The City – Dean Koontz, 2014 ★½

Trying to Like Dean Koontz

Reading The City makes me wonder what makes for pop-fiction success. Is it writing something that truly engages, provokes, inspires? Or is it delivering product to a well-conditioned audience? After a pulsating start, The City settles into a tired-feeling, slow-moving tale that delivers morals and thrills with the loping subtlety of a ball-peen hammer.

It’s my first time reading a novel by Dean Koontz, long a success in the horror genre. Though The City has elements of horror, it’s not a strict genre work. A black musician, Jonah Kirk, looks back on a frightening adolescence in the 1960s, where domestic strife came together with urban terrorism in the small apartment building where he lived. Strange visions suggest some kind of supernatural presence watching over him, as well as incipient danger to himself and his devoted mother.

The City starts out elliptically but well, builds slowly toward some crisp, suspenseful moments, and develops a central character I cared about. Jonah is not particularly convincing as a pre-teen; he speaks like an adult and is prone to pangs of guilt over the whitest lies he tells his mother. But as he is also the narrator, telling the story as a grown man, you can accept his narrative as a subjective lens. Koontz establishes him as our empathetic focus as the mystery kicks in.

This happens slowly, amid some coy misdirection ploys. Jonah is innocent enough to believe his mother when she tells him the loud grunting and thumping sounds coming from a female neighbor’s apartment are because that neighbor is writing a book about rodeos. Eventually Jonah recognizes one of the upstairs groaners as his father, which sets up this later announcement from his mother:

“Your father’s no longer living here. He went upstairs to help Miss Delvane with her rodeo act, and I wasn’t having any of that.”

That father is just no good, a point Koontz gets more and more emphatic on. Even early, when the parameters of the tale are still being outlined in a beguiling way, there is a frustrating lack of subtlety and creative ambiguity, overridden by Koontz’s need to spell out what is good and what is evil. For a while, it doesn’t intrude overmuch.

“Maybe the difference between horror and holiday was just the width of an ordinary street…” The city of the title isn’t identified by name, but Koontz’s descriptive abilities build it into a living, breathing environment, especially after a character named Miss Pearl appears out of nowhere to tell Jonah he needs to be strong. She helps him find a fresh direction in life by mysteriously providing his local community center with a refurbished piano. Miss Pearl pushes The City into the realm of the fantastic, being a mystical figure only Jonah seems to see who speaks of his need to stay strong in the face of a menacing future. More, apparently, she cannot say.

In addition to Miss Pearl, Jonah encounters other elements of the mystic: An eye detached from a stuffed doll that makes him uneasy, a feather encased in amber that seems to guide him toward what is right, a bird painted by a contemporary of Vermeer which shows him the unfairness of mankind as well as its promise. Jonah also encounters another boy who calls himself “a twelve-year-old geek saxophonist;” a teenage girl who takes him on tours of city attractions, and a Japanese neighbor scarred by his experience growing up in an internment camp. As impressed as I was by Koontz’s imagination, I also wondered how he was going to bring these diverse elements together.

Coming into this novel, I had low expectations. Koontz has been described as a down-market Stephen King wannabe, mostly by King fans it should be said, but they do command a lot of mindshare in the horror community. Just check out the comments thread of this Matt Molgaard's Horror Novels Review post. As I flew through The City’s first hundred pages, it struck me that a comparison could be made, just not all in King’s favor.

Dean Koontz. Image from https://www.scifinow.co.uk/reviews/the-city-by-dean-koontz-book-review/

Koontz is a writer with evident heart, who wants to impart thoughtful, hopeful ideas on his readers. His hand is not heavy like King’s. The City offers plenty of life advice worth sharing:

“It’s a sad world. Lift it a little.”

“In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.”

“Don’t waste a fine spring day, Jonah. There’s not as many of them in a lifetime as you think there will be.”

“That’s life. Always something, more good than bad, but always interesting if you’re paying attention.”

