Five out of five stars
Dean Koontz is one of my all-time favorite authors. He is talented enough to take on just about any subject and weave an exciting story out of it. So, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is one of the classics, one that almost every child or adult has read or, if not read, then certainly watched one of the many movies or television versions that have come about over the years. The name automatically brings visions of monsters with creepy bolts stuck out of his neck and jagged scars made from stitching his body together—pieces cut free from fresh corpses stolen from the cemetery.
Dean Koontz has taken this old classic and worked his own kind of magic to bring about Victor Immaculate, the clone to the original Victor, known by many other names in the two hundred years that he has been alive. Deucalion is the first monster made by Victor Frankenstein, though not his last, made from the power of lightning, which can still be seen pulsing through his eyes. Victor Frankenstein was a genius, no doubt about it, but his ultimate goal is not to create, but to annihilate. He wants to see all of humanity destroyed and the world filled with his own creations, a world where everyone will bow down and worship him as their one and only god. Once he achieves this, he plans to kill what he has created, his ultimate goal to be the only living creature to walk the face of the planet. Deucalion may very well be the world’s only hope, for he is the only one of Victor’s monsters that can stand up to his maker and destroy him.
Deucalion ends up with half his face crushed, almost killed, when he and his father first butted heads. A monk in a monastery where Deucalion lived for awhile spends a great deal of time applying an intricate tattoo to the destroyed part of his face. If he hadn’t done something to hide or mask it, everyone around Victor’s first creation would know the massive injury was one no normal person could’ve survived. During this five-book series, Deucalion enlists the help of two private detectives and another of Victor’s creations, Erika 5, who was also able to break the link of master and servant, to help him track down and destroy Victor and all the unholy creatures he brought into the world and turned loose on the unsuspecting population. In the end it will take the extraordinary efforts of a motley crew of professionals and misfits working together if they want to have any hope of bringing Victor Frankenstein down permanently.
I wish I had the room to touch on all the many different side plots I enjoyed while reading this series, but my review would be five pages long, and this just to touch on the highlights. Enough to say I became attached to the people involved and couldn’t wait each year for the next segment to arrive. The Dead Town brings the scattered groups of survivors from the previous four novels together for the last battle against Frankenstein and his unholy creations. Can Deucalion, and the people he enlisted to help him along the way, survive against almost unspeakable odds to destroy a brilliant mind whose only wish is to see all life on Earth destroyed? I highly recommend all five books in the Frankenstein series by Dean Koontz. You won’t regret the investment in this fast-paced, thrilling story, with a brilliant plot and exciting characters, both the good and the evil of the two halves. I was sad to see it all come to an end, even if it was an electrifying end.
Denna Holm 