One Door Away From Heaven
By Dean Koontz
Reviewed by
Kenny Brechner
No book buyer can help becoming one of popular suspense novelist Dean Koontz' characters after Christmas. Pondering a bizarre mystery, reflecting on the presence of doorways in time, and cautioning ourselves that "easy answers are what usually lead whole worlds into ruin," I mean to say.
This is because Koontz has taken to having his books released on December 26th, the day after Christmas, thereby deliberately missing the holiday season, which makes no sense whatever, except perhaps..., well, perhaps pondering mysteries is what life is all about.
This is not the sort of question one does well to ponder alone, and thus I consulted Koontz' newest book, One Door Away From Heaven, and discovered that lo, "if your heart is closed, then you will find behind that door nothing to light your way. But if your heart is open, you will find behind that door people who, like you, are searching, and you will find the right door together with them."
One thing immediately apparent to anyone encountering a Koontz book is that he loves dogs. The back cover of One Door Away from Heaven has a photo of Koontz's dog reading the new book with him.
Everything about dogs brings out the best in Koontz. When describing them even his prose comes out of the oven a little more readily than usual. Setting suns, for example, "turn a prairie into molten gold glass,@ a river is a place "where willow trees stencil filigrees of shadow on the purling water," but dogs are simply "beautiful, or "handsome," they don't do weird things to the world.
Fondness for Dogs is an unquestionably amiable quality, and in One Door Away From Heaven Koontz stretches William Beckford's principle that, when it comes to dogs, "one can scarcely praise them sufficiently," as far as it will go.
The central premise of the book involves a benevolent alien who has three "tricks," the second of which involves mind merging with dogs. "The third is the ability to teach the second trick to anyone he meets, and it is the third trick with which he can save a world."
As someone who tends goats I can certainly assert that Koontz made a wise choice in selecting dogs for the mind merge. Exceedingly fond of them though I am, I cannot hide it from myself that, had goats been the object of the alien's mind merge, we should all be inclined to smash each other in the head and develop shocking table manners, and thus, apart from being better able to address waste disposal issues, we should be no nearer saving the world.
The healing
properties of loving dogs needs an evil to be set against, and in One Door
Away from Heaven, that evil is utilitarian bioethics, which is related to
having a closed heart and an overactive logical facility. With this sort of evil
looming one can certainly see where a canine mind merge would be the appropriate
foil, and so it is.
