ELSEWHERE

RELEASED OUT NOW! 368 pages | Hardcover/ebook/ audiobook

Author Dean Koontz

Publisher Harper Collins

Bestselling thriller writer Dean Koontz turns to sci-fi with this story of a multiversehopping father and daughter. As someone who’s sold half a billion books, Koontz knows how to structure a story for maximum suspense, and his plotting rips along at a breathless pace. That said, his prose is direct if not plain, and Elsewhere often reads more like a Young Adult novel than a heavyweight SF thriller.

Much of that is down to his slender characterisations. Jeffy and his 11-year-old child Amity have such an idyllic relationship that it defies credibility: she’s impossibly wise beyond her years, he has infinite patience, and they exclaim “Bullsugar” when they’re really upset. Just one family squabble would be more believable.

All their conflict is external, embodied in the form of Falkirk, a sociopathic NSA operative on the hunt for The Key To Everything, a device that allows the user to jump between parallel worlds. A friendly mad scientist entrusts this to Jeffy, setting the adventure in motion.

It’s not a very believable opening, but once the set-up is complete, Koontz throws Jeffy and Amity into one perilous predicament after another and never looks back. Good and evil are painted in the broadest strokes and the denouement feels facile, but it’s a giddy, frantic ride while it lasts.

David West