The Bad Weather Friend (2024) by Dean Koontz
A soup kitchen for monsters in the best of all possible worlds
Readers unfamiliar with The Bad Weather Friend may prefer to read these notes only after reading the novel.
The colonel smiled and nodded. “I am already fond of you, Benjamin, even though we’ve never met. You have suffered as I suffered. And like me, you didn’t let the pain and misery corrupt you. You have remained nice, just as I have remained nice. This I’ve been told about you by an irrefutable source. I love you for being so nice, dear nephew.” He nodded and smiled and pressed a hand over his heart. Then in the kindest, nicest way, he whispered, “Now, whatever happens, no matter what—be not afraid. There is no reason to be afraid, though there may seem to be. There may very much seem to be. But there is not. In my experience, at least, there is not. Trust me.”
The Bad Weather Friend (2024) by Dean Koontz overtops itself with humor, happiness, and jouissance. It dramatizes and extols comradery and the meet-weird preceding marriage. All the deaths are -- perhaps -- by natural causes. Even long-lost school friends who once shared dangerous private school adventures are reunited before the final curtain.
It is a light, fantastical suspense novel with contagious positive energy. The usual villains show up: meritocratic know-it-alls and petty bourgeois bureaucrats (they call themselves “the Better Kind”) hell-bent on nudging and grinding down happy and positive people.
Their main target in The Bad Weather Friend is successful twenty-three year old real estate broker Benny Catspaw. His over-determined name indicates he is a dope. After a horrendous childhood, Benny is faking it until he makes it: being polite and friendly, positive and passive, confident and compassionate. But this world crashes down on him when the secret world conspiracy decides his Candide/Pollyanna approach to life is a danger to their priorities.
He loses a lucrative job and an apparently charming fiancee -- who speaks entirely in song lyrics -- before the second chapter is complete.
Fortunately, someone knows Benny is in the crosshairs of the Better Kind, and gives Benny something to turn the tables on his tormentors. Said protector is a rationalized guardian angel, part John Wayne and part Repairman Jack.
Then the fireworks begin. Benny and his guardian are joined by waitress and trainee private detective Harper Harper. The trio spend seven headlong hours fighting and cajoling their way up the chain of command of the "Better Kind." Like Parker in Richard Stark's The Hunter, they find wealth and arrogance increases the higher they climb. Along the way they are aided by gatekeepers, valet parking attendants, waiters, servants, and two mimes acting as party greeters. All these allies have, like Benny, achieved a hatred for the class enemy.
The Bad Weather Friend is an organized dash from one crescendo to the next. This is done through parallel narrative. After a chapter of present-day action by Benny and his two "destiny buddies," Koontz provides a chapter from Benny's youth: witnessing the murder of his dad; spending two years with a pathologically negative maternal grandmother; a year with a smart tutor who never got academic tenure because he "he didn’t hate Shakespeare enough, though he hated the bard a great deal."
Finally, after remarriage, Benny's mother sends him to a private school in the wilds of northern California. Briarbush Academy, which "educated only the brightest sons of the nation’s richest and most forward-thinking families," is something of a battery farm, where young scions of wealth are deformed on the forcing frame of "Better Kind" values. Benny befriends two other students who have not yet been reprogrammed; together they investigate the disappearance of the student that preceded Benny. He was last seen volunteering at a distant lab building run by the headmaster's wife, a driven researcher of tropical spiders.
The Briarbush chapters are equal in thrills to the present-day chapters. And like an Enid Blyton school story, there is plenty of action at night to combine with more than a hint of cosmic horror.
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Engagement with contemporary anxieties: Notabilia from The Bad Weather Friend
As engagement with contemporary anxieties, Dean Koontz novels express high levels of foreboding and worry as suspense: the build-up of menace, counterplotting, thickening inevitability flowing from certainty that something awful will happen soon, because it has already. Koontz's bad actor characters are typically narcissistic sociopaths, as he is the first to admit.
Koontz has also made no secret in media interviews that this component of his fiction flows from unresolvable traumas experienced in his youth. I will set aside the politics of child abuse since Koontz has spoken about it, and I do not want to abuse my use of “intentional fallacy.”
