Koontz’s ‘Fear’ Familiar Although Author Judges His Latest Work Very Highly, ‘Watchers’ Was Better

“Fear Nothing” By Dean Koontz (Bantam, 391 pages, $26.95)

Dean Koontz keeps churning out the best sellers, having sold, according to his publishers, 200 million copies of his 33 titles.

But the California author says he considers his 34th book, “Fear Nothing,” “perhaps my best work to date.”

Isn’t there an old saying about one’s not being the best judge of one’s own work?

Fear Nothing is a pretty fast read, which is typical for a thriller, but it isn’t Koontz’s best work.

He did better work on a similar theme in “Watchers.”

That one was about escaped lab animals that had been tampered with to make them smarter - and how such things can go wonderfully right or terribly wrong.

“Fear Nothing” is about essentially the same thing - except Koontz makes it all sound even more apocalyptic.

He does create a gimmick for his main human character, Christopher Snow, who suffers from a rare affliction called xeroderma pigmentosum, which leaves its victims very vulnerable to light.

Snow has had to be a night person, and, as it happens, he falls into a dark mystery one night in his little Moonlight Bay, Calif., town - involving evil doings at a nearby military base and townspeople who are not what they seem.

Nothing will ever be the same.

Koontz can write suspense with one hand tied behind his back. And his four main characters, including a dog named Orson, are interesting if rather one-dimensional. But he really needed both hands working to come up with a clearer, more involving story to put the characters in.

In the third paragraph of the Author’s Note at the end, Koontz mysteriously hints at sequels to “Fear Nothing.”

Maybe that will make the apocalyptic business come into focus more.

But it doesn’t help “Fear Nothing.”