This supernatural Dickens provides models of the human spirit at its best

Got it. Thanks!

Hey OGG -

Oh, the joy. The heart soars. To see you doing one of your great videos celebrating on one of my favorite authors. I do have to respectfully disagree.

concentrate on the books written over the past ten years or so.

If I was going to read Koontz for the very first time I would start with
WATCHERS it was published in 1987. It is a book you will never forget. It is riveting as all his works, but for me personally, it is a lesson in compassion that the whole world would do better for reading.

Koontz discusses WATCHERS on his website.

For years after finishing the story of Einstein–the genetically engineered golden retriever with wildly enhanced intelligence–and his friends, I wondered if I would ever write another book that was as personally satisfying to me as this one had been. When I am writing a novel, I experience bleak spells of deep self-doubt about my work, moments of surging confidence, despair followed by joy, although there are usually more dark moments than bright. With Watchers, however, I knew only joy. The desire to write well can never be fulfilled without hard work, and Watchers involved as many hours at the keyboard and as much struggle as any book I’ve done; but in this case, all the time and effort was pure pleasure, because I was aware that I had a grip on a unique idea, special material, and a group of characters whose depth and warmth were greater than those in any book I’d written to that time. For days at a stretch, I found myself in what psychologists call a “flow state,” a condition in which one performs far beyond what previously had seemed to be the peak of one’s abilities, with greater fluency and speed and grace; it is similar to what athletes mean when they say they are “in the zone…
Eventually, I wrote a few books I liked as well as Watchers; but to date, as I compose this essay, I can’t honestly say I’ve written one that I like better.In an annotated bibliography in The Dean Koontz Companion, a book about my work, the bibliographer made the following observation about Watchers. “It embodies all of the major themes with which [Koontz] has been obsessed: the healing power of love and friendship; the struggle to overcome the past and change what we are; the moral superiority of the individual over the workings of the state and large institutions; the wonder of both the natural world and the potential of the human mind; the relationship of mankind to God; transcendence; and how we sustain hope in the face of our awareness that all things die.” Those are, indeed, the fundamental issues in this novel.

On the contrary, I am

a) born & bred California girl (even used to surf)
b) definitely female
c) early middle-aged (but aging well & I don’t do botox)
d) was alive during the Viet Nam war

…and in spite of these shameful conditions, I have not only read most of the Biggles books, but have bought & sold quite a few on ebay from countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, and of course, the United Kingdom. I once sold a Biggles paperback for over $120! You’ll never guess where the buyer lived. Arizona! Put that in your pipe & smoke it, Your Grumpiness!

PS: I did look at a Koontz book a couple of years ago, but didn’t finish it & ended up donating it with a bunch of other contemporary novels to my local library.