Hideaway by Dean Koontz: An Awful Book Well Written

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

My views I must admit on how women are depicted in the media have changed through the decades. Take for example the Carry On movies. My teenage self would have no worries about scantily clad women wandering around the screen. My current fifty something self is more nuanced however. For while I'm happy to defend the films of the fifties and most of the sixties as saucy seaside postcard fun (my favourite being Carry On Cleo) I can't really defend them from the late sixties onwards. Given that they were crude, sexist and in some cases racist and misogynistic.

However whether as a testontroned teenager or a man of fifty whose shades of grey is in his hair the one thing I've always disliked with regard to the way women are shown in fiction is as victims to a male serial killer. My view is that the people (and let's face it we're talking men here) who are entertained by such fare should be examined not entertained.

Which brings us then to Hideaway by Dean Koontz.

The villain in this novel is a serial killer. He kills men but prefers to kill women. No that's not quite right young women. Not only that he collects the bodies of some of the women he's killed. He enjoys it.

Now let's make this clear here. Although there is a psychic element to this book the actions of the villain are realistic. There is no biting of necks here. There is instead mutilation. The enjoyment of it and the anticipation of doing it to other women (and indeed a teenage girl). The description of some of the victims only indulges it's audience ( eg a woman is wearing a sweater that is "tight").There is a wallowing of evil in the villain's actions and thoughts which led for me to a nasty taste in the imagination.

And the cover of the book with it's blurb gave no indication of this either. It also gives out quotes of praise from The Times and The New York Times though I realise now these quotes are of the author and not this specific novel. I wonder why.

But you know the worst thing about this book and it's subject matter? Dean Koontz can write. Although this was the first book of his I've ever read you can see that here is a guy who has got the formula for bestsellerdom and knows how to use it. In terms of how the plot was paced he knew exactly what to do. It was not unfortunately a boring book. If you're the sort of person who is into this kind of thing you would have enjoyed this book as a classic of it's genre. For the rest of us we would have been mentally vomiting in a bucket.

I have said before that this is the first book of his I've ever read and as previously mentioned in this blog I've always held the view that as a reader I subscribe to the Mastermind principle of  I've started so I'll finish. I really don't want to be surprised to finding myself reading something similar by him in the future. So I won't read another novel of his again.

Until the next time.