, as usual, there is a need to suspend the reader's disbelief sufficiently to accept the "magic" of the novel.

But I do recommend the book...it is not as off track as some of Koontz's recent novels...and any dog lover will get choked up with some of his passages of homage to dogs. Koontz has immense talent and a love for dogs that comes together in this story.

Everyone is talking about the "dog angle", "too much about the dogs". Let me point something out that some may not have seen, the cover of the book has a dog on it. It kind of speaks to me that dogs may have alot to do with this book. That being said....

My favorite Koontz books are Lightening and Watchers. I enjoy the "story". Be it a love story or a scary story involving messing around with human and dog genetics.

The Darkest Evening of the Year made sense to me. Amy was married before to a sadistic son of a gun. This man murdered everyone, including their daughter. Amy grew up in an orphanage and one of the main important people in her life at the orphanage was Nickie, a golden retriever. Nickie is also Amy's daughter that was murdered. Years later, the sadistic son of a gun husband meets up with the crazy mother of another child, the child has downs syndrome. The sadistic son of a gun is looking forward to tracking Amy down and finishing the job, and he's recruited this crazy woman. Amy's current boyfriend just happens to be the crazy woman's daughter.

That's where the golden retriever comes in. The golden retriever is divine intervention to work at saving Amy's life and the other litte girls life.

This is fiction people. It's a wonderful story. I enjoyed it. People in these reviews are pretty much just re-writing what's on the book cover so I tend to question whether or not they really read the book.

Yes, there is alot about the dogs. But it's not nauseating. The cover sort of warns you, so you cant complain.

I gave it three stars because Lightening, Watchers, Dragon Tears and Taken all set the bar for me. The book was enjoyable. By the way, I live with a cranky 17 year old cat. I wasn't put off in the least about Koontz's dog characters in this book.

It is unpleasant to admit that a great one has feet of clay, especially a great one whom one has come to expect has no flaws artistically. But such is the case when I just completed reading Dean Koontz's The Darkest Evening of the Year. It is an example of the courtesan revealing herself to be nothing more than a whore with good make-up.

The great Koontz traits are here--innocents in peril, deranged evil psychopaths on the march toward Armageddon, righteous causes beautifully expressed, lavish prose that requires one to read slowly and repeatedly--but this book is a mess. It's a great man writing simply to write, either for money or expediency, but without conviction or compelling need. A pay check will do.

Koontz, when working with his favorite dogs, golden retrievers, can still call forth a tear to the most jaded eye. But really! This is just a mish-mush. He creates a sinister psychopath, Vanessa, who is nothing more than a wan imitation of his great female nutsoid, Datura. This girl has no reason to exist, she has no background, family, or believability that would have produced such a monster except for Koontz's desire to shock us.

Then there are the trademark Koontz tropes--the nice guy who kills at the end of a chapter, so coldly, so irrationally. The weird but believable sub characters who populate an underworld we hope does not exist. The use of the word "susurration." (I wait for that and the use of the word "butter" to make sure I am truly in "le monde Koontz.") But this book is all formula, no substance.

Let's see. There is the demimonde of a child who is inarticulate but wise, oh so wise. Dogs have prescience and supernatural goodness and direction. Intuition trumps all rationality and reason. Coincidence is accepted as a "not to be questioned" fact of life. This book, in short, drips with the formulaic Koontz fantasies that can make even his best works descend into laughable, eye-rolling nonsense that sabotages his considerable skill and creativity.

I have a golden retriever who is the love of my life, but he is not capable of sensing evil, as are Koontz's dogs. I am glad that there are people so dedicated to their preservation and protection that a whole subspecies of people have evolved to create evolved habitats for them. But that these dogs have become so evolved as to be able to predict and direct human events, including sprouting wings and reversing time and tragedy, is just too preposterous for words. Dean Koontz is drinking and petting his golden retriever and growing lachrymose and insane.

This book adheres to the Swiss Cheese School of Dilapidated Writing. Holes, holes, everywhere there are holes in this inane plot. He pulls on his successes in other works, recycles them, and fails to substantiate any coherence. The arch villain, Harrow, is not really who he says he is. Harrow seems to have evolved in the writing and given a plot twist that is jejune. I didn't buy it for a minute.

