"We have a responsibility to stand watch over one another, we are watchers, all of us, watchers, guarding against the darkness."
Watchers is an early suspense novel from Koontz, which cemented his career as a best-selling author and competitor in the horror/sci-fi genre Stephen King had already begun to dominate. The premise is clearly imaginative - Travis Cornell has come to believe that he is cursed to a life of love and loss, and he comes across an incredibly intelligent dog in the wilderness of the Santa Barbara mountain range in California. At the same time he feels he and the dog are being tracked by an unnatural, inhuman stalker, which at first he takes to be a mountain lion or something of the sort, but he is soon filled with such a primordial fear that he feels something else is prowling after them. The dog, named Einstein for his human-like intellect, finds ways to communicate his fears to Travis, who has to uncover two mysteries - how did this freakishly smart dog come to be a stray wandering a forest, and what is Einstein so afraid of?
