 Hello everybody, E here, welcome back to another book review. Today we are talking about an author that it's no secret that I do not like him anymore, to kind of preface this and get this out of the way to anybody who's gonna go, why are you still reading and rereading him? It's because I used to enjoy him. I don't read him anymore, but I used to love him. In fact, at one point in time in my life, Dean Coontz used to be my favorite author. And I think that's one of the reasons why I dislike him as much as I do nowadays is because he is a shadow of his former self. The story behind me reading this book, or rereading this book, I'm pretty sure I read it at least once. I've read all of his stuff up until the crooked staircase, some shit like that, I can't remember the name of it. It's his most recent series, the Jane Hawk series. I read everything up until that point. I tried to read Ashley Bell and I did not finish it. I barely got, I think, seven pages into it, maybe two pages before the dog showed up and I was like, nope, I'm out. So the story behind this is I have a friend named Deely who I've known on Goodreads for years, probably five, six years, something at that point, probably even longer at this point. But me and her were reading Coontz's work in chronological order. And at some point in time, she kind of fell off Goodreads. I stopped going over there as much as I used to. We just kind of didn't talk anymore. And then she popped up last week and was like, hey, how you doing? And I was like, holy shit, Deely. And she asked, or I asked, one of us asked if we wanted to get back into the Dean Coontz chronological reread. I was like, yeah, sure, what's next? This was next. This is The Eyes of Darkness, one of five of Dean Coontz's books that he wrote under the pen name Lea Nichols. Also we have Shadowfires, The House of Thunder, The Servants of Twilight, and The Key to Midnight are the other four books. I've read all of them. We recently, not recently, last year, we reread The Key to Midnight, and you can look up my review on Goodreads. So are we starting back up? Yes, we are in chronological order. And the next one we have is The Mask, which is currently inside by my bed. And we'll be reading that around this time next month. So The Eyes of Darkness, one of the reasons why I wanted to do the chronological reread of Dean Coontz's stuff is because I wanted to see exactly where everything went wrong. And as far as I can tell, this is one of those books that was the precursor to everything that I feel went wrong with Dean Coontz's career. I like to joke that when he dropped the R from his name, he lost something special. Well, this one was never a Dean R Coontz book, so that can't be the case. I do have several notes back here. I'm gonna go ahead and review this book, but there are 10 things that show up in every single one of Dean Coontz's books. And I don't have them listed out here. I should probably should have done that, I apologize. But I will leave my review link to my review on Goodreads of this book down there. Go check them out and see if you can add to any one of those things. But Dean Coontz has pretty much been rewriting the same 10 books for the past 30 years, at least. Before that, he was pretty original. In fact, at one point in time, people had him up there with Stephen King. I don't think he was ever as good as Stephen King. In fact, once I started reading Stephen King was at the point where I thought, well, why have I been reading Dean Coontz all these years? I should be reading Stephen King. This book is built, the structure of this book is built like all of Dean Coontz's newer stuff. This is like, you can check off boxes, you know? There's a person that's dead that maybe supposedly isn't dead. In fact, that is something that comes up into play in Shadowfires, which was another late nickels book. I can't remember what the rest of these were at this point and I just got through reading Key of Midnight not too long ago. But there's the government conspiracy. There's so much stuff. But the structure, as far as creepy stuff starts happening, they start looking for a reasoning for it. They stumble upon government conspiracy. This, that, it just goes exactly like any of his newer stuff. Even Odd Thomas is built exactly like this book to where you could actually go and, you know, like I said, you could do a checklist. Okay, it's time for this to happen. It's like, I'll be damned, it just happened. It's time for this to happen. Damn, it just happened. And that was one of the things that I hated the most about this book was the fact that it was so damn predictable. I knew exactly when they were gonna go on the run. I knew exactly the twist or supposedly the twist. I did think it was one thing that it wasn't. I'm trying not to spoil too much here. But this is a pretty terrible book and the reason for that is the main characters, I guess love interest, so the main character is a woman named Tina and she ends up meeting this lawyer named Elliot Stryker. Now the problem here is every single thing that Tina needs throughout the book Elliot Stryker provides. And the joke is that Tina is the luckiest person on earth, this is my note. She just happened to meet a lawyer who's ex, so he knows the law, he's ex-military, so he knows all the government shenanigans that they're gonna get in trouble with, he knows why and how, he can save them. He's ex-military intelligence and he is a pilot. They end up needing a plane, he just so happens to own his own plane. There's even one point in the book where they need a four wheel drive and the person they just happen to be talking to at the time has a four wheel drive available. It was so, so terribly bad and this is, if you read this book, this is a perfect example of why I can't stand Dean Koontz. His stuff is just cookie cutter to the max and he finally