From The Corner Of His Eye (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
From the Corner of His Eyeby Dean KoontzBantam, 729 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a bookoriginally published in 2001Dean Koontz is probably, right now, the most underestimatedwriter at work in the field of fantastic literature. The reasonsare not hard to fathom. Unlike most authors, who go through thelearning process before they ever see print, Koontz had themisfortune although of course it must have seemed far fromthat to him at the time to find publishers for his early,clumsy attempts, which, again unfortunately for his status withinthe field, sold pretty well; one of them, Demon Seed(1973), an sf novel of risible implausibility, was successfullymade into an even worse movie (1977). His movie novelizationThe Funhouse (1980; initially published as by Owen West)is another to be recalled with the wrong sort of shudder. Throughthese and other books he gained a dubious reputation andgood sales figures as a sort of poor man's Stephen King, areputation that ignored the fact that he was slowly carving outhis own individual and quite distinctive niche: his novels, whichgot steadily better, grew less like horror novels and less eventhan like dark fantasies, instead becoming what might best bedescribed as dark technofantasies. Horrors there might beaplenty, and they might seem to be rooted in the fantastic, butalmost always there was a sub-sciencefictional rationalizationsomewhere. By the time of a book like Mr. Murder (1993) which is not far short of a fine novel he had moreor less mastered his art. It can be read as a technofantasyresponse to Stephen King's The Dark Half (1989): in bothbooks the central character is a writer being persecuted by adoppelg„nger, but in Koontz's novel the doppelg„nger has beenmanufactured rather than generated from the psyche.Bestsellerdom greeted many of his novels of the later 1980sand especially the 1990s, but by that time many readers offantastic literature had given up on him, having been more thanonce bitten by his earlier efforts. This was a great shame.And it would be a great shame were such readers to missFrom the Corner of His Eye, because, although not blemish-free, this is a good novel by anybody's standards. Although notas elegantly polished, it has the air of the novel that JohnIrving, perhaps, might write were he ever to stray into DeanKoontz territory.Most of the book is set in the latter part of the 1960s.Harrison White, a black preacher, writes a long and powerfulradio sermon based on the little-regarded disciple SaintBartholomew. This sermon provides important motivation for muchof the plot, as is slowly revealed. For example, a rehearsal ofit is playing in the background as psychopath Junior Cain isbrutally raping the younger of White's two virginal daughters,Seraphim; she dies bearing the resultant child, a girl who,christened Angel, is adopted by her elder sister Celestina.Although Cain barely listens to the tape, the name Bartholomewimprints itself upon his subconscious. Elsewhere, at about thetime of Angel's birth, the broadcast sermon much affects JoeLampion, whose wife Aggie is expecting their first-born; he diesin a car smash while taking her to hospital for the birth, hisdying wish being that the baby, if a boy, be called Bartholomew.Cain does not stop his psychopathic career at the rape ofSeraphim. Less than a year later he moves on to murder, thevictim being his fairly recent bride; he fakes her death as anaccidental fall from a rickety tower and is awarded millions inan out-of-court settlement by the authorities whose task itshould have been to keep the tower in a proper state of repair.Not all are entirely convinced by Cain's explanation, among themhis lawyer, Simon Magusson seemingly seedy but in factwith a moral core and most particularly a maverickhomicide detective, Thomas Vanadium, who can make coins(quarters) disappear in a seemingly sleight-of-hand trick that infact is real: he has accidentally learned the knack of flickingthe coins into parallel universes. (As an aside, this offers awry counter-explanation of the celebrated Randi-Geller dispute:what if it's not Geller who's doing conjuring tricks but Randiwho's performing paranormal feats?) Vanadium hears Cain talkingin his sleep, and discovers that the murderer has a subliminalfixation on the name Bartholomew a fixation that he beginsto exploit after Cain has very nearly killed him. Cain, you see,believes that he has killed Vanadium, rather than, inactuality, putting him into a months-long coma; and it is becauseof this false assumption that Cain's psychopathic career beginsto unravel; tormented by occasional, deliberately staged glimpsesof Vanadium's "ghost", by incongruously "materializing" quartersand by snatches of a meaningful song "spectrally" broadcast intohis luxury apartment, he becomes obsessed with the notion thatthe child born of his rape must have been a boy calledBartholomew, the murder of which infant will bring him releasefrom all the "paranormal" persecution he is suffering.As they grow through infancy, both Bartholomew whoproves to be a child prodigy and Angel discover they haveVanadium's ability to interact with parallel universes, only muchmore so; in Bartholomew's case this becomes even more pronouncedafter, at the age of three, he must have his eyes surgicallyremoved to halt the spread of retinal cancer. To help him moveabout without accident, he can let his mind briefly camp inclosely similar realities where he was never stricken by thecancer and so still possesses his sight.Cain is the star of the show. Koontz is obviously irritatedby