There’s something to be said about accentuating the positive, particularly in a novel often concerned with flashing images Jonah has of a strangled woman and murdered parents. I found Koontz at times quite eloquent. But a little of this can go a long way, evidently longer than Koontz must think, because he keeps offering up more words of hope as the novel goes on. It gets to be a problem after a while as the book begins to read like a Norton’s Anthology of fortune-cookie sentiments; but by then there are other issues.

The novel begins in 1966, and as it continues, you get plenty of reminders of what decade we are in. Jonah is shaken by the deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts, laughs at a Peter Sellers movie, and chats up a building superintendent who wears a T-shirt with the slogan “Get Off My Cloud.” There is also political unrest in the air, demonstrations and so on, which becomes a dominant if ill-fitting element.

If Koontz had dropped this element of the story, and worked in more magic instead, I think The City would have been a better reading experience. Ironically, Koontz does just this sort of thing in other novels, which leads to the common charge of him being too formulaic. I don’t mind formula so much when it is incorporated into a story as good as The City has starting out; with the lonely kid hanging tough with Mom and his music in the big city. I wanted to see how Jonah’s scary visions would be incorporated into the fabric of the book.

Weakly, as it turned out.

The construction of The City seems very loose; visions and characters are introduced early in the novel as if to portend great things, only to disappear without meaning anything. The good guys are all very noble, decent, and clever; the bad guys rabidly nasty and fairly inept. A couple of the latter are introduced as political radicals of the Weatherman stripe, who see their politics as license to murder:

“We have a score to settle. Unless you don’t have the guts. No one’s immune if they’re in the way of the Cause, brother.”

It is unusual to see left-wing agitators from the 1960s portrayed as villains in pop fiction, and, once established, I hoped Koontz would do more merging this element to Jonah’s mystical visions. Alas, these two storylines never come together. By the time the radicals take center-stage, Koontz’s novel has moved away from the mystery of Miss Pearl and focuses instead on the internment-camp survivor, Mr. Yoshioka, who has his own network of decent Japanese-American people he enlists to figure out what the radicals are about.

The exchanges between Mr. Yoshioka and Jonah are arresting, sometimes even amusing. He’s a distinctive character in a book sorely in need of some, and provides some real-world wisdom for his young charge to chew on:

“I haven’t lied to Mom about Eve Adams [a mysterious neighbor who has broken into Jonah’s apartment and threatened the boy],” Jonah explains. “I just haven’t mentioned her, that’s all.”

“I suppose there must be a distinction if we think hard enough,” Mr. Yoshioka wryly replies.

But as Mr. Yoshioka’s friends set to work, gaining information using oddball ploys, a deterministic and contrived atmosphere becomes harder to shake off. A crazed professor is introduced to prod the story along, but he becomes yet another dead end for the story to waste pages on developing.

I don’t want to offer up any spoilers, but none of the action in the book’s latter half did anything to resummon my flagging engagement. Storycraft is hard work; even a good novelist can struggle. Here I felt Koontz was leaning too much on his own potboiler legend; he makes plenty of nods at delivering a grand finale even after his basic narrative falls apart. What comes out of the last third of the book is labored, tired, and flat. And the sunshiny bromides continue, feeling more tinny than before:

In our lives, we come to moments of great significance that we fail to recognize, the meaning of which does not occur to us for many years. Each of us has his agenda and focuses on it, and therefore we are often blind to what is before our eyes.

Koontz’s agenda is easy to spot; he’s writing a book for his legion of fans, a book that may sit outside his more overt horror concerns but still works to deliver what that audience wants: Positive spirituality, good triumphing over evil, a sense of life as a gift to be treasured. There’s even a friendly dog to keep one of Jonah’s helpers company, dogs being a common force for good in Koontz’s work.

But if you are like me, someone reading this guy for the first time, The City won’t leave you wanting more.