found a formula for his stuff that he adhered to perfectly, almost every single time. Yes, he has some tremendous, terrific books out there. Twilight Eyes, A Bad Place, Cold Fire, Phantoms, Watchers, Lightning, there's some really, really good books but most of them are bullshit like this. So my rating is one star, it's one of the worst of his books. In fact, I'm gonna put it right now, I'll probably end up putting it at number one for his worst book because it's just that bad. Now the funny part about it is, these five books were all written under a pen name, he went back and rewrote them to try and make them better and I would love to get my hands on the original versions of these books to see if he may be over corrected, if you get what I'm saying. But anyways, have you read The Eyes of Darkness? Let me know down there in the doobly-doo but until next time, I have been E, you have been U, this has been another book review, I'll talk to you guys later, bye-bye. At some point in time, we gotta have a discussion. We gotta sit down and we gotta have a talk about whether or not my opinion should matter, whether or not your opinion should matter. Where do we draw the line with what we allow each other to like and dislike? If you're sitting there right now and going, that's a bunch of bullshit, I'm gonna like and dislike whatever I want, you should be feeling that way. The amount of people who commented or messaged me or whatever, when they saw I was reading this book, I thought you were done with Dean Coombs. People are allowed to change their opinion. People are allowed to go back and, especially me, I'm not one of those people who's stuck on a certain anything. If I feel like I have been unfair to someone, I'm gonna give them another chance. Unfortunately, I've given this guy so many chances, I mean, at this point, but the whole thing is, I enjoy buddy reading and I enjoy the act of just reading or rereading and revisiting stuff that I may not have liked or that I loved or whatever and changing my opinion. But the thing is, even bad books can be good if you enjoy reading, if you like the person you're reading with. People just don't tend to think, well, if you hate the guy, why do you keep on reading him? First off, I don't hate old Coombs. Like I said, at one point in time, he was my favorite author until I realized Stephen King was that much better. But it seemed, especially with Dean Coombs, people who dislike Dean Coombs are just adamant like he's always been garbage. No, he hasn't. I mean, he's not James Patterson. James Patterson has always been garbage. Dean Coombs was good at one point in time. Were those books that were good rewritten over and over again? Yes, they were. Were those books, you know, books that he had written before he just finally got it right? Yes, and I think that's one of the things that he constantly does is he's trying to make the perfect story. So he keeps reusing these ideas and these tropes and everything over and over again because he's looking, he's got a certain target in mind and he's just not hitting it. But also there was a thing, like I made some kind of joke about Dean Coombs having a BS, a bachelor's study or something like that. Anyways, there's a picture of Dean Coombs and next to it it said DeanCoombsb.s. I said, on Twitter I posted the picture and someone had sent me that. I said, I told you, Dean Coombs has always been about that bullshit. And Keelan Patrick Burke popped on and said, oh, but he's a super sweet guy. I never said he wasn't a nice guy. I was talking about his work. But there's something to be said about the line in the sand that people always draw. Either you have to love someone or hate someone. It's like, there's no gray area anymore. Or that nobody, once you have said something, that is the only way you can think ever, ever, ever. And that bothers me. That really, if you can't tell, I'm kind of adamant here. That really, really bothers me. When people say, oh, well, you didn't like this guy. Why are you still reading him? Because I liked his books at some point in time. Or when you say something, it's like nobody can change their mind anymore and nobody can be wrong. We get stuck on that so much these days. You see somebody saying some stupid shit and you're like, oh, well, let's just go, well, it was a cancel culture. Somebody says something that you don't want to agree with and all of a sudden they're canceled for the rest of their life. That's a bunch of bullshit. Give someone a chance to either change their opinion, give them a chance to learn, give them a chance to be a better individual. I don't understand this mindset that people think that people should be damned for one opinion or whatever. And especially anybody who thinks that I can't change my mind or I can't continue to read who I want to, when I want to, you can go fuck yourself. Anyways, that was my diatribe. How do you feel about this shit? I would hope that if you're watching this or you continue to watch me that you are open-minded enough to maybe have your own opinion about things and to not be upset when someone else's opinion changes or when somebody decides that they're gonna read whatever they want to, whether or not they like or dislike that thing. Sometimes, I do this more with movies than I do with books, but sometimes I read things because they are bad, because they're supposed to be bad. Sometimes I watch a movie because it's supposed to be bad, because it's fun to enjoy those things with someone who is your friend. I don't understand the mindset. If you wanna explain it to me, just don't be rude. If you wanna explain the mindset of why you think whatever someone says should be set in stone, please let me know down there in the comments below or the doobly-doo. Don't wanna offend any of you guys. I'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.