Enjoyed the somewhat shocking Chinese-human-harvesting-for-cash plot turn but Ryan's paranoia was driving me insane and eating up way too much of the read. Sorry Koontz. ( )

I couldn't finish this book. The prose was weak, the story more so. What was an excellent premace desolved under the "message" Koontz was trying to present.

I picked this up to see what the hype surrounding him was all about and found myself still not understanding it. There are better books out there, and I'm off to find them. ( )

Apologies on all of the Dean Koontz reviews today. I am just reading books as I find them in my messy under construction house. This has led me to re-read some Koontz books (really just skim since I have read them before). I forgot how much I disliked "Your Heart Belongs to Me" until my re-read of it. A main character who I didn't care for and a BS ending just made me roll my eyes. Koontz for once didn't have a HEA ending, but the whole book felt seriously out of sync.

A rich man named Ryan Perry has the whole world in his pocket. He has a woman he loves (Samantha) and can do anything he wants. Then he gets sick and gets diagnosed with something that is damaging his heart. If he doesn't get a heart transplant, he is going to die. Then Ryan starts to investigate how something could have caused him to get sick and then starts running scared from an unseen enemy. When Ryan meets with a doctor who promises he can get him on the top of a heart transplant list and damn the cost, the book goes sideways from there.

Ryan sucks. I really didn't like him and when we figure out as readers what happens and how Ryan was "saved" I really despised the guy. I can't recall Koontz ever writing a main character this way before. Ryan and Samantha are finished after his heart transplant and you are left wondering what the hell happened. When the book skips a year later we find out what Ryan has been up to and how he wants to reach out to Samantha again. When someone starts stalking Ryan and telling him that his heart belongs to her I maybe laughed a few times. The woman and the fear that Ryan has is not scary at all. I just felt bored and hoped that the woman ended up killing Ryan so something interesting would happen.

Samantha is perfection in literary form. Does Koontz know how to write women any other way these days? She is also a writer so when she and Ryan ends things, he spends a lot of time dissecting her work in order to read about the subtext behind her words. I hope you like the word subtext. I think it appeared like a billion times (sarcasm).

There are secondary characters I can't even recall or care about too much since in the end they don't matter. We have a red herring character who was just freaking odd and terrible. A mysterious nurse whose name I am blanking on.

I think the biggest issue I have with this book is that I don't think Koontz knows what it wanted it to be. We have Ryan who goes from being happy and in love with Samantha to then thinking she is all femme fatale. It doesn't ring true based on what Koontz shows us and we have to wade through a ridiculous amount of red herrings to figure out what is going on. The book was overly descriptive about things I did not give a damn about. At one point I wondered did I wander into a James Patterson novel (I stopped reading that guy years ago because I don't care to read about the thread count of people's fucking bedsheets) and felt really annoyed.

The dialogue was painful as hell to wade through. No one talks like this and stop it!

The flow was awful too. We just skipped a ton of stuff that I think was necessary to even get a gleam of figuring out what could possibly be happening.

As I said the ending was terrible. Koontz should have just went dark with things and been done with it. Also there are dogs and I maybe screamed a bit about that. ( )

Until the last 40 pages or so, this felt like the Koontz book that might finally convince me to stop reading his new books. Then it was vaguely redeemed in the final pages. I do mean vaguely, though. The explanation of things is actually not very impressive, we find out that significant information was left out of the earlier story so that the reader can't too easily guess what was happening, and the wrap up is too tidy. The only reason I found it vaguely redeeming was the way it changed the story's overall portrayal of the main character. It took away some of my earlier annoyance.

I suspect my compulsion to keep reading Koontz's new books will continue, though we'll see. The Odd books are the only ones that seem even somewhat inspired anymore. Perhaps not surprising when the books are coming out like clockwork, one every six months, with a writing style that seems to mimic R.L. Stine more all the time (it's noticeable, for instance, when a paragraph is longer than five lines or a chapter longer than six pages.)

Why can't I break my addiction? Why can't Koontz go back to writing the somewhat less preachy and much more compelling, not so by-the-numbers books of his past? And yet, they're still just compelling enough for me to continue reading them. (Or maybe it's just the vague sense of accomplishment I get from pounding them out in a day or two, since they read so fast and easy.)

Anyway, even if you're a fan of Koontz, if you don't have to read all his books, I'd recommend giving this one a pass. It's pretty mediocre and the overwriting borders on ridiculous at times, even for Koontz. And you'll very possibly find yourself wanting to strangle the main character throughout most of it. Don't bother. ( )

När jag gick på högstadiet läste jag Gömstället av Dean Koontz och var inte alls imponerad. Hade hoppats mycket på honom eftersom jag tyckte mycket om Stephen King, men blev av någon anledning, som jag glömt, besviken. När jag nu efter snart trettio år plockade upp en av hans böcker och läste förstår jag inte varför jag blev så besviken. Boken var väl inte den bästa jag läst, men den var ändå svår att lägga ifrån sig och den gav mersmak. Kommer definitivt att läsa fler av hans böcker. ( )