Dean Koontz, a Rambler : Discuss

salad1

If ever there was an author who could be described as Rambler or a waffler or indeed a Guilder of the lilly, it the Writer Dean Koontz. I've read loads of his books  from the  'Odd' series to his latest spell binder and on every occasion I have put down the book and cried' Shut up and get on with it' The narrative is essential and the flesh in a book enriches the page, but please.

If a guy is being chased down by bad guys and seems to be being led to safety by a Cat- do we really need a page and half of filler to complete our visionof how his Mum felt and temperature of the back of his fridge on cold day in September - see he got me at it now...

O.M.G I just thought of worse rambler - Stephen Donaldson- 'The first and second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the unbeliever'. what a fantastic Tome. Tolkienesk and the first book to make me sob after taking 3 days off to read the subsequent books , there are 9 now. The first 3 magical and then it crept in... by no.8 I was suicidal to see how the plot ends. Did he break the arch of time and kill every one...We may never know or indeed realise as we were bailing out the Book Boat.

Your thoughts please.

Thank you and a Merry Xmas

stevenM

You can add Dan Brown to the list too. I loved the da Vinci code and Angels & Demons. However in his last book he felt the need to explain everything in such detail that i got bored of the book very quickly.

salad1

even Tolkien was keen to get rid of some ink... Paul Hoffman( left hand of god, what a book,) was a wordy nerdy. i was lucky to have the audible book and the Gravely and rich Sean Barret saved the day with his rendition.

Apsilon

King's been this way for the last 10-15 years. One of the reasons I stopped reading him. He'll take 40 pages to describe a setting or scene that could've been done just as well in 5..

Dan Browns Inferno felt like a text book for the most part.

pringtef

I think it was part of the genre to describe things in huge amounts of detail at the time, but i found Victor Hugo's Les Miserables awful.  I seem to recall reading a six page description of the inside of a house at one point.

Courtjezter

I remember some of Konntz' earlier novels being quite brisk, i enjoyed them due to this, Tick Tock being one that stands out.  It seems like authors do this in later life, they tend to overwrite things.