Chapter 1: The Life of Dean Koontz

FAMILY BACKGROUND AND EDUCATION

Dean Koontz's childhood was one that no child should be forced to endure. The family was very poor, and this was primarily because of the character of Koontz's father, Ray, an alcoholic who was violent when he was drunk and who, not surprisingly, lost one job after another because of his drinking. Although the father was relatively short-5'6"-he must have seemed huge to a small child, and it is likely that his drunken rages have contributed a great deal to such terrifying sociopathic characters as Bruno Frye in Whispers (see Chapter 8), The Outsider in Watchers (see Chapter 5), and Alfie in Mr. Murder (see Chapter 9). All three are characters consumed by a need for violence. Another contributing factor to the poverty of Koontz's childhood was the fact that his father was a compulsive gambler, so that even when Ray Koontz was employed (he was a salesman, and Koontz says that he was a good one), there was no guarantee that his family would benefit. In later life, Ray Koontz was diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic with tendencies to violence complicated by alcoholism, and throughout his son's life, he continued to be a real danger to him, attacking the adult Dean twice with a knife in an attempt to kill him.

People magazine, in a 1994 interview with Koontz, ran a picture of the house he grew up in, a graphic representation of the deprivation of his childhood. A four-room house built (poorly, Koontz says) by his grandfather, it is a classic portrait of rural poverty. In fact, it was not until the writer was about ten years old that the house had indoor plumbing, and this would have been in about 1955, when most middle-class American homes were anticipating their first television sets rather than their first indoor toilets. Koontz says of this time, "We were always on the edge of destitution and my father was a violent drunk. . . . You have nowhere to go when you grow up in a household like that" (Feeney and Gleick 1994, 142). Somehow, though, Dean Koontz found a place to go-in his writing.

If Dean Koontz was cursed in terms of the father fate gave him, he was blessed in his mother. She was a very pretty woman, small and delicate; in her picture in People, she looks like the actress Wynona Ryder. Koontz has described her as a gentle, passive woman who was also very brave, and he credits her with shielding him from much of his father's rage. She is clearly the source of the many fine women characters Koontz uses in his works-women who are beaten down by circumstances and who yet find the strength to go on and create better lives for themselves and their children. One of the most vividly imagined of these women is Janet Marco of Dragon Tears (1993), a homeless woman who lives in a car with her five-year-old son Danny and scavenges in the affluent Laguna area of California, "seeking survival in the discards of others" (44).

Koontz shows, through the character of Janet, the tension and despair of living in poverty, of having no resources, nothing to fall back on if things should go wrong, if something out of the ordinary should occur. He describes her terror of having something happen to her old car, a battered Dodge: "She lived in dread of a mechanical breakdown severe enough to be irreparable-or irreparable within their means, which was the same thing. But she was most afraid of theft, because with the car gone they would have no roof over their heads, no safe place to sleep" (45). The image of a car as a safe place to sleep-indeed, as safe place to live-shows vividly the vulnerability of Janet and Danny.

Janet is the child of sadistic alcoholics (as is Holly Thorne of 1991's Cold Fire-see Chapter 7-who is another strong female protagonist). In her effort to escape these parents, Janet married Vince Marco, a man who seemed strong and who turned out to be a wife-beater and control freak. His name is very similar to that of Vince Nasco, the psychopathic contract killer in Watchers, who seeks immortality; in some ways, Nasco has attained this, since characters like him appear over and over again in Koontz's work. It is as though Koontz has conferred a kind of fictional immortality on both his mother and father, showing his mother's goodness and courage through many of his female protagonists or heroes and his father's sadism and pathology through many of his male antagonists or villains.

Overall, in terms of Koontz's positive image of women, it is unusual to find female antagonists in Koontz's work, and when they do appear, they are partnered with a male antagonist who is the dominant figure, as in the parents of Janet. In Dragon Tears, Janet ends up killing Vince to protect Danny, who was at that time only four years old. She flees to California with the boy in the old Dodge, and there is a strong hint that Vince's body will never be discovered and she will never be charged with the crime. It is when she is in California that the reader is introduced to her in the novel. In her killing of Vince, Janet is the most extreme portrait of Koontz's passive female characters, who somehow find within themselves the strength to strike out against their fates. It is tempting to see in them the ultimate triumph of the young, pretty Florence Koontz, who found in herself the strength to protect her son.

BEGINNINGS AS A WRITER

Koontz left home after high school and went to Shippensburg State College, where he majored in English and minored in communications. While he was a student there, a story he wrote for a class won the coveted Atlantic Monthly Creative Writing Award, the first time that any student from Shippensburg had been so honored. When he graduated, he married his high school sweetheart, Gerda Ann Cerra, and as of this writing they are still married. Koontz went to work for the Appalachian Poverty Program for one year, a year of disillusionment in which he came to have a gut-level distrust for government schemes and programs, feeling that they are an inefficient means of getting help to those who desperately need it. He also came to feel that programs such as the Appalachian one may do more harm than good by encouraging dependency on those whose greatest need is to become independent. The distrust of government and government programs that Koontz developed then has become a common theme in his writing, and is the motivator for the many layers of action in his most complex novel, Dark Rivers of the Heart (1994-see Chapter 10).

