Since his wife, Michelle, left seven years ago, Jeffy Coltrane has worked to maintain a normal life for himself and his eleven-year-old daughter, Amity, in Suavidad Beach. It's a quiet life, until a local eccentric known as Spooky Ed shows up on their doorstep.
Ed entrusts Jeffy with hiding a strange and dangerous object-something he calls "the key to everything"-and tells Jeffy that he must never use the device. But after a visit from a group of ominous men, Jeffy and Amity find themselves accidentally activating the key and discovering an extraordinary truth. The device allows them to jump between parallel planes at once familiar and bizarre, wondrous and terrifying. And Jeffy and Amity can't help but wonder, could Michelle be just a click away?
Jeffy and Amity aren't the only ones interested in the device. A man with a dark purpose is in pursuit, determined to use its grand potential for profound evil. Unless Amity and Jeffy can outwit him, the place they call home may never be safe again.
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Without need of a door and unconcerned about the security-system alarm that has been set, the library patron arrives at three o'clock in the morning, as quiet as any of the many ghosts who reside here - from those in the plays to those in the plays of Shakespeare to those in the stories of Russell Kirk. THE VISITOR IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT
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(Thomas & Mercer, 6 October 2020, 368 pages, ebook, copy from the publisher via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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I've been reading Koontz for twenty-odd years, on and off. I stopped reading him for a while but have started to get back into his work over the past couple of years. I really enjoyed Elsewhere. The multiverse and ideas of parallel words is something I've come across over and over in fiction and I find the idea fascinating. I like how Koontz deals with it here. Elsewhere is exactly what I'd expect from Koontz, characters who tick all the boxes for decent human beings, sinister figures skulking in the shadows and crazy ass-ness on a grand scale.
