 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another Retro Book Review. Today we are talking about Dean Koontz's The Fun House. This, in case you do not know, the history of this book is based on a script by Larry Block. So it is a novelization of the Toby...Toby? Is it Toby? I think it's Toby Hooper's movie The Fun House. The odd thing about this is the movie was delayed so long that the novelization came out before the movie did, and Dean Koontz published it under his horror pseudonym Owen West. I loved this book when I was a kid. This version came out in...19...June 1994. So I was 14. I remember buying it off the rack at Lucky's grocery store in Fontana, California. Either that or it was San Bernardino. I can't remember which one. I don't even think Lucky's is around anymore. Any California folks want to let me know if Lucky's is still around? I remember Stater Brothers and Lucky's and a couple other places. Instead of end caps, I remember they had these wire racks in gas stations. And I remember seeing it going, ooh, Dean Koontz, and buying it off the rack with some of my fun money. But my mom wouldn't let me read this stuff. This is still around the time of the great book closet. If you're a fan of the channel, you might have heard me reference that before. She used to keep all of her adult horror novels in a closet. She had a walking closet, and they were all stacked up. There was no bookshelves. She kept the bookshelves out in the living room. She kept them all stacked up there in the closet, and I wasn't allowed to go in there to get the books. Those were her adult books. My mom being, oddly enough, my mom being a devout Christian. It was fine for her to read it, but it would, I guess, darken me, ruin me as a child. She finally let me start grabbing books out there when I was about 16, I think. I mean, even then, she had to read them first. But with this book, like I said, I loved it. 14-year-old me, he was hot for this book. It was a great book, great experience. Books like this that made me go check out some of my favorites, like Twilight Eyes and Phantoms. I tried to read this last year or the year before at some point in time, and I couldn't finish it. I was trying to read it with my friend Dully. I've been pronouncing her name wrong the entire time. I thought it was D-L-E-L-E, but she says it's like delete, delete, without the T. So I'm saying Dully. I hope that's correct. Dully, if that is not correct, you will let me know, I'm sure, in an email. Sorry, I've been pronouncing it wrong this entire time. So we tried to read it, and I couldn't get through it. It was so bad. The plot holes, the writing, it was just utterly atrocious. Now, I have went back and watched the Tobey Hooper movie again, and I love that. So I'm not exactly sure why I disliked the book so much. Maybe there's some differences in the storyline as far as the internal dialogue and the reasoning for certain characters that you don't get in the movie. I couldn't finish the book, and I don't remember enough about it, about the first time I read it, other than I loved it. But 14-year-old me probably loved it because it was very brutal, very gory. I believe there's a scene where a head rolls up to our protagonist on a roller coaster ride or something like that. Well, the movie, the special effects of the movie are terrible, but it's in a fun way. The monster's head-faced deformation of his cranium is cheesy as hell, but I enjoyed it. In a visual aspect, it was fine. It was great as a film. Because with a film, it only took up an hour and a half of my life, whereas the book is 340 pages long. If I buddy read it, we're only going about 50-60 pages a day, so that's a week of my life. I'm not going to get back. So I just ended up quitting it. If we had started reading it probably later on, when I was bound set and determined to reread all of his stuff, I would have forced myself to finish it like I did with The House of Thunder. Because if any book needed to be quit, that one was. But this one, I would recommend it to people who like cheesy horror novels. I wouldn't pay too much attention to the actual plot or the motivations of the characters. Because if you do, you're probably going to have a bad time. Not Stephen King's, oh, Freudian slip. Just like all of Dean Coons' stuff, his characters are forgettable. The plots are forgettable. In fact, there's no end to the comments on my Dean Coons' reviews that say, hey, that was one I just got for The House of Thunder where the person said, I read this not too long ago, gave it four stars, but I can't remember anything about the book. That's Dean Coons in a nutshell. There's nothing really memorable about his stuff. But if you're just looking for dumb fun, I would say this is the closest thing to a Richard Lehman experience you're going to get from Dean Coons. It really reminded me of that. Richard Lehman stuff was a little bit better than my experience with this. But it's far below the likes of, if you're talking about other paperback horror authors, far below the likes of Bentley Little and Jack Ketchum, that kind of thing. You're well below that. In fact, I would probably put it more on the line of, I don't even know, I would say it's closer to like the indie horror you're getting nowadays without all the errors. So if you're into that kind of thing, definitely jump on this because it's fun if you can turn your brain off. Unfortunately, the older I get, the harder it is for me to turn my brain off. I've worked with some fantastic editors and writers in my day and I just can't do it anymore. That's unfortunate because I enjoyed these books when I was younger. But nowadays, all I can see are the problems with the story and the writing. So if you don't mind that aspect being on the poor to bad side, then definitely check it out. But for me, I mean, I'm going to give it one star. I couldn't even finish it. So it's an easy one star for me. But if you read The Fun House, what did you think about it? Let me know down there in the comments below or in the doobly-doo. I know some of you are like, what are these comments you were talking? I 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!