After leaving the Appalachian Poverty Program, Koontz taught high school for two years while continuing to work at his own writing. Amazingly, he had sold three paperback novels and some twenty short stories by the end of this period, at which time Gerda offered to support them for five years so that Dean could pursue writing as a full-time career. Since then, he has always worked as a full-time writer, although it was about fifteen years before he could actually support both Gerda and himself through his writing, and another five years before he believed that being able to do so was something that would last. Today, he considers the writer "Dean Koontz" to be a partnership between Gerda and himself, one in which he does the writing and she handles the business aspects. In terms of his writing schedule, Dean Koontz is one of the hardest working of contemporary authors. He spends about ten hours a day, six days a week, at his writing and this has not changed over time; if anything, he now works longer hours than he did as a beginning writer. He feels that such extended stints give him greater empathy for his characters, and clearly they reflect the fact that Dean Koontz is a writer who loves to write.

DEVELOPMENT AS A WRITER

It is one of the realities of the publishing world that publishers are resistant to having popular writers write under the same name in more than one genre. The general belief is that audiences identify a particular author with a particular type of book, and they will be very disappointed if they buy a book written by author X, who has in the past written only adventure stories, and discover that what they have bought this time is not an adventure story but instead is a historical romance. It is also much easier to market a writer who writes only one kind of book; all the publisher has to do is say something like "Another tale of high adventure from X!" Readers know exactly what to expect and even where to find the book in a bookstore. And it is not just little-known writers who are faced with this problem. One of the world's most honored contemporary mystery writers, British author P. D. James, recently wrote a science fiction novel after having made her reputation as a writer of mysteries. Anyone who wanted to find her science fiction novel had to go to the mystery section of the bookstore, although some enlightened bookstores carried it on both their mystery and science fiction shelves.

Authors respond to such generic constraints by pointing out that if readers enjoy X's adventure stories, the chances are excellent that they'll want to read X's historical romances, too-it is the writer they enjoy rather than the genre label. Authors also say that in terms of marketing, young writers receive almost no advertising exposure from their publishers, so little is lost by a publisher not being able to use an all-purpose slogan for a given author's work. Finally, authors make the excellent point that for writers to grow in their craft they must branch out, try new things, imagine new kinds of stories.

It was in order to be able to do this kind of experimenting that in 1971, Koontz adopted his first pseudonym, Deanna Dwyer, adding to it over the years the names K. R. Dwyer, Brian Coffey, Anthony North, John Hill, Aaron Wolfe, David Axton, Leigh Nichols, Owen West, and Richard Paige. He used the Deanna Dwyer name for gothic romances, K. R. Dwyer for suspense, Brian Coffee for short suspense, Anthony North for the technothriller, John Hill for occult mystery, Aaron Wolfe for science fiction, David Axton for adventure, Leigh Nichols for romantic suspense, Owen West for horror novels, and Richard Paige for romantic suspense. By using these different names Koontz achieved his goal of being able to write-and publish-in different genres. However, he has also made it difficult for critics to track his work. Thus, Karen Springen, writing in Newsweek, says that Koontz has written under eight pseudonyms, Contemporary Authors credits him with nine pseudonyms, and The Dean Koontz Companion (Greenberg, Gorman, and Munster 1994) lists ten pseudonyms.

In retrospect, it would have been much easier on his readers and critics if Koontz's publishers had listened to him and allowed him to write under his own name in whatever genre he chose. It would also have made it a lot easier to determine exactly how many books Koontz has written. His publisher neatly evades the issue by saying, in an information sheet on Dean Koontz that was used to publicize Dark Rivers of the Heart, "Koontz has written nearly 50 books," although how near is left to the reader to determine; I make the total count to be sixty, but Jay Rosen, in a review of Dark Rivers in the New York Times Book Review, calls it Koontz's twenty-fourth book. His most recent novel, Intensity, would therefore be book number twenty-five rather than sixty. This raises the question of whether to count as Dean Koontz novels all the novels he has written, including those for which he used pseudonyms, or only those novels published under his own name (this seems to be how the New York Times has arrived at its number). If, for simplicity's sake, we follow the lead of the New York Times, how will reissues be counted? This is no frivolous question, since although most of Koontz' pseudonymous works are now out of print, some are slowly returning under his own name, and others he plans to revise and reissue, again using his own name. Publishers Weekly says, "Once Dean Koontz' writing career lifted off, he realized that as the years went by, certain of his earlier books could be sold for republication-and do better the second time around. In some cases, rather than wait for the rights to revert, he bought them back from the original publishers" (Nathan 1995, 18).

Readers interested in finding reissued Dean Koontz works should look at the copyright page of any book now in bookstores under the "Dean Koontz" name to determine whether the book is a reissue. For example, The Face of Fear, published as a Berkley paperback in 1985 under Koontz's name, was originally published in hardcover by Bobbs-Merrill in 1977 under the name Brian Coffey, while The House of Thunder, published as a Berkley paperback in 1992 under Koontz's name, was originally published as a Pocket Books paperback in 1982 under the name Leigh Nichols.

The novels that are studied in this Critical Companion were all originally published under the Dean Koontz name. They span the years 1976 to 1995, and include some of his writing in the horror and science fiction genres, although the overall emphasis is on what Koontz refers to as his "cross-genre" works; these cross-genre novels, which incorporate elements not only of horror and science fiction but also of the mystery, the romance, and the thriller, begin with 1980's Whispers. They are representative of Koontz's mature work at its best, and together the sixteen novels reflect the interests, concerns, and overall shape of his writing today. They are also books that are relatively easy for readers to find in bookstores and libraries; this, too, was a consideration in their choice. However, serious fans of Koontz's work will find it worth their time to seek out the pseudonymous works that have been reissued under the Koontz name. It will also be interesting, when Koontz begins to reissue earlier works that he has subsequently revised, to compare the originals to the revisions and, in that way, gain a sense of his development as a writer.

EMERGENCE AS A SERIOUS WRITER

GOALS

A NOTE ON SOURCES

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS