The Husband - Dean Koontz
I’ve read a fair amount of Koontz books, and the response I have is damned near binary. We have the morose quasi-religious books, and the hectic adventure novels. The Husband isn’t really any different, in that it completely fails to engage and is morose. There’s some half-hearted spirituality, but it’s almost as muddled and ignorable as that sort of thing is in real life.
What’s it about? Well, some dude, Mitch, he runs a small landscaping business, receives a call from some people saying that they’ve kidnapped his wife, and he has 60 hours, I think it was, to come up with 2 million dollars. Sounds like an adventure, doesn’t it? Tragically no, it’s just boring crap. You’re made to assume that Mitch is likeable and a good sort, but there really isn’t anything in the story to help convince you of that. It’d be like me introducing my roommate to people by saying “He’s very likeable!”, then refusing to let you talk to him.
Anyway. We plod along, waiting for the action to pick up or the characters to get more interesting. There’s some half-assed ode or jab or something at Running With Scissors in there, in the form of Mitch’s parents. The idea wasn’t bad, but the execution was way hard to swallow and they come off as little more than a paragraph that could be boiled down to “Hey, I read that book. Those people were crazy.”.
Then we get to the bad guys. Replace “likeable” in my roommate example with “evil” and you’ll get the idea.
I’d suggest reading it only if someone gives it to you and you’re too broke to make a trip to the bookstore seem like a good idea. It’s better than a poke in the eye, but a lot worse than doing anything fun, interesting, or terrifying. Maybe you should play mumbly peg instead.