Publishers tolerate the occasional vanity project from money-making genre writers, but privately encourage a return to profitable series, because they know that fans who love an author's mysteries won't necessarily buy her sensitive coming-of-age novel. What's to be done, then, with Dean Koontz's Life Expectancy, a comic love story that plays like Big Fish meets The Time Traveler's Wife? Koontz's claim to fame has been a seemingly endless series of mysterious haunts and frightened suburbanites, but he reveals a shocking gift for quirky poignancy in Life Expectancy, the story of five terrible days in the life of Jimmy Tock. Take Koontz's name off the cover, and this page-turner about a baker, a family of criminal clowns, and a deathbed prophecy would make every book-club schedule in the country.
At the moment of Jimmy's birth, another mother dies in childbirth, and her circus-clown husband reacts by going on a killing spree with his infant son in his arms. Meanwhile, Jimmy's grandfather, long crippled by a stroke, blurts out a warning accompanied by five future dates, from the '90s to the '00s. As Jimmy encounters each date in turn, he's dogged by the fugitive clown Konrad Beezo and his son Punchinello, who try to blow up his town, steal his progeny, and use him to pursue a vendetta against a family of trapeze artists.
The novel's structural gimmick is the calendar itself—the passage of each successive preordained "terrible day." Along the way, Koontz's snappy patter and screwball fantasies keep pace with the addictive tug of the mystery outcome. "No makeshift weapon could hope to be as deadly as the well-flexed hands of an angry baker," Jimmy's father thinks as he contemplates disarming Beezo in the hospital. When Jimmy, handcuffed to a smart-mouthed dame in a library crypt, tries to move his captors with a sympathetic tale of woe, he tones down her suggestion that his grandmother lost an ear to the town villain. "It was her hat," he hurriedly substitutes. "They tore off her hat and stomped on it." In a book that pulses with vitality and intelligence from start to finish, Koontz delivers comedy and sentiment with equal elegant ease, as if he's been writing these romances all his life.