But I do briefly want to underline political statements and viewpoints made explicit in The Bad Weather Friend. They are not extensive, but they openly demonstrate Koontz's passion for individual autonomy, the absolute liberty of the bourgeois subject, and his profound skepticism about claims by petty bourgeois meritocratic social-engineers that they can erase irreconcilable class differentiation and antagonisms with various methods of nudging and social engineering.
The “Forgotten Man”
[....] Although he had only one eye, Gordie Armstrong was a tug cart driver who had worked twenty-two years for Mayweather Universal Air Freight with not a single work-related injury or negative report on his employment record. He had sustained the loss of an eye in one of the Middle East wars that politicians were eager to fight and just as eager to lose.
In spite of being disabled, though he had been betrayed by the very leaders who sent him into battle, he never complained, and he loved his country. Being practical and economically prudent, Gordie chose not to have a decorative eye installed in the empty socket, which was permanently sewn shut. He wore an eye patch; not the usual black one, but a patch that was a miniature American flag.
“Opiates of the masses”
[....] Evening traffic on Pacific Coast Highway was heavy, complicated by the fact that maybe 15 percent of the motorists were undocumented aliens with forged driver’s licenses and no firm understanding of the motor-vehicle laws of California, while another 15 percent were well-documented drunks and drug addicts who either had contempt for the motor-vehicle laws of California or thought they were on a yellow-brick road in Oz.
“And yet the rich get richer”
[....] The property was worth many millions. Many. Year by year, as long as government programs promising equity and social justice did what they were actually designed to do, which was transfer wealth from the poor and the middle class to those at the top of the economic ladder, this residence would be worth ever more fantastical sums, until it had greater value than any city with a population of one hundred thousand in the nation’s heartland—or until the US dollar collapsed and you could then purchase the place with a year’s supply of canned food and whiskey.
“Modern art expresses and breeds misery”
[....] the inside of the house had nothing in common with the exterior. There were tens of millions of dollars’ worth of scary-as-hell expressionist and abstract expressionist art on the walls. As they passed canvases, Spike said, “Francis Bacon. Never learned to draw. Used smudges, whorls, jagged slashes, and disturbing shapes to alarm the viewer. Edvard Munch. Lived most of his life on the edge of insanity, spent time in an asylum, serious alcoholic. Ah, Jackson Pollack. Had very little instruction in art. Threw the paint at the canvas, dripped it, applied it with sticks and even turkey basters. Serious alcoholic. Died in a car accident. All three adored for the incoherence represented in their work, and highly collectible.”
“Social engineers seek to crush deplorables 'in the egg’.”
[....] “Mr. Catspaw,” [Llewellyn Urnfield] said, “those of us who have taken it upon ourselves to develop algorithms that identify dangerous individuals such as you—we aren’t stupid. Indeed, we’re the best and brightest. Yet we are often surprised by how ineffective you people are when we destroy your careers, how little most of you are able to grasp that a powerful organization has devised your destruction. Perhaps this is because we choose our targets early in their lives, before they have acquired much wisdom, when they regard everyone with good will and don’t yet understand that some of us do not regard them in the same let-live spirit. Indeed, we work tirelessly to identify them ever earlier in their lives, so that we can eliminate the threat they pose to a perfect society before they even begin to know what they believe, before they develop the ability to influence others, when they’re still naive fools as pathetic as you.”
“Gee,” Benny said, “that’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”
“I do think, Mr. Catspaw, and quite deeply about many things that you have never thought about in your life. In time, we hope to identify our targets when they are in elementary school and disable them psychologically at such an early age they will achieve nothing of which they were once capable. We have been aware for some time that there must be a mysterious organization assisting some of our targets, undoing our fine work, promoting creatures like you into successful lives on the very path that we find unacceptable. Never, however, has one of them identified us so quickly, and none has dared to come after us and confront us as you have this night.”
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Koontz has written The Bad Weather Friend in a charming yet garrulous third person free-indirect discourse style. The parallel narrative plot structure and use of analepsis ensures reader interest is inflagging. The novel's blissful, droll, and fantasticated narrative voice -- including moments when the voice speaks directly to the reader to editorialize and foreshadow -- convinces.
I am always pleased when I read a Dean Koontz novel. This is an intermittent event at best, but The Bad Weather Friend was an exciting and provocative pleasure.
Jay
6 February 2025
