Books I Didn’t Finish: Phantoms
Gather round, all the Skibidi-zoomers reading this blog, and let me tell you about a magical experience from my childhood that you will never get to have for yourselves. This is definitely something very important and consequential, and not at all a random non-event that happens to stand out in my mind due to nostalgia.
So back around the turn of the millenium, I had a nifty little TV/DVD player combo in my bedroom. It had a handle on top, so you could lug this heavy piece of analog equipment around the house, which was always kind of thrilling due to the risk that you might drop it catastrophically. Also thrilling: channel surfing after the watershed, when you might accidentally stumble onto a horror movie and spook yourself.
During one of these fishing expeditions I caught a bit of a movie featuring a dude wandering around an eerily abandoned town at night. There was a creepy dog involved, and at one point the guy turned around and saw a bunch of people staring at him silently. To a small-brained young Ronan, that seemed like the most terrifying shit ever, and I promptly changed the channel.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but that movie was 1998’s Phantoms, an adaptation of a Dean Koontz novel of the same name from 1983. I’ve never gone back and watched more of it. According to the review it’s not very good, and in hindsight even that one scene that spooked me so much as a child was pretty silly. I would have forgotten all about it if not for the fact that I later found out that either the book of the film were one of the bizarre sources of inspiration that went into the first Silent Hill game, which would permanently reprogram my brain chemistry several years later. After picking up a cheap second hand copy of the book (it wasn’t available digitally at the time, although annoyingly it is now), I recently gave it a whirl.
It’s not very good, although I should really have known that since Dean Koontz’s name is on the cover.
The public perception of Koontz is probably best summed up by this Family Guy joke: He’s that author who’s kind of like Stephen King, except not as popular or well-regarded. Prior to Phantoms my only exposure to the man was a) a short story collection that I tried to read in secondary school and couldn’t get through (and this was at a time when my taste was not exactly refined) and b) a thriller about an evil clown that my brother tried to read and told me about afterwards. He also couldn’t get through it. Now, decades later, I bailed on Phantoms after 170 pages. Time, it is a flat circle.
Phantoms opens with our protagonist, Jenny Paige, driving her fourteen-year-old sister Lisa home to the quiet mountain town of Snowfield following the death of their mother. Due to the large age gap between them, the sisters haven’t been in each other’s lives a lot, and consequently the fact that Jenny is taking on the role of Lisa’s parental figure is theoretically interesting.
I say “theoretically” because the book is quick to sabotage any drama that might have arisen from the situation: as of page one the sisters have gotten over any initial awkwardness that might have been present, Lisa is perfectly happy to live with Jenny and accepts her right away as her new legal guardian, she loves the town, she’s not homesick, no friction is present whatsoever. It seems to me like this is a huge missed opportunity to make the story more interesting, but I’m not a bestselling author so what do I know?
Once they get into Snowfield they find the town completely silent and empty, save for the occasional corpse or dismembered body part lying around. Fearing some sort of biological agent at work that might escape to the outside world (Jenny is Snowfield’s doctor), they decide to stay in the vicinity and summon help from the next town over, in the form of Sheriff Bryce Hammond and his posse. However, even before the lawmen show up to render assistance, it starts to become gradually undeniable that whatever is happening to Snowfield isn’t a disease or some sort of attack by a gang of murderers, and that becomes especially apparent once the monsters how up and begin picking the side characters off one by one.
To dispense with the good parts of Phantoms first, I’ll give the book credit for being able to conjure an atmosphere. Snowfield as a location manages to feel evocative and rich, and the sense of eeriness and creeping dread that comes over Jenny and Lisa as they explore the town is well-handled. Even after Bryce and his disposable goons show up and things get a lot more crowded, that sense of isolation remains strong. I particularly like that the book actually ramps up the gore and supernatural manifestations pretty quickly, from a few mutilated bodies to decapitated heads stuffed into ovens and shit, but still maintains the same eerie, low-key tone. There’s a particularly effective part where the group searches the ground floor of a building, goes upstairs, and then when they come down again there’s a severed hand sitting on a table that wasn’t there before, placed with an object that’s obviously meant to be taunting them. It’s a really neat demonstration of the fact that you can have horror scenes with a lot of overt scares, without letting it get too over the top or action-heavy.
That’s…the last positive thing I have to say about Phantoms.
