TICK TOCK by Dean R Koontz

Dean R Koontz has had a strange career. He started off very young in science fiction. Didn't get the recognition there he felt he deserved. Moved on the thrillers, often under pseudonyms, and eventually surfaced with a bunch of bestselling novels that combine the two genres.

This is offbeat in that he's also adding up the screwball comedy of such movies as THE PHILADELPHIA STORY. It starts out routinely enough -- with a Vietnamese-American mystery writer suddenly experiencing attack by a horrible creature for reasons we can't figure out.

Once he teams up with the waitress from the restaurant and things get humorous as well as weird and scary, you start to figure out that Koontz is having a joke with this book.

I'm not sure I really get the family dynamics -- as the ex-husband of a Lao refugee I do know something of how 2nd generation Americans come into conflict with their parents. But since it's all in fun anyway, it doesn't really matter.