Rating: 
Summary: Ok, Who Really Wrote This Book?
Review: I haven't read a Dean Koontz authored book in a couple of years but I don't remember him being this detail oriented. My paperback copy was six hundred and eighty-one pages. Enough already, this story could have easily been told in half that many pages. In bold type too! That's not to say it wasn't an interesting story. It was. I guess you might say I enjoyed it despite itself. There is no doubt Koontz is one of the better story tellers around and this was a good yarn. Trouble is I read through five hundred pages of tedium to get to one hundred and eighty pages of knock down drag out excitement and that's the part I can't tell you about. So let's talk about what I can tell you about. Dean Koontz's M.O. is that he writes very good horror and science fiction horror stories not unlike the other guy whose name also starts with K, only Koontz is less erratic.
With the other K, you get a good one, then an bad one, then an average one then a great one and so forth. Koontz doesn't quite get to the great threshold very often but he also stays to the left of average as well. Main Characters: Da good guys
Curtis Hammond - a ten year old boy (or is he?)
Leilani Klonk - a precocious, handicapped nine year old girl
Mickey Bellsong - A pretty twenty something ex-con (she was framed)
Aunt Geneva - Mickey's aunt
"Old Yeller" - dog who tags along with Curtis
Noah Farrel - semi retired private eye
Polly and Cass - beautiful, buxom former show girls. Da crumbs
"Ole Sinsemilla" - Leilani's good for nothing drugged out mother
Preston Maddoc - Leilani's evil stepdad, whom she calls "Dr Doom". Da yarn
Mickey and Geneva's new but temporary neighbor, nine year old Leilani is smart as a whip (who ever thought up that expression?), Cute as a button (another one, never saw a cute button yet) and sharp as a tack (ok, that one fits) but she is also handicapped, with a deformed left hand and leg (she wears a leg brace) and she obviously fabricates stories, saying her mother is an insane druggie and her step father has murdered eleven people that she knows about, including her severely handicapped year older brother. It seems that Dr Doom is a sort of Dr Korvorkian but worse, an advocate of mercy killings and more. Like killing his version of the misfits and Leilani falls in his version. Yes, tall tales indeed, until Mickey get a taste of the utterly bizarre behavior of Leilani's mother "ole Sinsemilla" dancing in the moonlight and then jumping down Mickey's throat for calling her Sinsemilla. At this point Leilani's tall tale seems a lot shorter and after that and a couple other episodes, Mickey and Geneva are quite worried not only for Leilani's welfare but indeed for her life. Curtis Hammond is running for his life. There is something evil after him, worse than evil, malevolent and it's closing in. In Utah, after visiting a sleeping families house to find clothes and food, the family dog trails after Curtis as he makes a hasty get away after the evil almost catches him. It seems, what is after Curtis has already killed his mother and now they're killing this Utah family, so not only is Curtis in danger but so is anyone he contacts. And so on goes the story where our divergent characters, good and bad alike, are inexorably drawn to a confluence in a small town in the Idaho panhandle. Conclusion Dean Koontz seems to come up with unusual and original plots and he tells the story well with an open easy to follow writing style. Likewise One Door Away From Heaven is a well presented clever story in Koontz's classic Good versus Evil motif. His depiction of the characters, especially Leilani was excellent. He made you want to adopt her and similarly with Curtis, however this book is not without some faults. The effort that Koontz put forth was overly loquacious and there was much too much attention paid to detail. An example that comes to mind is where Curtis goes into a truck stop bathroom. This bathroom, which has no real bearing on the story is described in such detail that some 140 words are used. I felt this excess of description turned a rather simple straight forward novel into a wordy complex story that, as I mentioned, bordered on tedium, not to mention the additional two or three hundred pages took me an extra five or six hours to read. I have read many Koontz books, Coldfire, Hideaway, Tick Tock, Strange Highways, Lightning and others and I don't remember Koontz's writing being so distracting. It almost seems like Koontz supplied a plot and someone else wrote the book. Regardless, the plot and story were interesting enough despite the overdone presentation to salvage the book.
Rating:
Summary: Dissappointing Ending!
Review: I have only read a handful of Koontz books, they were all great. I loved Cold Fire and False Memory the best. This book was interesting, but not exciting, a little boring. However my major complaint was the ending. Leading up to it in the last few chapter was a page turner, but the ending left me wondering why the heck did i waste my time reading through this book. It's just ok. Not at the least, one of his best.
Rating: 
Summary: Hard to get involved in this book
Review: This book started really slow and it was hard for me to get in to. It took me several months to complete this book as I kept putting it away and reaching for others. Finally about 75% of the way, I was determined to finish this book and was glad I did because the ending of the book was much better than the beginning.
Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful, very lengthy reading experience!
Review: I've never liked dogs. I'm a "cat person," yet I find myself captivated by canines as they are presented by Koontz. The primary thing that appeals to me about Koontz is his mixture of true belly-busting humor with gut-wrenching horror: a tough mix of genres!
