| Phantoms | 
 enlarge | Author: Dean R. Koontz
Creator: Buck Schirner
Publisher: Brilliance Corporation
Category: Book
List Price: £19.71
Buy New: £14.80
You Save: £4.91 (25%)
New (6) Used (2) from £14.80
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 887768
Media: MP3 CD
Edition: MP3 Una
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 1423339282
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781423339281
ASIN: 1423339282
Publication Date: January 29, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new! Ships to anywhere in the United Kingdom! Orders only take 7-10 days! We specialize in service to the U.K. and only ship airmail.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 15 | | NEXT » |
 A missed opportunity March 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book shows both what I love and hate about Koontz. Great premises, but crappy endings.
For the first 70 pages or so he had me hooked. A town suddenly empty of people; Marie Celeste like food still hot on the stoves. A woman and her young sister, alone, with "something" creeping around. So far, so creepy, and I was loving it.
I was still with him when the cops turned up... but when the "creature" turned out to be a huge, almost omnipotent amoeba, he lost me. I stuck with it through to the end, but I had ceased to care about what happened to the characters by then.
A missed opportunity. It could have been so much better.
 So Scary You Will Be Watching Your Back As You Turn The Page July 25, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is the first Dean Koontz book I have had the pleasure to read, my mum readit before me and told me I really should read it. Upon hearing the plot I thought 'yep same old crappy The Hills Have Eyes novel' but I sat down to read it one sunny afternoon and could not put it down! It is one of those books that is spinechilling yet you can't put it down as the suspense is everbuilding and it is so annoying to have every theory you come up with thwarted! It is a clever story that hs the basis of your average horror story but more intelligence to it. Well worth reading, set aside an afternoon for this one!!
Traditional horror June 1, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I thought that this was a great book!
It has all the aspects of a traditional horror story, but is also fabulously written, so it doesn't seem hackneyed in the slightest. The only thing that brought it down was the amount of swearing, which just got boring after a while.
 Over-the-top horror, Koontz style July 7, 2005
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
"Writing PHANTOMS was one of the 10 biggest mistakes of my life, ranking directly above the incident with the angry porcupine and the clown, about which I intend to say nothing more."
- author's afterword, US paperback editionAlthough Koontz wrote several books under pen names in the interim, PHANTOMS was the first book under his own name since WHISPERS. Since the publishing powers-that-be squawked whenever he produced a book differing from the previous book's perceived genre, he deliberately attempted a very different book from WHISPERS here. Ironically, PHANTOMS shackled him to the horror genre label for years to come. PHANTOMS was meant to be an over-the-top horror story, with a full-blown monster but with a scientific explanation for everything that takes place. (Good luck working *that* out before the Big Exposition Scene, though.) Whether or not there are supernatural aspects to the monster, there are definitely scuzzy human villains littering the landscape. To crank up the tension, the story takes place in a very compressed timeframe once the action begins. Drive-in totals (as Joe Bob Briggs, movie reviewer extraordinaire, would say)
- Small town? Check.
- Everybody missing except a handful of main characters? Check.
- Dismembered, mostly missing bodies, with occasionally body parts artistically planted where the characters have just passed through to add that special "we're being watched by a psycho" touch.
- Romance subplot, being Koontz. Mind you, a lot of that would also apply to JURASSIC PARK, which didn't seem to be hurting any the last I knew. Still, if you read this one alone on a dark night, don't come crying to me if you can't sleep. You've been warned. Not my cup of tea, but tastes differ. Frankly, if Koontz didn't have extraordinarily bad luck with Hollywood (his plots generally seem to be dismembered in translation), I'd have expected this to make a successful film; Koontz tends to use lots of concrete visual imagery, which *ought* to simplify matters.
Very Good Read October 11, 2004
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
IF you're a fan or horror and suspense, this book has got the lot.
What has happened to the town of Snowfield? Why has half the town vanished, and the remaining souls found dead in bizarre circumstances. ??A gripping read that forces you to turn that next page. A well written horror that stabs at your fears and leaves you feeling rather alone and "venerable" in the house after you have put it down.
When books leave me with an after effect like this, I know I have be thoroughly entertained and my mind suitably messed with.
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