"The Other Emily" Isn't Bad But Builds Up To A Loose End

I’m a big fan of Dean Koontz, who I think is unfairly compared to Stephen King, despite totally understanding the comparison. King was the king of the market Koontz wrote for, back in the 1980s and 1990s, when the horror paperback novel was the king of mass publishing. If King was the Coke of horror, Koontz became known as the Pepsi of the genre. The funny thing is, Koontz has actually quietly sold more copies than King has, but due to the iconicness of King’s creations, King is better known then Koontz. I’ve been reading King and Koontz for a ton of years, though, and I think they both have their charms. King is able to convey pure evil, while Koontz is able to portray good triumphing over it. If King is rock and roll in book form, Koontz is Christian rock in book form, and I’m actually fine with both of these things.

So Koontz’s latest novel “The Other Emily” was a Kindle deal on Amazon, and I picked it up. The story is about a 30 something guy named David Throne, who is obsessed with the disappearance of a girlfriend from 10 years ago named Emily. She went out one night and never came back. He is also a successful author, so he has considerable wealth, and also funds the life of a murderer named Ronald Lee Jessup in prison, a sweet seeming man who killed 27 women, kidnaping them and playing games with them in a basement, until he would murder them. He visits him in prison, under the false pretense of writing a book about him. He visits him monthly, trying to get an answer about his girlfriend, who he thinks might be one of his victims. Thorne’s life goes off the rails, when he meets a woman named Madison, who is a dead ringer for his disappeared girlfriend, and they end up having a relationship.

This book shows both the best and worst Koontz is able to do. One of the things Koontz is best at is piling on events, more and more, making things get more weird and suspenseful. Koontz is primarily known as a horror writer, but he’s great at weaving tons of genres into a narrative that doesn’t seem all over the place. Koontz’s novels follow a very straight line, as opposed to King, who often gets into bloat, and has a subplot or two which seem to just serve to make a book longer. I love King, but damn, when I was reading “It”, I often forgot there was even a clown in the book, due to 100+ pages of the personal problems of the victims of Pennywise. Koontz has these things too, as Thorne has plenty of problems that aren’t a part of the main plot, but the length of his books are often more manageable. 

However, a common problem of Koontz novels is he builds himself up to a reveal, and a lot of times, they don’t pay off. This is another book where the end has a reveal, but cuts it there, and just sorta ends. I was on board throughout the entire novel, asking myself if this is a science fiction twist of some sort, like “Blade Runner” or some supernatural thing. Was Emily and Madison a robot or clone? Her mother was blind. Was she even her baby? Koontz keeps raising the stakes, but I was a bit confused at the end, and this novel would have benefited greatly with a year later epilogue. I wanted to know if Madison and David somehow made this work or considering the overarching problem of where Madison came from, this fell apart somehow? Either way, I enjoyed the novel but wish the ending answered my question a bit better. Koontz is a master storyteller but his endings still often leave a lot to be desired.