Midnight by Dean Koontz (1989)
By the late 1980s, Dean Koontz was being pushed by his publisher as "the next Stephen King."* His books were always placed on the horror racks and--due to the same letter of the last name--they were never far from King's. Looking back, this was a bit of an injustice to Koontz as he never was primarily a horror author. It may have sold some extra books in those days, but I do wonder if a lot of horror fans read his books and found themselves profoundly disappointed. Yes, there were some true horror stories, but not really that many. Midnight is one of the best of Koontz's tales that can be put in that classification.
The story is of a small coastal town in California where a number of strange and inexplicable deaths are occurring. Several people have noticed and investigation into it has started. Midnight takes you on a strange and dark journey into what it means to be human and whether evolving to a higher state is really something that you might want to do. There is plenty of blood-and-guts savagery, as you would expect in a good horror novel, but plenty of heart, too, which you always want in a Dean Koontz story.
Some of the themes and situations presented here seem to be a prototype for what Koontz would do with the Christopher Snow novels about a decade later (Fear Nothing and Seize The Night), but while the Snow trilogy has sat incomplete for over 10 years now, Midnight is complete in and of itself. Good story, well presented--a true horror novel by an author who later overcame that genre label for good.
*This characterization of Koontz was "another Stephen King" was especially unfair since Koontz had been writing for a decade before King was on the scene and very little of his writing up until the 1980s could be considered horror in any way.
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