It sure took him long enough — four years! — but Dean Koontz finally has completed the promised trilogy with DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN: BOOK THREE — DEAD AND ALIVE. The wait proves worth it, as this final chapter in the reimagining of Mary Shelley’s creation is better than BOOK TWO and almost on par with BOOK ONE.
Victor Helios, née Victor Frankenstein, continues to live life as a physically superior immortal, and is intent on replacing humans — the “Old Race” — with his double-hearted new ones. Under his long-gestating project, financed in part by Hitler, he’s now successfully placed 2,000 New Race specimens among the New Orleans populace, with immediate plans to crank out 10,000 of them a year.
Two recent New Racers are dupes of the district attorney and his wife. They look just like them, but they act … well, different, having a newfound appreciation for stripping naked and slaughtering their neighbors.
They’re not the focus of BOOK THREE, and neither, surprisingly, are police detectives Carson O’Connor and Michael Maddison, who were front-and-center for the previous novels. Until the finale, they spend most of their time driving around town, wooing each other with flirty dialogue and craving local food as they await phone calls from Deucalion, aka Frankenstein’s original monster.
Made from the eyes of an ax murderer and the brain of a child molester, Deucalion has infiltrated Helios’ lab with the intent to destroy it. But there are mutated experiments there to impede him, including a six-legged, two-mouthed monstrosity with tails, stingers and untold orifices. (Readers were given a taste of these scientific freaks in the bonus story in this series’ recent graphic novel adaptation.)
The real star of BOOK THREE turns out to be Erika Five, the fifth of Helios’ wives created purely for his enjoyment and abuse of all kinds. Like her previous incarnations, however, she’s not quite perfect by her husband’s standards, and here, she stealthily disobeys him by befriending an ugly little troll that grew out of New Racer Jonathan Harker.
She names the tongue-haired troll Jocko, and he’s prone to pirouettes for no good reason. Their exchanges are hilarious, with the brain-vacant Erika coming off like a comparative genius, such as when she introduces him to the concept of a soap:
“Is that good to eat?”
“No, that’s bath soap.”
“Oh. Is this good to eat?”
“That’s another bath soap.”
“So it’s good to eat?”
“No. Soap is never good to eat.”
“Is this good to eat?”
“That’s also bath soap. It’s a four-pack.”
“Why soap, soap, soap, soap?”
There’s a lot going on here, and clearly, Koontz is having a blast. Initially, one wonders if its episodic nature — bouncing as it does from one character to another, keeping them separate for so long — will work against it, but it doesn’t. Instead, he manages to keep you interested in each of the subplots, which eventually fold into the inevitable showdown.
That that scene is a little anticlimactic given all that comes before it is a foregone conclusion. Admit it: Once you refer to a butler who bit off seven of his fingers, or introduce a creature who just wants to orgasm, those things are tough to top.
FRANKENSTEIN was the book that got me interested in Koontz in the first place, so it’s a little bittersweet to see him calling it a day with the genre-bending series. However, we should be thankful that he got around to putting closure on it at all, and that it works as well as it does. —Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• BROTHER ODD by Dean Koontz
• THE DARKEST EVENING OF THE YEAR by Dean Koontz
• DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN: BOOK ONE – PRODIGAL SON by Dean Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson
• DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN: BOOK TWO – CITY OF NIGHT by Dean Koontz and Ed Gorman
• DEAN KOONTZ’S FRANKENSTEIN: PRODIGAL SON — VOLUME ONE by Dean Koontz, Chuck Dixon and Brett Booth
• DEMON SEED by Dean Koontz
• THE FACE OF FEAR by Dean Koontz
• FOREVER ODD by Dean Koontz
• THE GOOD GUY by Dean Koontz
• THE HUSBAND by Dean Koontz
• IN ODD WE TRUST by Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan
• ODD HOURS by Dean Koontz
• ODD THOMAS by Dean Koontz
• VELOCITY by Dean Koontz
• YOUR HEART BELONGS TO ME by Dean Koontz
Related posts:
- Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Book Two – City of Night
- Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Book One – Prodigal Son
- Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son — Volume One
- In Odd We Trust
- O, BROTHER, where ODD thou?, asks Koontz
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Still waiting for him to write book 3 in the “Christopher Snow” trilogy. He can turn out book after book about Odd Thomas but can’t turn his attention to the one book his fans really want?
It’s about danged time this book came out, isn’t it? I’ve read the first one, and will be devouring the second one. Can’t wait to find the third.
I may need to check out the “Christopher Snow” trilogy too.
The Chris Snow trilogy (so far) consists of: Fear Nothing (1998) and Seize the Night (1999). They deal with a protagonist who has a genetic disorder that makes him allergic to sunlight, so he basically has to live at night, during which time he comes upon evidence of a whole range of nefarious activities that seem to have something to do with a sinister army base on the edge of town. He’s got the usual lovable, intelligent Koontz dog, plus a couple of good friends to help him out. These were two of the best, most gripping books Koontz ever wrote, but he never finished the story. He keeps saying he’ll finish this “if he lives long enough” but that’s not really an answer. Anyway, it’s now been 10 years since book 2…
I am so glad that we finally get the 3rd book. He’s kept us waiting far too long. I have already requested it from my local library but they will apparently only have two copies. I suspect that will cause problems for the many people who will want to get their hands on it like me.
I have read Koontz for years and for some reason never picked up these books. Your review is excellent and I think it is time for me to say hello to Mr Koontz again.
Koontz has said in interviews that he plans on teaming up Odd Thomas with Christopher Snow in the near future. So Snow is coming back.
I had a totally different reaction to Dead and Alive: I disliked it. What a mess — Koontz reduces the entire saga to a farce. Book One was a fast, enjoyable read; Book Two a little less so, but still engaging. And now this. Too bad. My review is here: http://blogs.dixcdn.com/leftofcybercenter/?p=3021
Granted, it’s an absolute tonal shift. (Wonder if that has anything to do with the absence of a co-writer?) But I happened to have fun with it.
I seriously doubt this will be the last of this series. Koontz took one “Odd” book and turned it into an endless series.
The ending leaves several possibilities for future works, I won’t go into them now, so as not to spoil things for others.
I didn’t like this as well as the co-authored ones. He says in a reprint of book one that he thinks that was a mistake, and that he was responsible for most of the books. I’m not so sure.
Of course, Dean manages to work in a DOG and GOD where they hadn’t been before. His latest works have been way too “preachy” for me.
Like everyone else I waited for the third book of the trilology in hopes that it would end in an amazing story. “dead and alive” was good to read but it wasn’t as good as I would have hoped. Don’t know if anyone else noticed this but the proof readers screwed up on the first page of chapter 42 the fourth paragraph. The name Christine was used instead of Erika. Christine lies dead after being shot by Victor. Erika is going to dispose of her and it reads like this: “Instead of wrapping the body for whoever would collect it and at once cleaning up the blood as instructed, Christine returned to the troll’s quarters in the north wing.”
Not really a big deal but even proof readers are not perfect.