Dean Koontz ventures One Door Away From Heaven

One Door Away From Heaven has been described as a cross-genre novel. It's hard to say what genres it crosses though except that it introduces a Science Fiction story into a usual Dean Koontz story about a child and her prospective female guardian menaced by a dangerous sociopath.

The book plays with several interlocking storylines, one involving a boy on the run from unknown pursuers, a second involving Micky Bellsong living in a trailer park with her eccentric aunt who becomes involved in the fate of Leilani Klonk, a 9 year old girl who has temporarily moved in next door with her odd family and a third involving Noah Farrell, a former cop and now P.I.. As is usual enough in a novel with multiple storylines, these stories do converge but the three stories in One Door Away From Heaven have very little in common except to convey Dean Koontz's rather unsubtle message about the value of human life.

In practice though One Door Away From Heaven is three novels combined into one a bit awkwardly. Noah Farrell is decidedly the odd man out in this arrangement with an extensive introduction and then only a few brief appearances until he's called on to perform the climactic rescue. That suggests that the cuts made to One Door Away From Heaven disproportionately targeted Noah Farrell's storylines as the most excessive. Like the two other storylines, Noah Farrell's storyline feels like it's a displaced novel plonked down in the middle of One Door Away From Heaven.

Of the two remaining storylines, the unknown boy's storyline is certainly the most gripping as he flees ruthless pursuers who are prepared to brutally kill anyone in their way. After running through the woods and venturing into an isolated house, the boy encounters a sleeping older boy named Curtis Hammond and takes his identity before fleeing along with his dog, before the Hammond family is slaughtered and their home burned to the ground.

Like most mysteries the story of the fraudulent Curtis is the most gripping for as long as it remains a mystery and Curtis is fleeing unnamed attackers who seem to represent some sort of conspiracy. As Dean Koontz insists on emphasizing that there is something different about Curtis and then has him drop into the usual Spock mode of reacting with naive cluelessness to common human behaviors and speech that has become the default for writers trying to squeeze some comic potential out of an alien, the Curtis storyline becomes increasingly silly until Dean Koontz concludes by revealing that Curtis is a kind of alien jesus sent to show us the light by showing us how to find god through our dogs. It's no secret that Dean Koontz really loves his dog Trixie as you can see in the video on the right and he's written about dogs as superior and empathic creatures and even super-intelligent, but that is really pushing it.

Along the same point in Curtis' journey, which had previously held the harrowing quality of Jack Sawyer's journey in Stephen King's and Peter Straub's The Talisman, becomes increasingly goofy as he encounters twin sisters Polly and Cassie, formerly nude Vegas dancers who love UFO's and guns. The unstoppable alien hunters who had formerly batteled their way through dozens of FBI agents are stopped after a quick battle at a gas station and then are heard from no more.

Meanwhile the Leilani\Micky storyline, which is One Door Away From Heaven's dominant storyline, has Micky trying to find a way to save Leilani from her evil stepfather, Preston Maddox, a utilitarian bioethicist who combines Peter Singer, Dr. Kevorkian and Jack the Ripper in one. Preston Maddox is another one of Dean Koontz's patented evil liberal academics and Dean Koontz writes the novel around him specifically to make it clear how evil assisted suicide and utilitarian bioethics are as he makes clear in the afterword to One Door Away From Heaven. Preston Maddox is supposed to be a brilliantly evil character yet his evil plots make very little sense. If he simply wanted to kill disabled children, why wait around for years before doing it? In the climax meanwhile Preston Maddox's brilliant evil plan involves chasing Micky and Leilani through a house filled with paper and wood, which he sets fire to behind him. Yes that's right, his plan involves setting on fire the way back which he needs to escape. This officially makes Preston Maddox the dumbest evil genius since Dr. Evil himself. I would tell you what happens next but you can probably venture a guess yourself.

One Door Away From Heaven isn't entirely a waste of time just as Dean Koontz isn't a bad writer. Like Stephen King he's quite good at setting up a tense situation and unrolling an engrossing set of mysterious events. Unlike Stephen King though, he's much worse at providing an interesting payoff and the problem only gets worse when Dean Koontz allows his political and religious preoccupations to hijack the story outright, as he does here and in Forever Odd, among many other examples. Horror and mystery require subtlety and once Dean Koontz begins explaining things, not only does the subtlety vanish, it's brutally beaten to death with reams of exposition that hammer the message home in large print type.

One Door Away From Heaven does produce some memorable characters, most of all Leilani, who like a lot of precocious kids in movies and books is a bit unrealistic, but is deeply felt. Leilani like Noah Farrell and like Curtis Hammond, really deserved her own novel and the ending that has her joining Curtis’ dog worshipping cult does not do her or her story justice. Up until the latter half of the novel, Noah Farrell’s story has nothing to do with the rest of the novel aside from sharing a vaguely general theme about the sanctity of all life. Curtis Hammond’s story shifts from dark and frantic to a comedy routine. From his opening quotes, Dean Koontz makes it clear that he is trying to write a dark comic novel. Unfortunately that is one task too many for the already overburdened One Door Away From Heaven. It’s also too heavy a task for Dean Koontz who fails to understand the meaning of what combining dark material and comedy requires. It isn’t using comedy to look on the sunny side of things, when times are bad. It’s laughing at them when things are bad because comedy itself is a way we use to express pain and turn it into something else. The light slapstick, vaudeville routines and puns, Dean Koontz tosses around don’t make for dark comedy. They simply make something serious into a joke.