Phantoms

Phantoms is a horror novel by the American bestselling author Dean R. Koontz, first published in 1983. Although it draws on an urban legend that has since been debunked, the tale of a village that vanishes mysteriously beside a lake, the book is filled with nods to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, whose influence shows both in the central creature and in some of the names. Its structure blends the suspense story with scientific and military investigation.

The story begins when the sisters Jenny and Lisa Paige return to Snowfield, a small ski town in California's Sierra Nevada where Jenny works as a doctor. They find no one alive. Most of the residents have disappeared, and the few bodies they come across are either mutilated or show signs of a sudden, unexplained death. When Jenny asks for help from the sheriff's office of a nearby town, the case falls to Sheriff Bryce Hammond, a widower whose young son lies in a coma. It soon requires a military chemical and biological warfare unit. The only clue is a name written on a mirror by one of the victims: Timothy Flyte, a British writer whose book catalogues mass disappearances throughout history.

Flyte believes the town was built over the resting place of an amoeboid, shape-shifting creature he calls the Ancient Enemy. It can consume other beings to increase its mass, imitate them convincingly, and detach pieces of itself, the "phantoms," which hunt under the direction of a hive mind. In this view, the creature may have helped bring about the extinction of the dinosaurs or the disappearance of societies such as the Maya or the colony of Roanoke. The scientists discover that its flesh is rich in hydrocarbons and attack it with bacteria that break down oil, modelled on the real patented microorganisms developed by Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty.

The novel was a commercial success and became one of Koontz's best-known books. It was adapted to film in 1998 as Phantoms, directed by Joe Chappelle and starring Peter O'Toole, Rose McGowan and Ben Affleck, though the movie dropped much of the novel's Lovecraftian allusion. Koontz also successfully sued a publisher whose two titles copied passages from the book.