In my recent post about Silent Hill movies I said it would be difficult to adapt the structure of the games directly, since they mostly involve a lone character exploring abandoned locations. Phantoms proves that not even adding in more characters can make this work in a non-interactive format. A huge portion of what I read of the book consists of Jenny and Lisa, and later Jenny, Lisa, Bryce and the deputies, wandering from building to building getting spooked by dead bodies or the vague feeling that something is watching them. By the time I checked out on page 170, nothing had really happened beyond Jenny calling the police and then the police showing up.
Granted, not all of this sluggish pacing is due to the actions of the characters. There’s also the fact that Koontz does the Stephen King thing of spending an absolute age detailing (much more clumsily than King would have) the back-stories and lives of the deputies, most of whom you know full well are just in the book to get killed off when the monsters show up. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Jenny also spends a lot of time describing the denizens of Snowfield, none of whom are actually present in the story because they’re all either dead or have inexplicably vanished.
The book also just has a lot of padding. Jenny and Lisa don’t explore one empty building, they explore half a dozen. Bryce and his deputies don’t have one conversation about how spooky and weird the situation is, they have five. At one point the characters spend ages setting up a base of operations in the police station, then shortly afterwards they all decamp to a different building and set up a new base there, and both times we get riveting descriptions of what furniture they move around, where they got it from, where they put it afterwards, what job everyone gets assigned to do. Every conversation, whether it’s exposition or a big emotional outburst, takes three times longer than it needs to.
Just to illustrate the point, the 170 pages I made it through cover just this first paragraph from the book’s Wikipedia summary:
“Jenny and Lisa Paige, two sisters, return to Jenny’s hometown of Snowfield, California, a small ski resort village nestled in the Sierra-Nevada Mountains where Jenny works as a doctor, and find no one alive. The few bodies they find are either mutilated, or reveal some strange form of death. Finally, after growing more alarmed by the town’s mysterious and alarming situation Jenny manages to call police in a neighboring town to come help.”
When you read my summary of the book’s premise, an obvious question might have occurred to you: why don’t Jenny and Lisa just leave when they realise there’s something wrong with Snowfield? It’s an obvious problem with a “stuck in a haunted town” story, one that’s harder to solve than a “stuck in a haunted house” story. Silent Hill solved this by having all of the routes out of town inexplicably blocked by mysterious voids, which is a great way of turning a practical storytelling choice into an opportunity to do something atmospheric.
As I mentioned before, Jenny decides that she can’t just take Lisa and run because she’s afraid the catastrophe that’s stricken Snowfield is some sort of disease that they might spread to the outside world. This just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The situation in the town as Jenny discovers it is that 99% of the population has vanished, and the few that remain show signs of having been killed by violence. Nothing about this suggests a virus or a biological weapon, and the fact that Jenny thinks it does is therefore utterly contrived. It’s obvious she only comes to this conclusion because the story needs her to in order to keep her and Lisa from escaping.
Also, Snowfield isn’t a suburb of LA or something. It’s an isolated ski resort town in the mountans. They could leave the immediate proximity of the town while still keeping away from other people.
Another example of the characters making bizarre choices for the sake of facilitating the plot: at one point all the characters are hunkered down in the police station and they see a giant moth bashing itself against the window. A few pages later, Bryce decides they need to move to a larger building (which takes way too much talking, of course) and that they should go and check out a nearby hotel immediately, no waiting for the reinforcements that are on their way or until the sun comes up.
When Jenny is naturally hesitant about this idea, Bryce counters that they’re not any safer inside the police station, because earlier they found evidence that people had tried to barricade themselves against whatever struck the town and it didn’t help. Jenny finds this argument persuasive.
Except…no, they literally are safer in the police station, because they just saw the giant moth failing to break through the windows. They just saw it like a few minutes ago. And of course, when they go outside (taking Lisa with them) the moth comes back and immediately kills one of the police officers. When Bryce quite naturally concludes that he was a fucking idiot for bringing his men out to where the giant face-eating moth was for no goddamn reason, Jenny reassures him that he was right before and they wouldn’t have been safer in the police station even though they literally saw that the moth couldn’t get into the police station what the fuck are you talking about.
If the plot drags and the actions the characters take are blatantly contrived then what about the writing? When it’s just describing nuts and bolts action and setting it’s perfectly fine, if a little flat and obvious, but whenever it tries to reach for anything more we get shit like this:
“But the words rattle-clanked out of her as if they were links in a chain that bound her to an albatross.”
This is actually the specific sentence that made me give up on the book, so I think it’s only appropriate that I abruptly end the review here.