Of course the reader wants it spelled out. I'm all for leaving certain things to interpretation but when you introduce a seemingly important piece of information that if enlightened about it's relevance will allow the reader to remain engrossed within the story and not outside of it wondering the hell the author is doing. It started off great but as the pages dwindled down I began to suspect the ending was going to be BS. It was worse than I could have imagined. I almost feel like Koontz was on vacation and his publishers wanted to release the book before he was ready so they got a remedial vagrant to type out the last few chapters.