the fallacy perpetuated in almost all serial-killer chillersthat serial killers are phenomenally intelligent allHannibal Lecters. In real life this is total nonsense: serialkillers are almost always pretty dimwitted but their psychopathyleads them to believe themselves to be more intelligent byuntold orders of magnitude than the "common herd"; this falsebelief is what leads them to getting caught, usually throughrepeated acts of thundering stupidity. Koontz, going against theliterary trend but more accurately reflecting reality, portraysJunior Cain as an exceptionally stupid and gullible, if at thesame time cunning and certainly lucky, psychopath, and he does sothrough often hilarious, laugh-out-loud satire. Cain haspretensions to Culture, and is completely hoodwinked by thestances of the bad modern-art cliques of the late 1960s: nopainting is acceptable to him unless it is utterly hideous,preferably stomach-churningly so, and thus he squanders much ofhis ill gotten gains on the dire but fashionable artworksproduced by idiot poseur Sklent. In his sexual life, Cain,physically handsome but affectingly vile, is convinced of hismagnificence as a lover and that he is completely irresistible towomen; he is perplexed by the fact that so few of his ex-loversever plead with him for a reconciliation and by the way so manyof the women lusting after him play the game of pretending toresist, but chooses to dismiss these facts as just quirks ofhappenstance. And throughout everything he is guided by theludicrous but bestselling self-help writings of the crackpot guruCyrus Zedd, which have titles like Act Now, Think Laterand which advise that one should live always in the future, neverin the present or the past. As example, Zedd's prescription forthe recovery of lost memories is to stand in a cold shower for aslong as it takes, tightly pressing a fistful of ice cubes to thegenitalia. Cain discovers that the technique does indeedeventually help him recover a specific lost memory, andthereafter, for some reason, he becomes generally muchbetter at not forgetting things. There are other books inCain's library almost all purchased from the Book of theMonth Club, of which he is inordinately proud to be a member but somehow he has never quite had the time to read morethan a page or two of any of them, obviously believing that,through their very possession, he has transformed himself intoLiterary Man through some sort of osmotic process.But Cain is not the only character in this long and much-woven novel to leap out of the page and permanently imprint onthe mind. Celestina White is another delightful discovery. Ahighly talented artist, she becomes successful creating paintingsof the type that Cain has learnt to detest and despise: onlymorons could like paintings that uplift the heart and displaybrilliant technique, after all. More to the point, havinginitially, briefly hated the baby whose birth "killed her sister" the newborn who, while half the offspring of the lovedSeraphim must also be half the offspring of the deservedlyloathed (but unidentified) rapist takes her in andsacrifices much to be an ideal mother to her. It might sound asif Celestina could read as a nauseatingly good goodie (and theportrayal of Agnes Lampion does on occasion veer this way), butin fact she emerges as a charming and extremely intelligentwoman, someone one wishes one had as a best friend. While it ishard to control a grin of derision, if not outright laughter,when Cain is at centre stage, in Celestina's case it is hard tocontrol a warm grin of affection.As noted parenthetically, the depiction of the one-womancharity movement Agnes Lampion is less successful, and, oddly,the same can be said for the unkillable cop and retired priestThomas Vanadium, who really should be the tale's Immutable Forceof Good. Perhaps part of it is to do with the name. As will beobvious, there's quite a lot of coding going on in terms of thebook's names: Cain, the black Whites, Simon Magusson, Angel,Bartholomew, and so on, and this is by no means limited to thecentral characters. But Vanadium harder, of course, thansteel þ? It's a highly artificial surname, and the effect is abit hokey, damagingly so in that it colours our perceptions ofthe rest of Vanadium's characterization, which would be just onthe verge of clich‚d caricature even without the name, whichpulls it (only slightly) too far in that direction. It'spossible, of course, that this was a deliberate gambit onKoontz's part to set a caricatured Force of Good againsthis inspiredly caricatured Force of Evil and certainly inthe rest of the novel Koontz displays a sufficiently attunedintelligence that this may very well be the case, but in thisinstance, at least for this reader, it is a minor irritationrather than an effective literary stratagem.Fantasy, technofantasy, science fiction, chiller thriller orcomedy of manners? From the Corner of His Eye is all ofthese, to a greater or lesser extent. Although it has occasionalclumsinesses (almost inevitable in such a very long novel) the final, inevitable despatch of Junior by the kids is, forexample, hurriedly and rather flatly done these are justabout irrelevant in the context of the whole, which is a splendidachievement. Do not be deceived by the book's trumpetedbestseller status, or by the bizarrely misleading blurb, or byany memories you might have (no need for cold showers and icecubes here) of early experiences with Koontz's novels: give thisone a try.This review, first published by Infinity Plus, isexcerpted from my ebook Warm Words and Otherwise: A Blizzardof Book Reviews, to be published on September 19 by InfinityPlus Ebooks.
