Review: The House of Thunder – Dean Koontz

SYNOPSIS: Susan Thorton awakens in a hospital, after a near-fatal car crash, to see four men lurking outside her door–men who exactly resemble those who killed her boyfriend years before. Can these be the same men? As she tries to uncover the identities of those stalking her, Susan enters a terrifying nightmare–one from which she may never escape. – via Goodreads

I picked this up at the secondhand book sale downstairs from my work while popping out for lunch the other day. I have been in such a reading slump lately, and unable to drag myself out of it with what I had, so I decided to grab something at random, something I knew would be a quick read. Dean Koontz fits that bill: entertaining, quick, and easy. The House of Thunder was no exception. The book seems to meander on, telling us about Susan, her accident, and being in a hospital after awakening from a coma. We deal with her thoughts, her fears, her recover, and the way she falls in love with her doctor. We also follow her through her abject terror when some horrendous men from her past seem to be popping up in her present, men that killed her college boyfriend, men who are dead. This is essentially the guts of the book, the back and forth about Susan’s sanity, the thinking about how things are possible, what the hell could actually be happening. The era that the book was set in, too, is something I liked. SPOILER: The Cold War spin on things is actually something I quite liked, though I can see that it is going to be annoying for some. I was always fascinated by the Cold War, and how insane things were back then. The premise for this is preposterous, but if you let your conspiracy mind take over, you might just have some fun. The House of Thunder definitely has its flaws, the main perpetrator being that it was too long, and wasted a lot of time just going over the motions, never really going anywhere, but even with that managed to barrel along. Not a bad read, though not the greatest, either. It lacks depth, even while it entertains. Definitely helped me with my reading slump, though I am still not totally recovered. Let’s see how it goes.