What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz

What the Night Knows, by Dean Koontz

Reviewed by Steve Weatherbe

Long after I read the Lord of the Rings the first time, the point of it became clear: it is all in the response Gandalf gives to Frodo when the hobbit laments the task given him and cries something like : Oh why should such horrible things happen and why couldn’t we hobbits and me especially be left alone?
It is Tolkien posing the theodicy question, the problem of pain. And Gandalf replies: wrong question, buddy (or words to this effect): you should be asking, what do I do about this horrible evil
Lord of the Rings consists of telling how dozens of major and minor characters responded to the question. Some answer the call of evil, some answer the call of good, but many simply exploit the chaos for their own good, while many more remain neutral. Think of the elves. We expect them to enlist on the side of good. Most of them simply opt out of the conflict, like, say the Swedes or Swiss in WW2. One group of elves, however, sends an army to aid one of the embattled human kingdoms on the brink of ruin. What a great scene in the movie this makes: I cried, as I did when I read of the Plataeans coming the aid of the Athenians just before the Battle of Marathon.
Which brings me to my latest Catholic read: What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz. Koontz writes gothic or supernatural thrillers which get him lumped into the horror category sometimes—and I never read these kinds of books, except the ones he writes.
He’s written a lot of books and there is a certain sameness to them, I admit. But what is undeniable is that there is good and evil, not just dysfunction and emotional maturity. In some, the evil is implicit. At the forefront are power-hungry government scientists or psychopathic psychiatrists. But in others, God, or more usually, angels and demons take major roles, if not center stage.
In What the Night Knows center stage is occupied by Koontz’s usual protagonist, a couple bound by love and, in this case, matrimony, with children. They are attacked by a demon who must get at them through other humans. And other humans are more or less vulnerable to the demon’s attempts at possession, depending on the degree to which they have already given themselves over to selfishness and depravity.
The three children are also variously susceptible to the demon: the most vulnerable is a dreamy girl who loves fantasies involving magic doors to faerie kingdoms.
Some characters are possessed by the demon but fight back from within.
There is a well-delineated failed priest in the novel, the only character who believes that a demon is haunting the hero; but he is disqualified from helping: he is a pedophile, struggling with the compulsion but failing so regularly he cannot assist with an exorcism. No demon made him abuse children, he notes. He chose evil with no outside help.
But the hero’s own parish priest fails him too: the Church doesn’t do exorcisms anymore, he says, it does food banks and social justice. At the book’s end, the family finds a new parish with a priest who believes in the reality of evil.
God calls to Koontz’s characters but so does Satan. Each is free to choose. The underlying moral seriousness of the book may offset for some Koontz’s preference for wealthy, witty protagonists living in dream homes with cloyingly brainy children, people with no problems in the world-- except for having become the target of an evil mastermind.