The Bad Weather Friend (2024) is a darkly comedic fantasy-thriller by best-selling American author Dean Koontz. The novel follows Benny Catspaw, a man who is too nice for his own good and who retains his optimistic outlook despite surviving a deeply traumatic and painful childhood. When he loses his job, his girlfriend, and his reputation all in a single day, a mysterious, looming figure named Spike arrives and promises to discover who is behind his recent downfall. With the help of Spike and a young woman named Harper, Benny sets out on a surreal quest to confront the secrets of his dark childhood and his current predicament. Through Benny’s adventures, the novel explores The Contradictory Presence of Evil and examines the benefits and dangers of goodness in an increasingly hostile world.

This guide refers to the 2024 hardcover edition published by Thomas & Mercer.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, death, child death, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, addiction, and child abuse.

Plot Summary

Benny Catspaw, a real-estate agent in California, is surprised when his boss, Handy Duroc, fires him without warning, but he accepts the situation without complaint. He then meets his private investigator friend, Bob, at a diner and tells him what happened while a waitress named Harper takes his order. Bob warns Benny against being too nice.

At home, Benny receives a package containing a video message in which an old man introduces himself as Benny’s great-uncle Talmadge Clerkenwell. Though they have never met, Clerkenwell believes that he and Benny have faced similar forms of suffering and have remained nice despite their experiences. He is therefore sending Benny an inheritance: a large crate that will arrive by freight. He promises that this inheritance will be a blessing.

Benny’s girlfriend, Jill Swift, arrives and breaks up with him, saying that their paths have diverged. Confused by this sudden breakup, Benny focuses on looking for a new job, but all his real-estate contacts have cut him off. Meanwhile, air freight workers ship a large, odd crate to California. The crate spooks the workers, one of whom claims that he briefly regained vision in his missing eye while handling it. Another worker tries to inspect the contents, only to wake up hours later with no memory of having done so.

In flashbacks, Benny recalls his childhood. When he was seven, his abusive father was murdered in front of him, and his mother left him in the care of his grandmother Cosima Springbok, who had a history of murdering her husbands and tried to drive Benny to suicide.

In the morning, the crate arrives. Benny places the crate in his garage and opens it to find a metal, casket-like box. Unsettled, he goes for a run. When he returns, his pristine kitchen has been ransacked, and the metal casket has disappeared, leaving a carved wooden box behind instead. Benny calls Bob for help.

While Benny waits for Bob, he thinks about his past. After two years, Benny’s mother returned with a new wealthy husband who placed him in a boarding school called Briarbush. There, he met his friends, Jurgen and Mengistu, who believed that the school was trying to brainwash the boys and remake them into cruel, entitled adults.

In the present, a woman arrives at Benny’s door. It is the waitress, Harper, who is really a private investigator in training and Bob’s assistant. When Bob arrives, he listens to Benny’s story and investigates the garage. Benny and Harper check on his progress and find him breathing but immobilized inside the wood box. An enormous man named Spike appears, calling himself a “craggle.” He has come to help Benny find out who is trying to destroy his life.

Spike explains that craggles help people who are too nice, offering support when others try to destroy them. Craggles have special abilities, such as being able to freeze or “sideline” people—as Spike has just done to Bob. Benny, Harper, and Spike drive to Handy’s house and discover Handy and Jill dancing together. Spike threatens Handy until he directs them to the person who ordered him to fire Benny.

A flashback chapter reveals Benny’s experiences at Briarbush. He, Jurgen, and Mengistu discovered that the headmaster’s wife, Mrs. Baneberry-Smith, had been an entomologist before she began experimenting on Briarbush students, using knowledge she had gained from an encounter with an alien. During Benny’s tenure at the school, she turned a boy named Prescott into a bug hybrid. When Prescott escaped her lab, she and several henchmen killed him.

The narrative returns to the present, and Benny, Harper, and Spike find the person giving Handy orders: an attorney named Oliver Lambert. They sneak into a lavish party that Lambert is throwing and corner him in a spare room, where Spike threatens him into sharing everything that he knows about the people who are trying to ruin Benny’s life.

Back in the car, Benny is surprised to realize how quickly Harper has supplanted Jill in his affections. Unbeknownst to him, Harper returns his romantic interest. Benny and Spike discuss what their arrangement will be after this adventure is over. Spike explains that he stayed with Clerkenwell for 70 years and that now he will do the same for Benny. He states that in 1,800 years, he has only lost two of his charges to violent death; they both died because they possessed niceness but not wisdom and would not listen to him.

Next, they find Lambert’s boss, a billionaire named F. Upton Theron. He has already been alerted that someone is coming after him, so he has prepared a trap. He injects himself with an antitoxin and then prepares a trigger that will fill his room with toxic gas and kill any intruders. Benny, Spike, and Harper confront Upton, who rants about the “Better Kind,” a group of wealthy people who intend to reshape the world as they see fit. Upton claims that Benny is a threat to that project because his niceness might inspire others to do good deeds in the world. Spike prevents Upton from using his toxic gas trigger and forces him to reveal the Better Kind’s leader. Then, Upton dies of a heart attack.

On their way to meet the Better Kind’s leader, Benny recalls his final days at Briarbush. He remembers that Mrs. Baneberry-Smith took over the school and turned the students into compliant zombies. Only Benny, Jurgen, and Mengistu remained free. The boys agreed to escape by running to Jurgen’s uncle in Arizona. Then, Benny’s mother arrived and took Benny out of school. She left him with a tutor for five years while she moved to Italy, never to return. When Benny turned 18, he visited Briarbush, only to discover that it was shut down after Mrs. Baneberry-Smith accidentally caused her own death and that of several students in a lab explosion. However, Jurgen and Mengistu had already run away.

Finally, Benny, Spike, and Harper confront the leader of the Better Kind, Llewellyn Urnfield. Urnfield is certain of her superiority and her right to reshape the world as she sees fit. She attempts to shoot Harper, but Spike freezes time just before the bullet strikes. Only Benny is immune from the time freeze. With no other options, he turns the bullet around in mid-air, causing it to strike and kill Urnfield instead as soon as Spike releases the time freeze.

At last, they return home. Spike warns Benny that the Better Kind may regroup one day, but he promises that he will always be there to help. Spike finds Jurgen and Mengistu, who have acquired craggle protectors of their own. Benny and Harper get married.