Velocity

I've been a big fan of Dean Koontz since reading Watchers the year after it came out, and I normally like everything he writes. Velocity is a decent novel, but it represents a departure from some of Koontz's normal style conventions. Although I appreciate the effort to do something different, to experiment a bit, I thought the experiment was unsuccessful. The book is tense and suspenseful, as Koontz novels always are, but throughout most of the novel I felt it lacked something. It was not until the end that I realized what.

Probably my favorite aspect of Dean Koontz's novels is his wonderful characterization, and his startling ability, novel after novel, with character after character, to make me love and care about his characters. His novels are "page turners" because I care so much about the characters. I worry about them. I want them to make it. And so I keep reading; I can't put the books down.

In Velocity, however, I did not feel the same way. There's really only one character. The book is told entirely from his perspective -- it could easily have been written in first person format. There are no scene breaks, no shifts into someone else's mind. Although that is fine, the problem here is that I didn't really like main character Billy Wiles very much. I didn't find myself DIS-liking him either... But I didn't care about him the way I've cared about characters in all of Koontz's other novels. Billy becomes somewhat likable in the very last few chapters, but it happens too late, and for the bulk of the book I found him uninteresting.

Don't get me wrong. Velocity is not a bad book. If this were a novel by some other author I'd never heard of, I'd probably say it was pretty decent. But as a Koontz novel, I felt it was one of Dean's weaker offerings. My advice is, save this for last, and read all the other ones first. They're all better than this one.Show Less