Dean R. Koontz

• Born: July 9, 1945
• Place of Birth: Everett, Pennsylvania

TYPES OF PLOT: Horror; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Odd Thomas, 2003–15

Contribution

Dean R. Koontz is an acknowledged master of the horror genre but is also skilled at genre-blending, drawing from the genres of horror, science fiction, thriller, comedy, and sometimes satire. He began his career with a science fiction novel and wrote in that genre for four years before branching out to other genres. His novel Chase (1972), the story of a Vietnam veteran experiencing the rigors of civilian life, received excellent reviews and marked the moment when he first felt like a serious writer.

After the cross-genre novel Whispers (1980) became Koontz’s first paperback bestseller, his novels have made the best-seller lists multiple times. Works such as Phantoms (1983) and Odd Thomas (2003) are among a collection of work that crosses genres, combining the realms of horror and thriller. In 1986, Strangers was his first hardback best seller, and at that point, Koontz dropped the other pseudonyms under which he had been writing and began writing solely under the Dean R. Koontz name.

Koontz is one of the hardest-working authors in any field, spending ten hours a day, six days a week at work, feeling that extended stints of writing help him focus more deeply on his characters so that he can understand their stories. His impressive range of works features a finely tuned and precise style with occasional graceful metaphors that are polished and compelling.

Biography

Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Dean Ray Koontz had an abusive father and an impoverished and rigorous childhood. Nevertheless, he graduated from Shippensburg State College. While a college senior, he won the prestigious Atlantic Monthly Creative Writing Award for his short story “Kittens,” a victory that pushed him to continue writing. After college, he worked with the Appalachian Poverty Program and as an English teacher at Mechanicsburg High School, but after several years, his high school sweetheart and wife, Gerda, offered to support him for five years to determine whether he could make it as a writer. By the end of the five years, she had quit her job to handle the business end of Koontz’s writing, although it was not until fifteen years had passed that they were both fully supported by his writing.

Koontz’s first novel, written while he was a teacher, was Star Quest, a science-fiction novel published as part of an Ace Double in 1968. In the 1970s, he began writing and publishing works of horror and mainstream literature, many of which appeared under various pseudonyms. His novella Beastchild received a Hugo Award nomination in 1971. Koontz used pseudonyms to avoid negative crossover, a phenomenon wherein work in a new genre alienates existing fans and fails to create new ones. He divided his works into different genres among several pen names—David Axton (adventure), Brian Coffey (short suspense), Deanna Dwyer (gothic romance), K. R. Dwyer (suspense), John Hill (occult mystery), Leigh Nichols (romantic suspense), Anthony North (technothriller), Richard Paige (romantic suspense), Owen West (horror), and Aaron Wolfe (science fiction).

Koontz’s breakthrough book was the cross-genre thriller Whispers, published in 1980, which established an audience for his uniquely placed work. Since then, he has had close to two dozen best sellers in hardcover and paperback, has been published in thirty-eight languages, and has branched out in several literary directions, including nonfiction and essays.

Meanwhile, Koontz moved to California in 1975 and settled in Newport Beach with his wife and his dog Trixie. His work continued to range widely, from children’s books such as The Paper Doorway: Funny Verse and Nothing Worse (2001) and Robot Santa: The Further Adventures of Santa’s Twin (2004) to nonfiction such as Writing Popular Fiction (1972) and The Underground Lifestyles Handbook (co-written with his wife in 1970), but his central focus remained fiction. Koontz does not consider himself a horror writer, insisting that the optimistic outlook of his works, which do not end as darkly as those of most of his contemporaries in the horror field, moves them outside that genre. One of Koontz’s goals in his writing has been to convey that humans can survive and overcome the disabilities imposed on them by their pasts, having himself survived a grim and often terrifying childhood.

For the most part, Koontz has avoided series books, although he has made an exception for the character Odd Thomas, who appears in the book by the same name as well as in Forever Odd (2005) and Brother Odd (2006), saying that the character came complete to him, insisting on his own story.