Vanessa is his true downfall--incredibly creepy and unlikeable but totally unbelievable on every level. Datura, in Odd Thomas, on the other hand, was totally great and believable. Vanessa is just a piece of Koontz schlock. Oh look how horrible I am--I will abuse and kill an autistic child. Right.

I hate it when Koontz subverts his talents for a paycheck, knowing that his books will sell, no matter how implausible. He can, and does, create a turn of phrase better than anyone else, but there are lines in this book that are truly laughable. Pseudo profundity is expected to cancel plot deficiency and character plausibility. Well, Dean, it doesn't. This book is neither moving nor exciting. It is simply a sentimental wallow in Golden Retriever Uber Alles nonsense.

I have loved Dean Koontz's talented forays into the world of the insane and the frightening, but this book reveals his predilection to trivialize his talent for personal gain. If he has no better ideas for a book, then he should quit writing. Every great artist needs a gray eminence who will tell him that his work should not see the light of day, but apparently Koontz doesn't have this person at his publisher's. He needs to have this person to say, "Dean, this is crap--delete it, burn it if you have printed it, but don't put this out there."

Let's make a list of the absurdities of this story: Amy Redwing gets a call from a nun dead for ten years. Brian, a low-level talent of architecture, suddenly develops a skill for drawing of a golden retriever, drawings which are of unmatched excellence but which inspire Amy to do the equivalent of "That's nice." A murdered child channels herself to get revenge through a golden retriever that has her same name. An abused child also channels the dead girl with the same dream. Amy is an orphan, plus two, who is befriended by a golden retriever in a convent that adopts the dog and eulogizes it in what is virtually a pagan ritual. Now, this kind of nonsense goes on and on, but it all adds up to some kind of kinky catharsis for Koontz, but not for the reader. The reader is left wondering about the sanity of the author and the publishing house.

Dean Koontz has always walked the tightrope between realism and the supernatural, but here he allows himself to fall over into the realm of fantasy and unbelievability. He allows himself to wallow in the maudlin, forsaking his duty to his readers to present a plausible explanation for the brush with the fantastic.

This book is poison, without any redeeming virtues. Avoid it at all costs, but do not ignore the rest of the Koontz body of work. Someone failed him here.

Final Note: The title has nothing to do with the story whatsoever!

Reading the synopsis of this book, I felt it had such promise: mystery, suspense, a hint of the supernatural, and hero dogs. What a letdown! The only reason I finished this book is to try to recoup the $8 I paid for it.

Here are the problems I had with it: Even though I work for an animal rescue group, this book at times seemed too preachy in parts; the writing style seemed to go from fictional prose to Public Service Announcement at the drop of a hat. (Example: "[He] will see [her] after she has been reduced to the condition of a caged breeder dog in those puppy mills against which she crusades.") Don't get me wrong: although I think it's admirable that Koontz is speaking out against puppy mills and trying to inform the general public about them in the medium in which he's familiar, his attempts seem much too ham-handed.

Despite his obvious love for dogs, Koontz is inconsistent in his view of them: they are often referred to as the characters' "kids", but then they are often referred to as "it" (instead of "he" or "she"). The heroine of the book rescues Goldens, having rescued her first golden when she was a child in an orphanage, but then when she's an adult, she BUYS her first two Goldens from a BREEDER?

So many of the characters have aliases as to get confusing. And the alias names are often ridiculous: "Bobby Onions"? Really? "Onions"? And "Tyrone Slothrop"? Egads!

There's no real action or suspense until after page 400 or so--and the book only has 461 pages!--and even then it's predictable and rushed, as if the author was getting tired and was like, "Oh, by the way, then this happened. The End." The resolution was one of the most flagrant examples of deus ex machina I have EVER read. Buyer (and reader) beware!

