Ticktock (1996)
Ticktock is a 1996 fiction book written by Dean Koontz.
Tommy Phan has a new Corvette, a detective-novel career, and a Vietnamese family whose old-country expectations he keeps at arm's length. Then a faceless white rag doll appears on his doorstep, its stitched heart popping open to reveal a living green eye. The thing that crawls out grows through the night, hunting him from room to room and changing shape as it comes. Dean Koontz opens in straight horror, then lets the fear curdle into screwball comedy as the night runs long. The chase from doorstep to dawn carries a real thread underneath about belonging in two cultures at once.
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A few thoughts on Ticktock
The doll that will not die makes Child's Play the obvious next stop, a killer-toy nightmare played mostly straight. For the horror-to-laughs whiplash Dean Koontz pulls here, Gremlins keeps the same balance of menace and mischief. Tremors works too, a monster picture that grins while its creatures grow.
A small, harmless-looking thing turns out to be a monster
Ticktock's stitched rag doll hides something that grows through the night, and these share that same turn from cute to lethal. Child's Play gives a plastic doll a second, murderous life, Gremlins turns an adorable pet into chaos once the rules get broken, Sweet Home traps residents with creatures born from human desire, and The Dark Half lets a writer's invented double become horribly real.
Shapeshifting hunters that stalk their prey through the night
The thing hunting Tommy Phan keeps changing shape as the night wears on, and these carry that same dread of an unidentifiable hunter. Summer Time Rendering follows a shape-copying double through a coastal town, FROM traps a community with creatures that mimic the people they hunt, The X-Files built a career on cases exactly this unexplainable, and The Wolf Among Us casts a literal wolf as the one keeping order.