If You Like Dean Koontz ...

You may enjoy these other suspenseful thrillers.

Few best-selling authors blend elements of as many genres as Dean R. Koontz does in his blockbuster novels that combine Suspense with Horror, Fantasy, and Thrillers. He is an author who refuses to be slotted in any single genre. Whatever he writes, he envelopes readers in a cloak of lush, evocative language and atmosphere. His stories often focus on the battle between good and evil, and his characters are placed against nearly impossible odds from which they emerge victorious. These hard-edged stories create a menacing atmosphere and nightmare tone but end on an optimistic note with good triumphant over evil.
 – Joyce Sarricks, Readers Advisory Librarian

Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear
Molecular biologist Kaye Lang has a theory on human retroviruses and it has just been verified with the discovery of SHEVA, a virus that has slept in our DNA for millions of years and is now waking up. Kaye and her colleagues must race against a genetic time bomb in this international adventure taking place in a cave high in the Alps and in Southern Russia. Also try Darwin’s Children and Vitals.

Afterlife by Douglas Clegg
This supernatural Horror story features a school for special children, an unsolved murder, a terrified widow, a dream of murder and lost souls, and a stranger with an unspeakable secret coalesce into a nightmare of unspeakable secrets that one stranger will do anything – even breach the boundaries of life and death – to keep hidden forever. Also try Naomi.

Jinn by Matthew Delaney
Someone – or something – is terrorizing Boston, leaving a trail of horribly mutilated bodies and cryptic epigrams in its wake. The first victim is the scion of Joseph Lyerman, an eccentric philanthropist who is strangely unmoved by his son’s brutal death. Detectives Jefferson and Brogan are at first stymied by the gruesome murder spree, but as the body count rises, so do some pressing questions. Why is Lyerman so obsessed with excavating a sunken World War II submarine? What is his connection with the notorious Blade Prison? And why have Jefferson and Brogan started having flashbacks to their military service in Bosnia? Delaney's pace is breathless.

Desperation by Stephen King
In Desperation, Nevada, an alien force has slaughtered everyone in town and is now in the body of a patrol cop who picks up two motorists. One is a burned-out novelist and the other an 11-year-old boy who hears the voice of God. Also try The Regulators written under King’s pen name: Richard Bachman.

Darkness Tell Us by Richard Laymon
Although a bit more hardcore and gruesome than Koontz usually is, Laymon's strength is writing about adolescents; the six highlighted here are college students, three male and three female, who, during a party at the house of one of their professors, are prompted by a Ouija board to look for a "4-T-U-N-E" at a remote California locale, Calamity Peak. Road-tripping there right away, the six students-two of whom mate in the book's affecting romantic subplot-eventually encounter a machete-wielding madman who terrorizes them. Meanwhile, as depicted in cross-cut chapters, the professor and her new lover, concerned about the students' impetuousness, follow the six, only to fall prey to the madman themselves. Also try No Sanctuary.

The Town by Bentley Little
Almost immediately after they unwittingly move into an old farmhouse where a deranged man once murdered his family and committed suicide, the Tomasovs are transformed. The two younger children become obsessed with the shadows inside the home's bathhouse, shadows that eat dead animals, torment children and kill mercilessly. As the deaths mount and small-town life becomes more dangerous and freakish, residents begin to blame the Tomasovs, whom they believe carry some kind of curse. Not until the terrifying finale, which takes place during a sandstorm and blackout, does everyone realize the evil's roots. Also try The Store.

Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon
Twelve-year-old Cory Mackenson's father finds a dead man handcuffed to a car's steering wheel that has plunged into Zephyr's Lake in 1964, and they realize that all is not as it seems in their quiet town. McCammon is a multiple Bram Stoker Award winner. Also try Swan Song.

Creepers by Davis Morrell
On a cold October night, five people gather in a rundown motel on the Jersey shore to make preparations to break into a nearby abandoned hotel – built by a reclusive millionaire during Asbury Park's golden days – but the group of urban explorers, joined for the evening by a reporter, are unprepared for the danger, terror, and death awaiting.

Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
A monster on the loose in New York City's American Museum of Natural History provides the hook for this high-concept, high-energy thriller. A statue of the mad god Mbwun, a monstrous mix of man and reptile, was discovered by a Museum expedition to South America in 1987. Now, it is about to become part of the new Superstition Exhibition at the museum (here renamed the "New York Museum of Natural History"). But as the exhibition's opening night approaches, the museum may have to be shut down due to a series of savage murders that seem to be the work of a maniac-or a living version of Mbwun. Also try Reliquary and the rest of the Pendergast series.

Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul
When Jeff Converse is convicted and sentenced to prison for an assault he didn't commit, he believes matters couldn't get any worse. Of course, he's wrong. While being transported to prison, he's kidnapped and thrown into the tunnels below the New York subway system, where he's the latest participant in a game in which humans are hunted for sport by a group of the city's business and civic leaders. The only way Jeff can win is to make it to the surface alive, which, not surprisingly, proves more difficult than it sounds. Also try Nightshade.

Lost Boy, Lost Girl by Peter Straub
A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son – beautiful, troubled 15-year-old Mark Underhill – vanishes from the face of the earth. To his uncle, horror novelist Timothy Underhill, Mark's inexplicable absence feels like a second death. After his sister-in-law's funeral, Tim searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this mystery of death and disappearance. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother's suicide Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. Also the sequel In the Night Room.