I normally like the stuff that Dean Koontz puts out. But his latest, The Darkest Evening Of The Year, seems to be lacking that normal Koontz flair. It's not necessarily a bad read, but it almost seemed like Koontz was trying to do a tribute to a lost pet of his own... Perhaps there's some of that there, but I haven't read any of his background on the book, so I don't know if that's the case or not...

The main character, Amy Redwing, lives for her rescue activities for golden retrievers. She ends up with Nickie, a dog she "purchased" during a family/animal abuse confrontation. Nickie seems to have special meaning, however. There are things from Amy's background that make her think this is an animal sent from her past to help her through some upcoming crisis. Brian McCarthy is her boyfriend, someone who doesn't totally share Amy's commitment to the dogs, but loves them (and her) all the same. Nickie also affects him in a bizarre way, causing dreams to take on a realistic quality. The trouble that both of them are moving towards involve two people from their past who have taken things from them that they held dear. These two mystery people are now lovers, and their plan is to eliminate both Amy and Brian in one climatic event that will erase their pasts and satisfy a bloodlust that they both possess...

So why didn't I find this book up to par? For one, the dog angle is overwhelming. The back cover of the book has a picture of Koontz with his retriever, and the dedication makes me think that this dog recently died. If that's the case, I can understand Koontz writing the book from this angle to pay homage to the pet. Fine, but it seemed to be a bit overkill. The normal writing style that Koontz has with turning a phrase seemed to be absent in large part. I saw brief periods where he was hitting on all cylinders, but most of the book wasn't up to his normal standards. And the plotline with the two people from the past was really confusing at the first, and it took about half of the book before the two very divergent stories started to intersect in any meaningful way. I think I would have cared a bit more had I known earlier on *why* people were digging into Amy's past. As it was, I felt as if I was just waiting for the chapter where I would finally understand why (and care why) these things were happening.

With a different author, I'd probably give this a bit of a higher rating. But knowing what Koontz is capable of, The Darkest Evening wasn't quite what I was expecting from him...

I believe that we are all put on this earth for a reason. If we are fortunate, we discover that purpose and use our lives for good. In The Darkest Evening of the Year, Dean Koontz demonstrates what has given meaning to his life. Through his prolific writing and generous contributions, he and his wife, Gerda, are changing a small portion of the world.

It is summed up so well through Dean's heroine, Amy, who is rescuing dogs and educating the public on puppy mills and the cruel conditions in which these dogs live. I am an avid animal lover and even I did not realize that a lot of the Internet sites, which sell purebreds, are simply fronts for such puppy mills.

Perhaps Dean Koontz described it best when he writes of Amy's philosophy in believing that dogs have a spiritual purpose. "The opportunity to love a dog and treat it with kindness was an opportunity for a lost and selfish human heart to be redeemed. They are powerless and innocent, and it is how we treat the humblest among us that surely determines the fate of our souls."

The Darkest Evening of the Year is the first book by Dean Koontz after the passing of Trixie, his former Canine Companion assistive dog. Indeed, he had to finish this book right after her death. But this book and the legacy that Trixie left with the immense funding of CCI show truly that Trixie really did make Dean and Gerda better people.

Trixie, who always was a "shameless huckster" for her Dad's books (keep Trixie in Kibbles), is now in avatar form on Dean Koontz's website. I hope that she will be there always because she will forever remain in the hearts of so many of his readers. She touched us all.

Frankly, although great suspenseful writing such as Koontz's is to be admired, in the whole scope of life it actually means very little. However, when you turn that tremendous writing ability into a TOOL; to influence, educate, and share intrinsic moral truths such as Koontz has done with The Darkest Evening of the Year and his other stories on dogs...now THAT truly is to be admired.

Great book and wonderful story. I know that Trixie is proud of you for this one! (Trixie thinks all books should be dog books.)

I love Dean Koontz books and have most of his books in hardback. I have reread them all the time. But this book is the worst. I got about halfway through it and finally had to put it down as I couldn't finish it. If you want to read it, wait for it from the library as it isn't worth it to buy it. I gave the book to my sister and she read the first few chapters, hated it enough that she skipped to the last chapter to finish the book. The story line is weak and he said he wrote from his love of dogs but that doesn't show. If you want to read one of his great dog books read Watchers - it is a page turner and a great book.

Having read nearly every single novel that Koontz has written, I found it hard to believe that The Darkest Evening of the Year was actually written by him. More of a lecture of the virtues of Golden Retrievers, this book had no suspenseful plot, undeveloped characters, and simply put, just a weird story line. It was obviously written at the spur of the moment to get it out just in time for the holiday shopping season, so that he and his publisher could make a buck. In a nutshell, this book was just plain awful. It's hard to believe Koontz wrote this.

Let me preface by stating that I have been a huge Dean Koontz fan since the beginning of his career --- way back to his Sci-Fi start in the early 1970's and through his many pseudonyms --- right through his professional peak in the 1980's and 1990's. That being said, I cannot explain what happened to the Dean Koontz I know and love. Somewhere around the turn of the new millennium, Mr. Koontz's fictional voice and tone shifted away from the thrillers and sci-fi adventures that marked his greatest success to that of "new age spirituality" that transgresses nearly all of his recent work.

In my opinion, the true Dean Koontz was last seen in 2000 with the fantastic thriller - "FALSE MEMORY". Since then we have been subjected to his "spiritual" novels - "LIFE EXPECTANCY" (2004), "BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON" (2003), "ONE DOOR AWAY FROM HEAVEN" (2002) & "FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE" (2001); the underachieving "Odd" series - "BROTHER ODD" (2007), "FOREVER ODD" (2005) & "ODD THOMAS" (2003); and three novels so close in their content that they are interchangeable - "THE GOOD GUY" (2007), "THE HUSBAND (2006) & "VELOCITY" (2005). The only exception is the pure horror novel, "THE TAKING" (2004), which I can only gather must have been an old novel not previously released.

On to "THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR". The basic premise of this story involves Amy Redwing, professional dog rescuer, and her architect boyfriend, Brian McCarthy. They are on the verge of taking their relationship to the next step, but both seem troubled by past demons that they are unsure of how to exorcise. Brian has "visions" that come out through drawings he creates while in a trancelike state (none of which are ever delved into deeply in this novel) while Amy focuses on saving dogs in danger. Brian accompanies Amy on a rescue that turns particularly tense. The result of this effort is Amy taking in a third golden retriever, this one a mysterious female named

Nickie. Does Nickie have magical powers? Is she the reincarnated spirit of Amy's long

dead daughter (also named Nickie)? None of these questions are answered satisfactorily by the end of this book. As in most Koontz novels, good cannot exist without evil. To that end, the embodiments of evil in this novel are "Harrow" (Amy's evil ex), "Moongirl" (Brian's evil ex) and an unstoppable hit-man who goes by many names. I almost forgot, Harrow and Moongirl are secretly keeping and torturing Moongirl and Brian's Downs-syndrome daughter, fondly referred to as "Piggy". Ugh!

What transpires is a mess of ultra-small chapters --- none of which are more than 4 or 5 pages long --- that are intended to keep the reader turning the pages furiously. It's almost as if Koontz had been possessed by the master of the short, unsatisfying chapters - James Patterson. The stories of animal rescue are the only saving grace here. If you are a dog or animal lover you will definitely relate to the keen details provided. As for the "human" characters in this novel - none are sketched out well and are paper-thin as a result. The "good" characters are all "too good" and their tale is similar to a sappy Hallmark Hall-Of-Fame TV movie. The "evil" characters, while given much of the novel's focus, are dispatched of so quickly at the end of the book you would think the author was in a rush to get this manuscript to his publisher. Also, the book's title is never explained or symbolically linked to anything more than a few Robert Frost quotes in the Section headings and one characters fear of the dark.

Being such a long-time reader of Dean Koontz, I always got a kick out of the themes that ran through much of his works --- like the remarkable dogs --- "Watchers", anyone? Other than that theme, "THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR" departs from all the themes and power that drove the many exceptional Dean Koontz thrillers I have read over the years. If I wanted to read heart-warming animal rescue tales I would pick up a James Herriot novel. Will the real Dean Koontz please stand up?!?!