Joey Shannon, an alcoholic whose life has been going nowhere for 20 years, returns to his hometown for the funeral of his father. As he leaves town, he gets a mysterious second chance to relive the night in 1975 when his life began its downward spiral: to both literally and figuratively take the road that he didn’t originally take. On this road he is supremely tested by conflict with his successful and charismatic older brother P.J., by conflict between his cynicism and his lost faith, and by conflict between the ultimate good and evil.

First, a warning. If you buy ‘Strange Highways’ by Dean Koontz in any other format, you get a 500+ page collection of thirteen stories, two of which are novella-length. If you buy the unabridged audiobook as I did, then you get only the first story in the collection. I mised that detail when I bought the book.

IN A NUTSHELL
A great premise with some very scary moments and an intensely dramatic setting. Sadly, the premise gets buried under a landslide of ideas from a Hallmark version of Catholicism that sweeps it towards a so-sweet-it-makes-my-teeth-hurt Happy Ever After ending and the writing feels clumsy.

Well, I read this all the way to the end. I enjoyed the beginning. Then I became frustrated and finally disappointed as the story unfolded. 

At first, the frustration came from the prose, which was overwrought to the point that the constant reaching-for-striking-and-only-hitting-clumisly-odd use of language was a distraction.

Then I kept getting thrown out of the story by the not-quite-Catholic views of guilt and redemption that were being used to set up the struggle between good and evil. I found it harder to take seriously when the hero had to demonstrate his faith to save the world save the girl and this turned out to mean that he had to reject Star Trek and Twilight Zone explanations of the strange and fall back on Divine intervention. 

I loved the description of the highway that shouldn’t have been there, the condemned village built over an abandoned coal mine that was burning out of control and the desanctified church set up for sacrifice. 

I started to have my faith in the story tested when one timeslip became several, turning the narrative into an uninteresting mix of video game / Groundhog Day. My disengagement increased as I realised that the purpose of the ‘replays’ was to teach Joey that he should stop trying to figure out the right thing to do to defeat his brother and simply place his faith in God. As an ex-Catholic, turned atheist, this wasn’t a storyline I was ever going to buy.

Then the Happy Ever After ending left me feeling as if I’d stumbled into an episode of ‘Touched By An Angel’. (a series that started a year before ‘Strange Highways‘ was published).

I finished the story feeling disappointed. It was such a promising premise and it delivered so little. I kept wondering what Stephen King or Peter Straub would have made of this idea.