Home in the Dark
A Book Review by Dominick Maino
Home in the Dark: A Book Review by Dominick Maino
Koontz, Dean. Going Home in the Dark. (2025) Thomas & Mercer Pub. 385 pages.
Throw together 3 typical boy Nerds and one Goth Nerd. This Goth Nerd is a girl but only wants to be treated as one of the guys. These kids are “the Amigos”.
Add to this mix families that are as dysfunctional as you can ever imagination (a mom who takes only lovers with a first name that sounds Hispanic; another mom who is a college professor and a Fascist wanna be; a dad who married a stripper and founded the Church of Sacred Erogenous Revelation; grandparents who hate each other; then throw in an excessive number of semicolons; well; you get the idea. [The semicolon comment will make more sense when you read the novel.]
All but one of these Nerds left the small town of Maple Grove and became famous (a successful novelist, a painter and an actor).
The one that stayed behind is a librarian and is in a coma (or is it a coma?)
Those Amigos not in a coma come back to Maple Grove to be with their friend. While there, they discover that each has a repressed/suppressed memory that draws them into the backstory of this small town.
What horrors await?
[I’ve done many book reviews of the works by Koontz. I always explain why I cannot give an unbiased review. To discover why this is true, see link at the end of this review.]
An aside comment: I’m currently drafting an essay about plagiarism. I’ve discovered that you really have to be careful if you are a musician. It seems as if you only have to hum a few bars of another song while writing your song before you cross over the line and are sued. If you copy a famous work of art and try to pass it off as original, well that usually doesn’t end well. If you write a college text that uses the ideas and words of others you will be drummed out of academia.
However, if you write fiction and especially if it is satire, you can borrow/steal as many ideas as you want and never have to pay the piper. In fact, the piper usually pays you and you may become rich and famous.
This story does that in a most wonderful and enjoyable manner.
The beginning intro by Koontz title is, “Read this first or live to regret it Forever,” is an example. The two paragraphs are remarkably similar, if not in word, certainly in tone, to what CS Lewis wrote at the beginning of his classic, “The Screwtape Letters.”
This is also similar to my satirical take on this classic titled, “The ScrewTrump Letters” on my Substack page. [see link below]
This story starts with a bunch of kids from a small town who experienced something tragic and horrible. They leave the town with little memory of what happened. Then they are drawn back to the town, back to evil, back to “It.” [Does this story sound familiar?] (Did you see what I did here? This was certainly a most clever way of referring to Stephen King’s novel “It” without even mentioning his name! Pretty cool, huh?)
Although Koontz has used comedy in his novels in the past (Have you read his “Odd” series?), he is not known for his sense of laughter induced belly aching guffaws.
Dean Koontz also successfully interjects himself (the writer) into the story as well. He laments the many things he must do as a writer as dictated by others. These include using short chapters, describing what’s coming next (i.e. “The previous sentence is a flagrant example of foreshadowing a plot device that creates a pleasant anticipation in the reader…,” this also serves as a way to keep the first chapter short. He will likewise inform the reader that he is leaving out identifying who is speaking among 4 or more people because that takes up too much space as well. You just have to figure it out. (That’s not hard to do.) Current readers do not seem to want the “long” story so as the author he is forced to shorten it up.
You are laughing while the suspense builds. Will the character in the coma awaken? Will all die at the hands of Wayne Louis Hornfly? (He has great names for the evil guys too.)
You will just need to read this book.
I highly recommend “Going Home in the Dark” to you.
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Why I am biased when it comes to anything written by Dean Koontz?
Satire (borrowing/stealing from CS Lewis) The ScrewTrump Letters
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On a more serious note, Mr. Koontz seems to have a negative attitude about windmills used to generate electricity primarily because it kills birds. They do kill birds, however when you look at other reasons for birds ending their lives prematurely, this is pretty low on the list of a coroner’s cause of death.
Between 1.3 to 4 billion birds die each year in the US due to human-related causes. Cats, collisions into buildings, automobiles, and power lines all kill more birds than wind turbines which account for less than 0.1% of human caused bird deaths.
I certainly agree with him that killing birds is not a good idea. Since we are both dog lovers, getting rid of cats might be a promising idea so more birds live. However, living in a tent, allowing my car to rust out sitting in the garage and having no power to run my computer are not acceptable to me.
What do you think?
I paid an enormous amount of money to a free AI to get me this list of authors who introduce their personal words, thought and ideas into a story. [I already mentioned CS Lewis.]
📚 10 Novels with Authorial Intrusion or Commentary
Author
Title
Summary
Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)
A chaotic, digressive novel where Sterne constantly interrupts the story to comment on storytelling itself. A foundational work of metafiction.
Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Vonnegut inserts himself into the narrative as a character and openly reflects on the futility of war and the act of writing.
Italo Calvino
If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979)
A novel about you, the reader, trying to read a novel. Calvino constantly addresses the reader and comments on the nature of fiction.
J.M. Coetzee
Elizabeth Costello (2003)
A novelist writes about a fictional author who delivers lectures—many of which reflect Coetzee’s own philosophical concerns.
Virginia Woolf
Orlando (1928)
Woolf frequently breaks the narrative to comment on biography, gender, and time, often with a wink to her real-life muse, Vita Sackville-West.
Martin Amis
Money (1984)
The author appears as a character named “Martin Amis,” who interacts with the protagonist and critiques the story’s excesses.
John Fowles
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
Fowles intrudes to discuss Victorian conventions, offers alternate endings, and even appears in the story as a character.
Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire (1962)
A novel disguised as a poem with footnotes, where the “editor” becomes the real story. Nabokov plays with layers of authorship and delusion.
Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler)
A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999–2006)
The narrator constantly breaks the fourth wall, offering warnings, definitions, and moral commentary in a darkly comic tone.
Bret Easton Ellis
Lunar Park (2005)
A fictionalized version of Ellis narrates a horror story that blurs autobiography, satire, and supernatural fiction.
