 I don't know which one of these covers to use. Which one should I use? Vote down in the 2v2. It's too late. Hello everybody! E here. Welcome back to another book review. This is going to be a retro review, but I got done with the book in time. So today we are talking about Dean Koontz's The Mask, or Owen West's. Yeah, because that's the name that he originally wrote this under. I do not have an Owen West copy of the book, but I do have these. Is this one, which is far superior to this one, but this one fits in with the Black Neon, what I call the Black Neon. It's the old Berkeley novels that have a black cover, there's something floating in the air over here. Black cover with some neon writing on it, and they always smell, this one doesn't smell anywhere near as good as this one. So if you're a book sniffer, definitely go for this one. But this was the second book that Dean Koontz published under the pen name Owen West. The first one being The Fun House, which was, I can't recall, I don't even know that I know whether or not it was a movie first or a book first, but I do know that Owen West wrote the screenplay for The Fun House, which was an 80s slasher movie. The book came out in 80s, The Fun House came out in 1980, The Mask came out in 1981. So Owen West was rather more along the lines of Koontz's horror, just straight horror, because that's what this one is. It reads a lot like Richard Layman. It's not rapey as a Layman book is, or some of Koontz's other books, but it does have more of the horror vibe than, let's say, just about any of his other books, Night Shills, those kind of things. It also has the Eyes of Darkness. One of the things that I brought up in that book was the book has the quickest ending. You're hanging out for 300 pages, you're going to know these people, things are happening. And right when it starts to get interesting, right when you start to get an ending, he wraps it up on the very last page. And I know it's like, well that's what you're supposed to do at the ending. I'm talking like there's no real buildup to the ending. It's just one scene of action and then it's over. And in this one, this is probably the worst example, no actually the best example of that bullshit, because you get no answers whatsoever. And I'm not talking about like an illusion to a mystery, I'm talking about there's no wrap-up whatsoever. The book literally ends, and this might be a spoiler. It says, the girl says spiders, the girl said quivering uncontrollably. No honey, Carol said no spiders, there aren't any spiders on you, not now, not anymore. And she looked at Grace wondering. That was it. There's no discussion between them about what happened. There's really no ending other than the action on that page, and that's it. In fact, I am giving this one a big fat one star, because the entire book is ruined by the ending. There isn't as much Coon's stuff going on here as there usually is. There's no intelligent dog, there is a blonde, there is sodium vapor street lamps, which if you're a longtime Coon's fan, you'll understand that every single one of his books has a blonde, a Bogan Villa plant, Bogan Villa plant, however you pronounce it, and sodium vapor street lights. Every now and again, he'll change it up and do like mercury vapor, but he has an obsession with those three things. On top of that, you have super smart dog, government conspiracy, so on and so forth. This one, which we'll get to a little bit more in the spoiler section of the review after the outro. This one doesn't deal with any of the usual Coonsian type things that I usually pick on, pick out, whatever you want to call it. I did have fun with this book up until the ending, but the fun that I was having mostly was I'm doing this reread with my friend Deely up in Canada. She's a fantastic person, super fun, I don't even know if she watches these videos, but she's super fun to read with, and we like picking on the books as much as we like reading them. She brought up some things, like the main character doesn't seem like she'd be driving a Volkswagen, does she? And she doesn't. She seems like she'd be a Mercedes or a Beamer type lady. There's some character problems in the book where some of the characters don't act right. The teenage girl in the book definitely doesn't act like a teenage girl. There's no wrap up with the teenage girl, and I'll get to more of that in the spoiler section. I don't want to get too much away here at the beginning. I don't recommend this book mainly because most of Coons' fans, and I'm not punching down here, most of Coons' fans are very easy to please as long as they have, as the beginning, middle, and end, and there's some kind of action, some kind of horror, some kind of sci-fi. They're usually happy. A Coons reader is kind of like a Patterson reader. They're not looking for the next big literary novel. They're looking for an escape. This book does not really provide an escape. In fact, it provides frustration. So I try to look at these things as someone who, and while I do not like Dean Coons anymore, while I give him a bunch of crap, I do know he has his fans. Sorry, my nose is itching like crazy. I don't know what's going on. I keep feeling like I have to sneeze, so I apologize for scratching my nose over and over and over again. It can't be helped. But with this one, I don't think even Dean Coons' fans would like it, and I spoke to two other people, one on Instagram and one on Goodreads, that are huge Dean Coons' fans, and they both hated this book. So if you're a Dean Coons fan, I doubt you'll like this one. Another thing is, this is one of the rare occasions where Dean Coons travels into the supernatural whole hog. And he does that in odd times. He does that a couple of times in his career, but mostly he tries to root things in real lists. Even if it's sci-fi or fantasy elements, he tries to root it in reality. He'll have, like in one book, he described supernatural activity as like nanoparticles or something like that. He tries to give them a realistic expectation. That's one of the problems with this book, is you see him constantly reaching, trying to explain stuff that he himself does not believe in or does not think possible. And it's almost, it's like watching Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, where you're dealing with someone who doesn't have that childlike imagination and you're getting a very clinical scientific aspect of it. So when they do get down to the supernatural business, it seems kind of hokey and overdone because they just don't know how to do it. They don't have it in them. They don't have the childlike wonder that it takes to describe these things or show these things if you're talking about a movie element. That's one of the things with Coons. Coons has always been, he's never written children right or well. Even though one of my favorite books from him is The Voice of the