Super Strange Villain in Dean Koontz's Fourth Jane Hawk Novel

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Reviewer: Forrest Schultz schultz_forrest@yahoo.com 770-583-3258

Blog Address: http://newsciencefictionandfantasyreviews.blogspot.com/

September 18, 2018

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.