millinocket's Full Review: Dean R. Koontz - The Face
Ah, the Bloody Knife novel returns with a vengeance! Yes, I’ve been keeping up with my Bloody Knife reading, but haven’t been quite compelled to share with you, dear readers, my feelings about any of these most wondrous of reads. To be sure, there are many, many, many crappy Bloody Knife novels out there. I think I’ve read most of them. To achieve Bloody Knife (named so for the completely delightful cover art sometimes wondrously featuring, you guessed it, a bloody knife) status, all a book really needs to do is contain excessive murder and mayhem with maybe a nice dollop of supernatural hijinks (nice, though not technically required). I can almost always count on Dean Koontz to fulfill these basic criteria. Once in a while he comes up with a stellar Bloody Knife (I still love Watchers), sometimes a medium level Bloody Knife (Sole Survivor comes to mind) and once in a while a Bloody Knife that’s so laughably bad that it becomes a masterpiece. Into this last category leaps The Face.
The Face is actually a nickname for the most famous actor in the whole, wide world, Channing Manheim. Manheim has loads of money, a giant mansion in Bel Air, lots of servants, world-wide fame and oh, yeah, a ten-year-old son. Said son was produced with none other than Fredericka Nielander, world-renowned supermodel, during their brief marriage. These two geniuses named their progeny Aelfric and moved on with their fabulous lives. Unfortunately, Son did not inherit Parents genetic gift of super-human beauty. Plus, Aelfric has asthma and is small and slight. And, again, remember that his name is Aelfric. Yeah, Aelfric (or, as he prefers, “Fric”) is a target at school – so much so that he is now tutored in the gigantic mansion, ignored by both his parents. He is not a particularly happy child.
Joining Fric on this vast estate is a bevy of servants (and, once in a great while, his father – but almost never his mother). But now it happens to be almost Christmas Eve, so most of those servants are not in attendance. The skeleton crew does include head of security Ethan Truman, who is Our Hero. We know this from the first pages of the book, as he is stoically trying to decode a mysterious threat to his employer as well as take care of an old friend. He is strong and ethical and generous and Good In Every Way. The threat, odd and disturbing, is keeping Ethan busy; distracting him from his own sadness (every good hero has his own sadness). It will be up to Ethan and Fric to deal with the baddies that will come to haunt them this Christmas, and bad they will be. When strange things start to happen on the Manheim estate, Fric and Ethan have to figure out what is good and what is bad, who is helping and who wants to harm, all within the cavernous mansion that is so deserted for the holidays.
Yep, so far it all sounds fairly typical. And so it is. Koontz takes pot shots at the excess of Hollywood from page one, painting The Face as selfish and clueless and too stupid to recognize either one. His loving descriptions of the gruesomely elaborate home with its dozens of rooms, acres of space and complete lack of anything resembling character or warmth help complete the picture that The Face, while not the named baddie, is certainly a baddie by default. Fric is the typical smart kid whose parents don’t see his inner beauty, Ethan is the typical hero who does, but with so much sadness of his own and this complicated weirdness going on around him, doesn’t realize how Fric is crying out with need, need, need. Both characters commit the cardinal Bloody Knife sin of not trusting each other when to do so would make the whole mess so very much simpler (but the book so very much shorter).
Koontz’s actual baddie is fairly amusing, in a trumped up and ridiculous kind of way. Each description of this person, who goes by the name of “Corky” (you learn this so early on that my telling you is in no way a spoiler), makes him more and more into some type of evil incarnate, but somehow he just isn’t all that hatable. This is quite a feat. Describing Corky’s actions should serve as sufficient proof he is the baddest of the bad, yet he is, in the end, almost lovable in his over-the-top badness combined with his pseudo-intellectual posing. We should really hate Corky, and hate him a lot. We should be riveted to the page as he advances his evil schemes, stunned by his cold, calculated cruelty, yet what we really want to do is see what he could possibly come up with next. It’s all so weirdly psychotic that we can’t help wondering just what else Koontz could possibly have Corky do to prove, definitively, that he is EVIL. My one regret is that he doesn’t get much of the supernatural goodies. Can’t have everything, I guess.
So yeah, the book sort of stinks. Actually it really stinks. The characters are caricatures, the baddie is ludicrous and the set-up is way too predictable. Koontz keeps things moving, introducing his supernatural elements just when the story needs a little boost and keeps the characters nice and shallow so we can focus on the action instead of the comparatively boring people. His commentary on the hollow façade that is Hollywood is painfully transparent and gets old really quickly coming from an author who probably has nearly as much money as his fictional Face. His characters frequently do the kinds of stupid things that teenagers do in slasher movies.
But…………I ate the whole thing up with a spoon. I admit it, The Face hooked me in the first chapter and didn’t let go. I stayed up too late to read it, couldn’t wait to get back to it. It’s marvelously indulgent, with its silly story and badly drawn characters. I didn’t care what happened to any of them, really, they aren’t developed enough. But I couldn’t wait to see how everything turned out and what Koontz could possibly pull out of his hat to up the Bloody Knife ante. What was going on with the supernatural stuff? Who were those mysterious people who kept turning up? Were they good or bad and how did they do all that otherwordly stuff? Would this baddie, this person who I should have seethed at and hated, do anything else gruesomely interesting? Just how much bigger could this mansion get as Koontz got more and more carried away with his descriptions? How many more rooms could he introduce before the thing was the size of the Louvre? I couldn’t help it, I had to know. It was the guiltiest of guilty pleasures – the bad Bloody Knife novel that’s so bad that I absolutely had to finish it. And the end, oh the end! I won’t tell, but it’s a dream, chock full of everything that makes the book so deliciously crappy throughout.
I can’t possibly give this thing more than two stars (the second star is for the couple of peripheral characters that tickled my fancy). But I’m also going to recommend it. If you, like me, love the Bloody Knife novel and are prepared to set every single ounce of disbelief you’ve ever had firmly on a shelf and leave it there – maybe forever – then you too can enjoy all the fabulous badness to be had in The Face. Don’t ask it to be good, instead ask it to be so bad that it deserves your love and attention, deserves it as much as the poor, unappreciated child at its center. Only then can you, too, lose yourself in the world of The Face.
He's Hollywood's most dazzling star, whose flawless countenance inspires the worship of millions and fires the hatred of one twisted soul...More at Audible.com
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.