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Thoughts on 77 Shadow Street

November 11, 2011

This morning I finished 77 Shadow Street and I just thought I’d share some thoughts without supplying any spoilers.

  • This is Dean’s first (correct me if I’m wrong) haunted house story.
  • Of course, being a Koontz novel, what you think of as a haunted house, and what Dean thinks of as a haunted house may not exactly match.
  • This book has one of the largest number of characters of any of his novels I can think of.
  • It also has what might be the least amount of character dialogue as any other of his novels. In some places there are stretches of 20 or more pages without any dialogue. To me this made it read much differently from most of Dean’s novels.
  • Lastly, all of the action takes place in one of the shortest time periods of his available work. (I think some of the Brian Coffey mysteries occurred in short time frames, but seeing as they’re not generally available…)

The other comment I have is that this ARC seems to have a large number of errors in it. Granted, advance copies are prone to having errors but I found three, and that many from a major publisher (Bantam) is pretty uncommon in my experience. The errors I found were:

  • The second-to-last paragraph on page 151 starting “Mickey’s mother has helped him to refine his sixth sense…” is repeated just two paragraphs later at the top of page 152.
  • The second full paragraph on page 299 starts “and they retreated quickly form the bathroom threshold.” At a minimum, “and” should be capitalized but it reads as if some text is missing.
  • The start of the fifth line of paragraph one on page 345 reads “mom’sl lyrics”. It should be “mom’s lyrics”.

I assume these errors will be fixed in the final publication.