Massive, massive, MASSIVE disappointment.Obvious spoilers ahead.The premise for this book is amazing; a boy named Bartholomew loses his sight at the age of three, when surgeons remove his eyes to save him from fast spreading cancer, and then, though eyeless, regains it at the age of thirteen.Thinking that it could be a fun, fast paced daredevil-like story, with quantum theory involved, I was setting my hopes high. Boy, was I let down.When a reader opens the book he reads how Barty loses his sight at the age of three...and then regains it at the age of thirteen. The fact has absolutely nothing to do with the factual story. If you though the novel would revolve around the boy regaining his sight, you're dead wrong.The book begins with the details of the boy growing up (before he loses his sight). There's an evil killer who murders his own wife and then is stalked in a hospital by a mysterious detective, who is mysterious because he can do coin tricks. The killer learns that he muttered the name "Bartholomew" in his sleep and of course decides that Bartholomew is his worst enemy, and that he must kill him.He decides to kill the detective (who wouldn't). He assaults him with a candlestick, puts him in a car and then drowns the car in a pond. However, the skull bashed, unconscious detective doesn't care about the killer's plans and just...swims up from the drowning car. Hooray for logic ! Viva la plausibility !Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, Bartholomew discovers that he has some superpowers dealing with alternate worlds (the quantum theory bit), that he can walk in the rain without getting wet, and loses his sight. And, of course, he's a child prodigy. He calculates the distance and curves in his calculator head, so blindness aint' a problem because he can add 2 + 2 and calculate his way through the world.The killer learns that a girl he once raped gave birth to a baby, and decides that the baby must be Bartholomew, so he goes on in a search to find the boy and kill him. The child turns out to be a girl, and she and her mother flee the evil killer only to end up being taken care by...AGNES, THE MOM OF BARTHOLOMEW. So when the killer finds them, he finds the girl (who is a brave prodigy too, though she has eyes) and the boy enters the scene.BIG CLIMAX: The killer is ready to kill the boy, but...the girl pushes him into an alternate reality because, it turns out, she has superpowers too. All in about three sentences. He's gone forever.BOOL ! THE END.The remaining twenty or so pages serve to wrap up loose ends, and on the last page the boy regains his sight. Yes, the fact had NOTHING to do with the actual plot.Koontz's characters have gone from naively charming (in a way) to simply naive. The melodrama is on the TV soap opera level. He spends paragraph after paragraph describing how brave and good Agnes is, how she delivers pies around the town to people who need pies and help. When her boy is born, he doesn't cry, doesn't take a poo, he isn't a kid; he's a robot.Some might say that Koontz doesn't want to show the reader "unnecessary" information about growing-up of children, but if he constantly abuses the "show, don't tell" writing method and devotes page after page to stuff like this:"Week by week, the slender sapling of frustration had grown into a tree and then into a forest, until Tom began every morning by looking out through the tightly woven branches of impatience" - what stops him ?One might guess that he's just lazy and decides to take the easy way out and create perfect, ideal children for one simple reason - they're easier to write, they never cry, never argue, and according to him are the dream of every parent. WRONG. Who wants to have a damn machine ?Koontz makes a point by clearly showing which characters are good or bad. Here he gives his heroes the biblical names of the saints (Bartholomew, Grace, Celestina, Seraphim, Thomas and even Paul Damascus, hell, one girl is named...ANGEL). The sole bad guy here is named Enoch Cain. Get it ? Enoch Cain. Talk about metaphors and implied meaning.The good guys are so saintly that the reader can't connect with them - it's quite hard to connect with a deity that drives around in a van and gives away pies. So the reader ends up rooting for the bad guy - who of course is present as stupid, bad, vile and disgusting person.All of the characters are of course so well stocked on cash that they don't have anything better to do but just go and have adventures.Koontz can't write kids; he just can't get them right. He deprived kids from all things that make them kids: emotions. His kids are too perfect, too smart, to ideal. He made both kids in the novel child prodigies, excelling at basically everything and pooping pure gold. Here's an excerpt."Each