Craig's Reviews > Phantoms

Phantoms is one of Koontz's very best straight-horror novels. It's a cosmic horror informed by Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (one of the characters is Captain Arkham!), and examines the decimation of entire towns by a shapeshifting amoeba monster that all fans of The Blob will embrace. It's very well-paced with intense suspense and a nifty little twist at the end; very well-written and the characters are interesting, too. It was made into a film in 1998 that had a screenplay by Koontz and a really terrific cast (Peter O'Toole, Rose McGowan, Liev Schreiber, Ben Affleck, Linnea Quigley, etc.) but wasn't very good. The novel became even more famous for being plagiarized in two novels that Zebra published in 1990 and 1991 called Demonic Color and The Crawling Dark and was the subject of a court case that Koontz won.