Phantoms take place in a small off season ski resort village in Snowfield, California. On her way back to her home after picking up her newly orphaned sixteen younger sister, Jenny drives through the oddly deserted town. They arrive at Jenny’s home which doubles as her doctor’s office. In the
kitchen they find her secretary dead on the floor, spotted with bruises that seemed to have been inflicted all at one time. The death must’ve happened quick and caught the woman of guard since her eyes were open; her face frozen as if she died in the middle of a scream. Requesting the help from the military’s Biological Investigations Unit the following morning and having them flown in,
another gruesome discovery is made. One of the victims had written a name on a bathroom mirror, “Timothy Flyte”. In Phantoms, Flyte is famously known for his book, “The Ancient Enemy” in which he shares these mass disappearances and says that the cause of these events was done by an ancient predator. Some of the mass disappearances he mentions are that of the Mayan population as well as the dinosaur extinction. As the story progresses, Timothy Flyte, Jenny, Lisa, the police and the biologists find that the cause is a creature who is able to mimic anything it consumes, growing in
mass as it does. It resembles a jellified, black mass which has been hibernating under the entire town until recently. It is never revealed how big exactly the mass is but it’s made clear it was big enough to fill caverns under the town as well as fill the entirety of under the town itself. The creature commands other parts of itself to detach in to phantom like creatures, into anything it has
consumed. Their only hope of getting out of Snowfield alive is to put together a biological weapon to attack the creature’s nucleus, obliterating it’s’ existence.
Phantoms was a book I easily got lost in. There were two different stories going on which had me wondering how these two were going to meet. The main story is about what was going on in Snowfield. The side story was about a man who had killed his wife and son. The side story was a nice
break every now and then when the main story was just starting to drag. At the end of the book, the side story met the main portion seamlessly and found myself not wanting the story to end. The ending tied all the loose ends in a nice little bow and I was happy to not to be let down at the outcome. The creature’s outcome was at first a little lack luster but then again Koontz tried to make this story as realistic as possible. I was impressed when Koontz’s “a note to the reader” reveled that the mass disappearances motioned in the book (The Roanoke Island colony, the deserted Eskimo village of Anjikuni, the vanished Mayan populations, the loss of thousands of Spanish soldiers in 1711, etc.) were true events and that he had really researched the back stories of these events for his book. One of the chemicals that were used in attempts to kill the phantom creature was called Biosan-4 which was a supposed more stable strain of the first patented microorganism which was to fragile to survive outside of the lab. Although Biosan-4 is fictional, the fragile version is in fact real and scientists have not found a way to make a hardier version like the characters used in this book. I would recommend this book to someone who likes facts integrated into fiction novels as well as a scientific twist on a suspense novel. There are some graphic as well as disturbing scenes. This is a book that is undoubtedly different from most.
Until Next Time…
~Fiction-Book-Reviewer
