NEW SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY REVIEWS
Reviews Of Recently Published Science Fiction And Fantasy Books
Super- Strange
Villain In
Dean Koontz’s
Fourth Jane Hawk Novel
A Review of
Dean Koontz The Forbidden Door: A Jane Hawk Novel (Bantam Books, 2018)
436 pp $28.00 ISBN
978-0-48370-0
Reviewer: Forrest W. Schultz
The character Egon Gottfrey
in Dean Koontz’s fourth Jane Hawk novel, The Forbidden Door is one of the strangest villains I have ever
come across in the thousands of books I have read. On pp. 8-11 Gottfrey
is described as a radical philosophical nihilist who contends that there is no
objective truth. He says of himself that he thinks, therefore he exists,
but his body, life, and the whole world and its history is a delusion, a stage
production for an unknowable audience, as if he is an actor in a drama for
which he has never seen the script; and that the world is caused by an Unknown
Playwright, who wants us to believe we and the world are real. On pp. 21
and 30f Gottfrey claims that only his mind exists, and that nothing else is
real. Everything else, he says, is an illusion, including his body. He is
very serious about this, but sometimes the result is very funny, as in his
statement (p. 103) that he would hate Texans if they really existed, and that
if he believed Texas was a real place he would never go there. This
notion is similar to that of a character in a place called “The Lost Land” in
Susan Cooper’s Silver
On The Tree, who claims
that “we are all actors in a play which nobody wrote and nobody will see.”
(A very stark contrast to that of Tolkien’s Hobbit character Sam who
expresses delight at “being inside a poem”.) I am wondering whether
Koontz chose the last name of his character, Gottfrey, because in German it
would mean being free from God (Gott is the German word for God; and
"frei" is the German word for "free". Anyway, this is
what really stands out in this novel -- the rest of it is composed of elements
which are familiar in crime novels, especially those with a science fiction
element involving a horrendous invention.