life,” Barty Lampion said, “is like our oak tree in the backyard but lots bigger. One trunk to start with, and then all the branches, millions of branches, and every branch is the same life going in a new direction."If you can imagine a three year old, who still uses potty, saying this in a pre-pubescent, pre-breaking, lisping chipmunk voice, without sheding tears of laughter I salute you.It's even funnier when he reagins his sight. The boy realized at the age of three that he can walk in the idea of rain, so he won't get wet. At the age of thirteen, he realized that he can use the idea of sight to see again. He spent TEN LONG YEARS without realizing that simple fact. Guess the prodigy turned out to be a fool after all.However, he has to do something to see and that would be to hard for him, right ? So he gets married with the little girl from before, and they have a daughter...who has superpowers too, and gives her dad his sight back, permanently. And to top the cake, they have a...golden retriever. I actually laughed at that, because of the sheer fact that when the book has over 800 pages there just has to be a dog in it, since it's a Koontz book, and boom ! t h e r e i t i s !I could go on and on but honestly, if a man writes eight hundred pages about a killer hunting down the good guys and then eliminates him in 15 words, he doesn't know how to quit.I do.Stay away from this book.
What do You think about From The Corner Of His Eye (2001)?
Weird, complicated, spooky. Dean Koontz is such an amazing author that it's actually good he didn't create movies from his books. The movie versions are always less enjoyable. Junior's disgusting idea of love for Naomi was even more creepy because there are twisted people in this world who tend to think along the same lines. That's one of the things about Koontz. His freaky characters come so close to the horror lurking in the world of today. I recommend reading From the Corner of His Eye just to keep a woman on her toes, if nothing else. There are dangers out there, and to turn a blind eye to them just because they are scary is stupid and dangerous. Junior is, unfortunately, like a lot of egotistical jerks who are unable to accept reality.Barty was endearing. What a great character to throw in for balance. I wanted to hug him and help Agnes take care of him! Celestina's family situation made me very sad, but I was envious of her inner strength and her artistic abilities. It was nice that her fate included such a special child as Angel.Loved the way the story ended with the families.Thanks, Koontz, for once again keeping me intrigued with your endless imagination.
—Shawnee Bowlin
Only Dean Koontz could write a book like this! Full of compelling characters with a strong spiritual them running throughout it has many of the features that you would expect from a Koontz novel, plus a bit more! I don't write reviews that rehash the story so suffice to say that this is a story with a number of lead characters whose lives are or become intertwined and there are numerous threads. The main 'baddie' is completely twisted with a self-worth that would be laughable if he wasn't so utterly dangerous. There is no one character that isn't flawed in some way and has a background that has created the way they now think. To that end we find honourable, unbelievably kind, moral and scumbag amongst them. I really enjoyed this story, although it was an inordinately long read, but I devoured every word. The threads of the story were sad, horrific but also happy in turn. Towards the end I felt things became a bit garbled and too much was happening at once, but this is my only criticism of an otherwise excellent story for lovers of the supernatural and investigators of meta-physics.
—Sandra
From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz is overal a great book. I thought the authors writing style was phenonmenal using substantial vocabulary. Dean Koontz other style of books seem similar to eachother but theres minor differences making each story unique. This book draws readers into a spellbinding world created by terror, love, hate, and mystery. I recommend this book to anyone who has either read some of his previous books before to get an understanding of his writing. In the book there are two storys taking part in every other chapter. In the first chapter the protagonist Bartholomew Lampion is blinded at the age of three, and gains his eyesight when he turns the 13, a rollercoaster and also a seagull had something to do with his recovery of his eyes. ( Read it to find out ) In the other chapter, it is about a couple who go sightseeing ontop of a mountain and one of them leave the mountain. I honestly, dont think this book could've been any better, it's more than you expect it to be.
—Nicole
