It’s only a month after the new year and people are already predicting the end of the world.

And hey, it might be armageddon soon but no one was running around all crazy before this.

Two little letters and a digit make people go nuts — Y2K! Y2K! It’s going to destroy us all! Start stocking up on toilet paper and get down in the bomb shelter, because 2000 is right around the corner, baby!

Just in time for the big boom is some light reading to take along on the trip underground.

Dean Koontz is back and does his best to confirm the worst of everyone’s fears with “Seize the Night.”

It’s the perfect end-of-the-world/mutating creature/everyone is going to die slowly and painfully joy ride that all the fanatics need to make ’em even more nuts. (Is that even possible?)

Koontz returns to the California town of Moonlight Bay and his character Christopher Snow, who was first introduced to the world in the bestselling “Fear Nothing.”

Snow has a rare disease called XP, which forbids him from being exposed to any form of UV light. Because of his disease, Snow performs his normal daily routines under the cover of darkness, in which he sees many things others do not.

When a friend’s child is kidnapped one night, Snow uses his night advantage and goes on the search for the missing boy. What he uncovers during his search opens up an entirely new bag of questions about the town he lives in and what once went on there.

Soon, Snow and his friends are not just searching for a missing child but are running for their lives — and running out of time. They are all sure that the world as they know it is quickly coming to an end, or turning into something far worse.

Koontz’ thinking can get a little far-fetched at times. The book’s opening sentence (“Elsewhere, night falls, but in Moonlight Bay it steals upon us with barely a whisper, like a gentle dark-sapphire surf licking a beach”) proves the reader is in for more than a lighthearted romance novel.

Besides the doomsday predictions, Koontz manages to write a scarily realistic novel that could keep a person up at night. With “Seize the Night,” Koontz creates an armageddon that laughs in the face of Y2K.

So the next time someone throws the “Y2K is going to wipe out civilization as we know it” line at you, just stare ’em straight in the eye and say, “Hey, it could be worse.”

Because it could, as Koontz proves.

Who knows. It may just make ’em think, or, more importantly, shut up.

4 stars out of five

Kelsey Foutch is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication from Waterloo.