Koontz' helpless approximation of a writing style, along with the cardboard characters and the fact that he forgets stuff he just wrote, always make for a fun read.

All of those usual quirks are present here: page after page of psychologically inept character backgrounds; a laughably naive style (randomly picked: “He spoke softly to the golden-haired boy in the picture.”); metaphors and similes so unoriginal they are painful (again, randomly: “pop out like a cork from a bottle”, “it was easy to believe that its shriek was full of gleeful malevolence”); terrible, terrible dialogue.

However, while the course of action is at no point anything less than clichéd, it is ridiculously absorbing. A page-turner. Unputdownable.

In the end, it's a little disappointing that such a horrible book should be so much fun (and you immediately forget why it was fun at all), but it still provides some hours of mindless entertainment. That's something!