Night, one of the kids is an evil character and one of the kids is precocious. So you have a super smart kid and you have a bad kid and those are always much easier to write than innocence or a childlike wonder or whatever. Now when he does write children, most of the time the kids in his books have some kind of, they like to build models, you know, the model airplanes, model toys, you know, like monster movie characters, that kind of thing. So all of his children characters are pretty much the same. I'm not sure if he ever had kids or if he just had dogs. He does not seem like a parent because all of the children pretty much read the same way. But that's all I have for the non-spoiler aspect. If you're hanging around for the, if you want spoilers and what I liked and didn't like about the actual goings on of the book, hang around until after the outro. Have you read Dean Coons' The Mask or own West The Mask? If you have, let me know how you felt about it down there in the doobly-doo. If you do not share my opinion of Coons and you love Coons wholeheartedly and you want to give him a big hug and kiss, please just don't be rude about it. All of us have different tastes and whatnot. I will, I have no problem discussing, you know, the, the good and bad of Coons down there. Just don't be a dick. But until next time, I have any, you have been you, this has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye. Oh, it is hot out here this morning. It is three, three or four o'clock in the morning. I'm not sure exactly when it is. Okay. So, but yeah, it's, it's already hot out here. So Dean Coons is The Mask. This is a spoiler section, spoiler, spoiler, spoiler, flashing lights, spoilers, spoilers. I'm going to talk about just about everything that I had a problem with in this book now. So if you don't, if you haven't read it and you don't want to be spoiled, GTFO. So the whole plot to this book is reincarnation. And you can tell that maybe Dean Coons, you know, he was excited to maybe try out the idea, but he doesn't really believe in it. So everything that came, everything that was discussed as far as reincarnation is concerned was completely, completely hokey. It's very silly, laughable. You got the feeling that he was trying his hardest to not only convince the reader that this could happen, but to convince himself that it could happen. But it did lend a little, it ended a little bit more mystery than normal Coons. It wasn't predictable in that. Me and Deely caught on early on who the girl was. She was the main character's daughter that she'd given up when she was younger. But when it started, when she was all these different people, when the girl Jane Doe, I guess we'll call her, when she was all those different people, I was like, what the hell is going on? Is she possessed by like this demon who's been possessing girls or whatever? So it did offer a little bit more mystery than your normal Dean Coons book, because usually Dean Coons' twists are rather predictable. I think he's only fooled me one time and that was with Odd Thomas. I didn't see that coming with Stormy. But the issue, again, with the main character, not the main character, Jane Doe, with the girl, the one that's been reincarnated over and over again, where did she come from? Where did this girl come from? It's explained to all these other, where did this girl live? Who has she been living with this whole time? Did she always have the, there's so many questions that we get nothing, no answers to there at the end. We know that she's this woman's daughter, she's Carol's daughter, but we have absolutely no idea where this girl has been living, what she's been doing, there's no wrap up, there's no, you know, not even a happy, happily ever after or an ending, anything. There's no wrap up. It's like with Stephen King and Cell, he just stopped writing, which blew my mind. One thing is, me and Dealey were talking about how quickly Grace kills Erie, or Aristophanes, which oddly enough, every time I came across it, the cat's name in this book, I had to read it out loud. So I'd just be reading along and then all of a sudden I'm like, Aristophanes, just silence and then Aristophanes. For some odd reason, every time I came across the name, I had to read it out loud. It was the weirdest fucking thing, man. She just mercs him, she blows him away in the kitchen, and he's just like, okay, the cat had to die. I understand the cat was possessed, but by what? What was in the cat? And what forces were they talking about, good, bad, evil, whatever? What forces are we talking about, like God and Satan? Are we just talking about evil demons, or what are we talking about? I don't know. I read the whole book over the course of like three or four days and I have no idea what the threat was. All I know is there was reincarnation. That's it. That's all I know about it. The dialogue in here was really bad, especially from the girl's point of view, because she said some shit I have never heard a teenager in the 80s or 90s ever say, like swell. There was some stuff that she was talking like she was from the 50s. Now even though this is about reincarnation, the girl never showed any signs of her other personalities there other than when she was hypnotized. So where did she get the swell and all these other terms from the past that she wouldn't have come across? The problem was, that's probably how Dean Koontz talked when he was younger. But I think the main problem, like I said, over and over again is just that ending, man. That ending does not wrap anything up. It is just a big pile of fuck you. And it actually upset me. The only reason why I'm not more ragey now and tossing books around like I normally do like, ooh, fuck this book, is because I've given it a couple days. I finished reading it either Thursday or Friday, so I'm like, I gave it a couple days to just chill in my head and, sorry, it is hot, chill in my head to figure it out. But yeah, this one is easily, easily one of the worst. And it's basically because Dean Koontz did not commit. He has that problem a lot of the time where he does not commit to his ideas. And this is one of those things where he did not commit. Another time when he did not commit was in the final Odd Thomas book that just absolutely, I mean, I almost, I almost lit that book on fire. I was so mad. It's one of those times when it's like he's built up this entire series of things and there's certain rules you had to go by. And then he breaks them all for that final book. Like whether or not the dead can talk and all this other stuff. But I'm not gonna spoil, we'll talk about the Odd Thomas series when we get there. But yeah, again, let's talk about this one down there in the doobly-doo. If you got any spoilers, please label spoilers ahead down there if you're gonna talk about it. And please, please pray for me. Pray Jesus that there's no stops itching sometime today.