Unlike other efforts by Koontz, though, this book took about 100 pages to get going. Once the ride began and settled in to a frentic non-stop pace, it just kept on going and going. Fortunately, this 700-page read can be set aside for a few hours without distress, because at any given time at least two plots are running at the same time; therefore the chapters almost stand alone if you don't have 20+ hours available to do a one-sitting read.
What a scream "One Door Away From Heaven" is! BTW, as much as I have come to appreciate the incredible insight Koontz gives me into the canine personality (especially in this book), I still view cats as superior because they are so damned self-possessed and independent.
Rating: 
Summary: A good effort by Koontz
Review: Micky lives with her Aunt Geneva for the short-term while she recovers from a stint in prison. The girl next door in the trailer park turns out to be the child of a psychopathic murderer (she is also disabled). This story intersects with the tale of a boy named Curtis who is on the run from a pack of otherworldly killers. Curtis himself is eventually revealed to be an alien.
The Good and the Bad:
This book has a lot of stuff going for it, including a couple of interestingly layered characters (including another tough-as-nails detective), and the genuinely exciting twin plot points: life on the lam by a young runaway alien contrasted with the dilemma of a disabled-yet-precocious girl who is about to be murdered by her father.
The ending is also good, with a satisfying glimpse of a group of adventurers banded together to save the world.
My problems included an injection of God that seemed unnecessary, a dramatically out-gunned and outclassed villain, and of course, lots and lots of bad dialogue. I don't understand why every good guy who isn't simpleminded seems to engage in a brand of witty banter that puts them into the chair of a late night talk show host. I'm not sure whether to like the characters of the twin Vegas showgirls who are simultaneously beautiful and superhumanly capable. They are supposed to be so over-the-top that they come right back to seeming real, but I don't know if that works. The same philosophy definitely does not work in the case of a grizzled westerner who has the bearings of a gold miner, but the job of a caretaker for a ghost town.
Koontz also rails against the philosophies of utilitarianism, while, in my mind, mischaracterizing them in the extreme.
What I learned: Dean Koontz seems to be incapable of straying from the following elements: Disabled people with hearts of gold, hard-boiled detectives who are tough and moral without being successful, outnumbered villains who have no redeeming qualities, and dog companions.
Rating: 
Summary: Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z A Real Snooze
Review: A one star rating is too high for this book. Negative stars would be more like it. What would normally take me a week to read took me 5 and a half months of boring reading!! I'm a big fan of Koontz work and have read a bunch of his books. This book doesn't fit the Koontz style. It feels like it was written by someone else. I trudged through about half of this book, and put it down for about a month. I finally decided one day that it had to get better and picked it up again. It didn't get better. This is a lousy book with no real story. It starts bad, the middle is bad, it gets good about a hundred pages from the end and then the ending stinks. If Koontz was trying to make a social statement with this book he succeeded, if he was going for entertaining reading he completely missed the mark. I can't even say its "not one of Koontz' better works" because it's not even good enough to be classified as bad.
Rating:
Summary: Disfunctional Story
Review: First, I love Koontz works. But...
This one stank. I forced myself to finish it. It started very slow. There was way to much family disfunction for my taste. It was unbelievably disfunctional. And I did not really like any of the characters, even the dog and the boy. Especially the disrespectful little girl.
Wait, there was one character I liked. It was Rickster. He was pretty cool.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome!
Review: I've loved all the Dean Koontz books I've read, but this has to be one of my favorites. Koontz writes with such description and humor that it is a joy to read "One Door Away from Heaven". I've told my friends, "You GOT to read this book!" From the remarkable young girl, Leilani, to the mysterious Curtis Hammond, I remained intrigued throughout the entire book. Dramatic twists and turns that I hadn't expected, add to the thrill of reading this charming novel. The characters are the best Koontz has done and have me laughing out loud much of the time. Is Curtis an alien or just plain stupid? Will Leilani escape her stepfather and psychotic mother, escaping alien transport or impending murder disguised as such? Will Micky find Leilani in time, and whatever happened to Lukipela? Read this one!
Rating:
Summary: The pic in the back tells us his dog can read, but write?
Review: Im guessing his genius dog wrote this book.
I am a huge Koontz fan, so I feel guilty not giving him a good review, but I just cant honestly say good things about this book.
He over details every single atom and cell on every object in the book, which gets old by page 2.
Im beginning to think he writes all children as witty, smart allecky geniuses because he doesnt really know how they speak.
Dogs eat their own waste, lets stop making them geniuses. (I loved Watchers, but enough is enough)
The ending is one of the worst Ive ever read. I read 680 pages of detailed drivel, and the last page, 681, still didnt deliver any punchline.
Rating:
Summary: One step away from the window
Review: so that you can easily throw this garbage out there somewhere. Listed the number three worst book inz Koontz catalogue (1. False Memory 2 the Taking) Hýmm. Bad Koontz books are recently on rampage
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