WHAT THE NIGHT KNOWS By Dean Koontz. Random House. 442 pages. $28
By Carrie Cousins
carrie.cousins@roanoke.com

Read a few pages.
Stop.
Listen.
What’s that sound?
Is it in the house?
Is it outside?

Neither. It’s the creepy feeling that comes with reading the latest Dean Koontz thriller, “What the Night Knows.”
This book is a nonstop creepfest.
From the opening pages, Koontz’s ghost story sticks with the reader, and has that person second guessing every sound around them. (Not the best book for the timid.)

The story revolves around homicide detective John Calvino and clusters of murders that began in his childhood and start again 20 years later.

Koontz delivers thrills without gore or implausibility. Much of the story centers on the internal struggles of Calvino’s family members as they sense something amiss, but are reluctant to tell one another.

That struggle, paired with the horridness of the killings that surround Calvino, are more than enough to give just about any reader a first-class case of the heebie-jeebies.

The narrative is clean, and the story moves quickly. Koontz’s masterful style again proves why he is one of the best thrill writers still delivering books.

The story is filled with questions, which are answered with ease, and his ghost is almost too real.

What adds to the mystery and scare factor are the everyday aspects of the characters. They go to work and have normal conversations. They struggle with looking silly and are too ashamed to admit thinking the house is haunted.

The characters, Calvino in particular, must reconcile what is logical about the things happening around him and what is real.He must find a way to stop a killer that by all logical explanations is already dead.

And this ghost is as evil as they come. The spirit is spiteful and ruthless, yet eerily believable. The nature of the ghost could embody the soul of the worst true crime serial killer you could imagine.

What Koontz does so well in this book is terrify without being silly. He mixes elements of honesty and what-ifs so well that you not only believe his story, you walk away wondering how you could have ever doubted such a thing.