Survivor
A Dean Koontz suspense novel from his early run of paperback thrillers, Survivor pairs one of the author's signature wrongly-hunted protagonists with the tight, pulpy pacing that defined his 1970s work. Koontz had not yet become the brand name he would be after Whispers and Watchers, and these earlier titles lean harder on lean chase mechanics, plain-language menace, and survivor characters forced to out-improvise the people hunting them. The book is characteristic of the period in which Koontz was still being quietly filed between genre shelves, and for readers tracking his career it sits in the transitional window between his science-fiction pseudonym years and the mainstream suspense career that began at the end of the decade.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Survivor
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
When Boeing Flight 353 goes down with no survivors, a single man walks out of the wreck and across the country. The accident investigators looking for him are not the only ones, and they are running out of time.
Multiple novels share this title. The most commonly searched is Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk (1999). Octavia E. Butler also wrote a 1978 novel titled Survivor that she later disowned and pulled from print.
Survivor by Palahniuk is structurally distinctive: chapters and pages are numbered backward, counting down to a plane crash. The form is intentional and rewards readers who enjoy his experimental approach.
Survivor is 403 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Survivor takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Survivor is a standalone novel by Dean Koontz, not part of a series.
Survivor is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.