“Sometimes going home means facing what you left behind.”
…but sometimes it just means a long conversation with no real punchline.
Review & Summary
I’ll be honest—I’m dialing my rating down to 3 stars on this one. I’m a huge Dean Koontz fan, and I wanted to love Going Home in the Dark, but it just didn’t hit the usual highs.
The premise starts strong: the “Four Amigos”, childhood friends reuniting decades later. The setup is engaging, with hints of deeper connections and the promise of long-buried secrets. The small-town setting is richly drawn, and you can almost feel it pressing in on the characters, as if the place itself has a say in how things unfold.
Koontz’s narrator occasionally breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly to the reader. It’s playful and self-aware, adding charm in spots, but sometimes it pulls energy away from the tension that should be building. Unfortunately, towards the end the “mystery” drops all at once—two ancient life forms, alpha and beta—followed by a flat, predictable finish. The suspense fizzles instead of peaking.
The story hints at deeper consequences from long ago, but those threads never really materialize. The characters didn’t do anything particularly wrong back then, so there’s no guilt or fallout to unpack. It’s like opening a locked box, expecting a surprise, and finding it empty.
I kept waiting for that classic Koontz jolt—that Strangers-level grip that keeps you up too late. Instead, the tension drops off early and never restarts. The two life forms could have been a mythic thread to pull through the story, but they’re explained away without the depth or lingering unease to make them resonate.
Final Verdict
If this were code, it would compile cleanly but feel unfinished—like a demo build rushed out before the good features were added. Koontz completists will still find it worth a read, but for me, it’s a mid-tier entry: solid prose, likable enough characters, but low on thrill factor.
Recommended for: Die-hard Koontz fans who don’t mind a lighter, more straightforward story; readers okay with a mystery that explains itself early; anyone curious about a quiet, low-stakes reunion tale.
Rating: 3 out of 5. Serviceable, but not one I’ll be re-reading when I need a Koontz fix.
Attribution: Written with help of ChatGPT 5.