Dean Koontz
The Dead Town
Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein, Book #5

Review brought to you by OBS Staff Member Heidi

This is the fifth and final installment of Dean Koontz’s rendition of Frankenstein.  In this volume of the story Victor Helios’ clone, Victor Immaculate, has picked up where Helios left off only in a new location, Rainbow Falls, Montana.  He has created yet another new race that is stronger and better than the human race, but not nearly as strong as Helios’ “New Race”.  Victor’s ultimate goal is to use the race he has created to kill every living thing on Earth, and then kill them and finally himself.

Carson and Michael have left San Francisco and arrived in Rainbow Falls to help Deucalion defeat Victor and save as many people as they can.  Ericka and Joko are also living nearby.  In this book, we meet many new characters that see what’s going on and take actions against the new communitarian race.

Deucalion is humanity’s last chance and uses a “broken” communitarian to find Victor’s newest laboratory and he faces him for the showdown of his life and one of them will not survive.

I really had high expectations of this series as a whole.  Who wouldn’t?  One of the best storytellers giving us a new version of Frankenstein to dig our teeth into.  Unfortunately, I have been pretty disappointed with the series as a whole, but have kept reading it in hopes that it would turn around.  I think this one is better than the last one, Lost Souls, but it still wasn’t as good as I had hoped.

I find the way Koontz has so many different sets of characters doing things all at once and only giving us small glimpses at a time makes the story hard to follow at times.  There are times I even forgot what was going on with a certain character before the story came back to that person’s part of the story.  Also, there were several characters that were brought into the saga in previous installments and there is no re-introduction and if you haven’t read the books in awhile it can be hard to remember who everyone is and where they come into the story.

I feel the characters just float around and there is no depth to them or the storyline in general.  I think Koontz has just introduced too many different characters to possibly be able to explore any of them in-depth and instead we just scrape the superficial story of all of them.  There were just too many pieces to this puzzle to try to put together and ultimately made a pretty dull novel and series.  Also, this book really seemed to be lacking the Carson and Michael dynamic as there was very little of them in this book.  The whole novel was just a recycled version of the other novels in the series.  I would not recommend wasting time on this series as it was just mediocre to me and I found I had to force myself to keep reading.