"Police officer Kirby Wayland is on his way home late one day when he sees a stray dog along the highway - a Belgian sheepdog with no collar - so he brings it home for the night. From that moment on, Kirby experiences a continuing strangeness about this canine. Man and dog quickly develop a bond, though there is always something very unsettling about it. Kirby, against the advice of colleagues and friends, takes a six-month leave from the police force and decides, entirely on intuition, to take a road trip. Where? Why? Kirby says, "I don't know. I think…I think that's up to the dog." On the road, Kirby and the dog - who by now has acquired the Ahab - have a series of rapidly escalating adventures and enter on a hair-raising quest that will ultimately have enormous emotional effect as the truth of the situation brings breathtaking revelations."

"In the late summer of a long ago year, a killer arrived in a small city. His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a fourteen-year-old boy.

Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, recreating in detail Blackwood's crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino is certain that his own family-his wife and three children-will be targets in the fourth crime, just as his parents and sisters were victims on that distant night when he was fourteen and killed their slayer.

As a detective, John is a man of reason who deals in cold facts. But an extraordinary experience convinces him that sometimes death is not a one-way journey, that sometimes the dead return.

Here is ghost story like no other you have read. In the Calvinos, Dean Koontz brings to life a family that might be your own, in a war for their survival against an adversary more malevolent than any he has yet created, with their own home the battleground. Of all his acclaimed novels, none exceeds What the Night Knows in power, in chilling suspense, and in sheer mesmerizing storytelling."

"You ask why WHAT THE NIGHT KNOWS was first described on Amazon and elsewhere as a scary road novel featuring a dog and a lead named Kirby Wayland--but is now described as a scary ghost story with a lead character named John Calvino and no mention of a dog. The answer is simple: I am a master of confusion! Wherever I go, I spread puzzlement, bewilderment and perplexion! Let me try to clarify:

I am working on a novel that fits the "dog book" description with a cop, Kirby Wayland, as the male lead. That book was titled WHAT THE NIGHT KNOWS and was supposed to be the next novel from Bantam, until--wham!--I was hit by an idea for a creepy ghost story that so captivated me I had to do it right away, and Bantam agreed. As I worked on the book, we struggled to find a suitable title. We must have considered and rejected 50 before my publisher, my editor, and I all realized on the same day that the title of the "dog book" was even more suited to the ghost story. Now the dog book--which most likely won't appear until after 2012, lacks a title. The current summaries of WHAT THE NIGHT KNOWS on Amazon USA and Amazon UK are for the ghost story, and if they sound somewhat different from each other, that is only because the copy in the US is based on Bantam's summary of the book, while that on Amazon UK is based on the summary provided by my British publisher, HarperCollins.

I have no idea why Barnes & Noble has the Kirby Wayland version as the synopsis for Karen Moning's The Hiqhlander's Trust. Evidently, when it comes to spreading confusion, puzzlement, bewilderment, and perplexity, I have competition.

Now that I have committed this to letter form, I think I'll remake it slightly and give it to my web master to use on our site.

Best wishes,
Dean Koontz"