My enormous thanks to Antara Patel at FMcM for inviting me to participate in the blog tour for The Bad Weather Friend by Dean Koontz and for sending me a copy of the book in return for an honest review. It’s my absolute pleasure to share that review today.

The Bad Weather Friend will be published by Thomas & Mercer on 1st February 2024 and is available for purchase here.

The Bad Weather Friend

Benny is so nice they feel compelled to destroy him, but he has a friend who should scare the hell out of them in this breathtaking new kind of thriller by #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense Dean Koontz.

Benny Catspaw’s perpetually sunny disposition is tested when he loses his job, his reputation, his fiancée, and his favourite chair. He’s not paranoid. Someone is out to get him. He just doesn’t know who or why. Then Benny receives an inheritance from an uncle he’s never heard of: a giant crate and a video message. All will be well in time.

How strange—though it’s a blessing, his uncle promises. Stranger yet is what’s inside the crate. He’s a seven-foot-tall self-described “bad weather friend” named Spike whose mission is to help people who are just too good for this world. Spike will take care of it. He’ll find Benny’s enemies. He’ll deal with them. This might be satisfying if Spike wasn’t such a menacing presence with terrifying techniques of intimidation.

In the company of Spike and a fascinated young waitress-cum-PI-in-training named Harper, Benny plunges into a perilous high-speed adventure, the likes of which never would have crossed the mind of a decent guy like him.

My Review of The Bad Weather Friend

There’s a mysterious package on the way to Benny Catspaw.

It’s such a long time since I read Dean Koontz that I had completely forgotten what a brilliant writer he is. There’s a simply fabulous iterative conceit of the author addressing the reader directly and reminding them that they are reading a story that drew me in like some kind of Faustian pact. It almost made me feel as if I were Benny himself rather than just a reader because Dean Koontz created an atmosphere as if The Bad Weather Friend had been written for me alone. 

Benny’s prosaic ordinariness is what makes him such a great character. His life experiences may have been somewhat surreal or horrific, but he retains an innocence and positivity that is admirable. I loved him (and the allegorical morality tale he finds himself in), because of his niceness and yet his wisdom. I loved Harper too because of her developing affection for Benny and her pragmatic approach when faced with something as startling as the brilliantly depicted Spike. As for Spike, it is impossible to categorise his impact. He’s a friend, he’s loyalty personified, he’s a guiding light. He’s both human at his very core and yet supernatural in his powers. He uses incontrovertible logic underpinned by intimidating threat and yet he’s the most moral of characters. I thought he was simply fantastic – even when he was removing his own eyeballs! 

I absolutely adored the humour in The Bad Weather Friend. At the darkest or most disturbing moments there’s a thread of the comedic so that the whole narrative has a surreal quality that it is impossible not to become mesmerised by. 

The plot is completely bonkers and yet completely believable. I was totally convinced by Spike and curiously slightly enamoured of him. Even when I wasn’t reading I felt the siren call of the book. To read The Bad Weather Friend is to be enormously entertained from start to finish. It’s completely captivating.

But scratch below the entertainment and there’s great depth here too. Using a scalpel sharp eye for observation and deceptive humour, Dean Koontz lays open the corrupt, the false and the self-serving social climbers. He interweaves themes of climate change, responsibility and power, loyalty and friendship, deceit and retribution so that the thin veneer of civilisation is stripped back in a powerful, affecting, and actually quite emotional manner, that shows the need for kindness in today’s world. I thought this aspect of the book made The Bad Weather Friend a kind of treatise by which we would all do well to live our lives – but with possibly less intimidation of others!

Occasionally horrifying and violent, often creepy and disturbing, always witty, clever and enormous fun, and with an altruistic sense of genuine equality and justice at its heart, The Bad Weather Friend is brilliant. It has made me want to return to everything Dean Koontz has ever written. I loved it.

About Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz, the author of many #1 New York Times bestsellers, lives in Southern California with his wife, Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens, Trixie and Anna.

For further information, follow Dean on Twitter/X @deankoontz, visit his website, or find him on Instagram and Facebook.

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