Killing me slow but I ain’t ready to die. Tonight, get ready for a fight, so now you know it’s time to ride my circus for a psycho. Round and round we go, look out below, because I want off this, I want off this, circus for a psycho. Let’s buy a ticket to The Funhouse, by Dean Koontz writing as Owen West.
Synopsis:
Once there was a girl who ran away and joined a traveling carnival. She married a man she grew to hate—and gave birth to a child she could never love. A child so monstrous that she killed it with her own hands…Twenty-five years later, Ellen Harper has a new life, a new husband, and two normal children—Joey loves monster movies, and Amy is about to graduate from high school. But their mother drowns her secret guilt in alcohol and prayer. The time has come for Amy and Joey to pay for her sins…
Because Amy is pregnant.
And the carnival is coming back to town.
Source: Goodreads
SPOILERS BELOW
After reading and loving Phantoms, I naturally sought out more works by Dean Koontz. That is when I learned just how uneven Koontz’s output was. While I found other books from him that I loved, like Watchers and Fear Nothing, I also stumbled across ones that I could only describe as complete piles of excrement, like today’s offering: The Funhouse. And yes, like I usually try to do with books it’s been a while since I’ve last read, I went and re-read it just in case I was mistaken and it wasn’t actually as bad as I remembered. It was.
The thing about The Funhouse is, I didn’t pick it out purely at random just because it happened to be on the school library shelf next to Phantoms. I specifically sought this book out, because it was the one book by Koontz which I’d actually heard of before. It was mentioned, you see, in another book I’ve reviewed for this blog: The Encyclopedia of Monsters, which contains an entry for Gunther Straker (under the name “The Carny Mutant”). It was always an entry that stood out to me, because it has a very good picture of Gunther in all his glory. So, even though the encyclopedia credited the novelization to Owen West (the pen name Koontz wrote it under), I immediately recognized the title when I saw it on the list of other works by the author and knew I had to read it.
Oh, yes, that’s right: the encyclopedia had a picture of Gunther because The Funhouse was originally a movie. That means that this is technically a “Know the Novelization” review as well. I actually tried to watch the movie version of The Funhouse before writing this review, for completeness’s sake; but since time has not exactly looked kindly on it, I was unable to find a copy. So, I won’t be able to do much comparison between the two versions. Sorry about that.
That said, despite being a novelization based on source material produced by someone else, the novel has enough of Koontz’s signature elements to make it unmistakeably his work. One Koontz classic, for instance, is the delusional psychopath with a warped worldview that he believes makes him enlightened and sets him above the rest of the ignorant sheeple. When this is done well, it can make for a very compelling villain; reminding me, for instance, of Raskolnikov’s dream at the end of Crime and Punishment of a prison full of madmen each proclaiming that they alone are sane. When done poorly, however, it turns into that ridiculous parody of villainy I call a Dark Kantian, who is Evil and does Evil for Evil’s sake.
Conrad Straker, unfortunately, is the latter. Because, he is a Satanist. As previously mentioned, I wasn’t able to watch the movie, so I can’t be sure whether this was his original characterization – but I have strong suspicions that it is an invention of Koontz. This is because Satanists also appear as villains in several other Koontz books I could name, and they all have one thing in common: they’re shit characters. Koontz, you see, is pretty religious, and that bleeds into his writing. So, when he writes a Satanist, he makes them caricatures of evil who make Saturday morning cartoon villains like Skeletor look positively subtle and nuanced in comparison. They do always and only evil, and need no motivation to do a thing other than it being an evil thing to do. Even at the time I first read this book, I was past being able to take such characters seriously. And now? I’ve read works with characters who serve evil deities roughly equivalent to Satan, yet are presented as complex and even sympathetic (oh hi there, Kirie Kotomine). I’ve read Gnosticism-tinged works where the Creator is actually a bastard and the Adversary is actually heroic and you shouldn’t be so quick to jump to moral judgements based on religious labels. I’ve read Brandon Sanderson, a devout Mormon, write characters of different religions and of no religion as being as complex and three-dimensional and sympathetic rather than mere one-note villains. And all of that has given me a lot less respect for Koontz’s “for the evulz” Satanist villains.
And speaking of Koontz’s religion seeping into his writing, The Funhouse contains another terrible Koontz cliche – his trademark divine intervention deus ex machina, where God Himself descends from the Heavens in a ray of Glory to bestow the protagonist with Divine Grace so they can prevail over the villain. This is something that varies in exact form and level of subtlety – sometimes it’s only an angel who shows up instead of God, like in One Door Away From Heaven; and the form of the divine miracle can vary, like the resurrection in Twilight Eyes – but it appears in too many of his books for my taste. I’m not sure what the reasoning behind it is. Does he think that we don’t like reading about characters succeeding based on their own efforts and own merits, so makes clear that his protagonists actually only won thanks to God stepping in and putting His thumb on the scale? Does he think that, despite how outlandishly, cartoonishly evil he made his Satanists, we might still not be quite sure which side to root for, and thus he needs Jesus to appear in the story and explicitly point out which are the good guys and which are the bad guys? Well, whatever the reasoning behind it: when this happens, it’s another sure sign of a bad Koontz novel.
To be fair, The Funhouse is probably not Dean Koontz’s absolute worst novel. And some of the blame for it should reside not in Koontz, but in the writer of the movie – there’s a reason Hooper, the director, is remembered for Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre rather than this piece of crap. That said, however, I found nothing enjoyable in this book; and enough of the problems are characteristic of Koontz’s other works than I have no reservation blaming him for them.
Final Rating: 1/5
profmorbius 