The cover
of the reprint of Dean Koontz’s 1981 novel “The Eyes of Darkness” askes the
question: Did this thriller predict the coronavirus virus? In some ways it did,
but that revelation doesn’t come until towards the end of the book. Most of the
novel is a thriller, and like a lot of Dean Koontz novels, it’s a chase novel.
The book starts with a showgirl named Tina Evans, who is divorced after her son
supply died in a bus crash after a field trip. However, that notion that her
son is dead starts to come into question when random messages that he’s not
dead starts to come to her through various supernatural means. She starts to
see on a chalk board in her deceased son’s room that he isn’t dead, a comic
book that eerily matches her dreams and a song that plays in a diner that
starts to skip to the same lyrics repeatedly. Tina starts to think maybe her
son isn’t dead after all.
She meets a
lawyer named Elliot, who at first thinks she’s just a grieving mother who is
losing her mind, but he becomes convinced that maybe she is onto something when
two mysterious men show up at his house, trying to drug him with a shot in his
arm. Maybe Tina’s son is alive, and the government is trying to cover this up
for some reason. The two men who show up in his house are creepy and had me
wondering what exactly they were doing there.
They end up
going on a trip up to the mountains where the field trip took place and find
there’s a conspiracy surrounding Tina’s son. I got some Stranger Things type
vibes from this book, though the government conspiracy and romance between Tina
and Elliot came off a bit cheesy. There’s also some crazy stuff about
government funds being misdirected towards secret projects instead of the
intended use. There are also some dated references, as reasoning that the
period this book took place was strange enough to cover up children being used
as experiments. What doesn’t date the
book is the prediction of the COVID virus which comes off well.
However,
Koontz is still good at pacing his books, and while this book does come off a
bit dated, it’s still a solid page turner.
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