Analysis

While Dean R. Koontz is typically regarded as a writer of horror fiction, in most of his works, the horror is the result of one character’s inhumanity toward another and not the product of any supernatural force. His tautly written psychological explorations of the darker side of the human mind often share major elements, including a protagonist with an abusive upbringing who has achieved financial independence and success, a sociopathic antagonist who cannot be redeemed, and the motif of love and compassion as forces of salvation along with lesser elements such as a dog as a character, the appearance of a Ford sports utility vehicle, and a Southern California setting.

Larger themes are frequently repeated. Distrust of the government often appears in Koontz’s books, a relic of his time with the Appalachian Poverty Program, which left him with the belief that such programs encourage the impoverished to depend on them rather than to work to better their condition and are vastly inefficient means of getting help to those who most critically need it.

Antagonists are seldom women in Koontz’s works. When female antagonists appear, they are usually partnered with a dominant male figure. Many of his female characters seem unwontedly passive and unable to escape their fates, although a few characters do contradict such a generalization.

Whispers

In Whispers, a young woman, Hilary Thomas, becomes the target of a psychopathic killer. When the killer dies but somehow continues to stalk Thomas, she and her detective boyfriend, Tony Clemenza, must track down the real-world explanation behind the killer’s continued existence.

The book showcases one of Koontz’s unfortunate tendencies—characters are prone to pausing and delivering long expository statements or dialogues whose topics range from the meaning of life to politics. In Koontz’s work, what seems to be supernatural events are eventually shown to have explanations more grounded in reality, although sometimes that reality seems somewhat stretched.

Phantoms

In Phantoms, when sisters Jenny and Lisa Paige arrive in the small ski resort town of Snowfield, California, they discover that the inhabitants have recently vanished. Only a few bodies remain, all bearing the marks of having died in a moment of terror. Despite the disruption of electronic communications, the sisters manage to call the police in nearby Santa Mira. When the police arrive, they find themselves and the Paige sisters trapped and hunted by a deadly force. The force is an ancient giant amoeboid creature that feeds rarely but largely and is responsible for past disappearances of entire populations.

Phantoms is solidly cross-genre, containing elements of suspense, science fantasy, horror, mystery, police procedural, and romance. In this novel, Koontz performs a sleight of hand that is apparent in other works: Initially, he offers a supernatural explanation, referencing Satan and “the Ancient Enemy” over and over again, only to rescind that easy answer by presenting the creature as mortal and as having possibly learned its cruelty and viciousness from exposure to humans.

Lightning

In Lightning (1988), Laura Shane, born in 1955, has a guardian angela mysterious stranger who shows up time and time again to save her, including at her birth, when he prevents a drunken doctor from delivering her. When her father dies, Laura is sent to an orphanage, where again, the mysterious stranger saves her from perils such as a rapist.

As an adult, Laura builds a happy life with her husband and child, but they find themselves pursued by individuals somehow connected with the mysterious stranger, who appears to save Laura and her child, although her husband is killed. Eventually, the stranger’s identity is revealed: a time traveler from 1944, he fell in love with Laura during a visit to 1984 and originally sought only to prevent the drunken doctor from delivering her, which had left her disabled.

Lightning’s repeated message is that in loving one another, people give one another the power to accept life and their individual fates. Like most of Koontz’s works, Lightning insists that love is what makes life worth living and is the ultimate redemptive force.

Intensity

In Intensity (1996), Chyna Shepard, a college student, is visiting a friend’s house when a serial killer breaks in and kills everyone except her and her friend. Chyna hides and finds herself in the killer’s motor home. She decides to stow away, hoping to rescue the young woman the killer has boasted of keeping prisoner in his basement. The killer, however, realizes that she is aboard the motor home and takes her prisoner as well. Eventually both women escape, defeating the killer in the process.

Intensity showcases Koontz’s ability to show the process of a killer playing cat and mouse with an unknowing victim with chilling detail in one of his shorter works. Taut, tightly written prose underscores the precision of the details in his presentation of a psychopath. The ultimate conclusion of the novel is that people have power over their fates and choose whether to become victims, a lesson Chyna acts out repeatedly in the course of the novel.

Odd Thomas

In Odd Thomas, a short-order cook with psychic abilities finds himself led by ghosts, often to avenge or resolve their murder. Odd Thomas also sees bodachs—dark creatures drawn by pain and death. A customer he nicknames “Fungus Man” shows up at the restaurant, followed by swarms of bodachs. Realizing that their appearance signals some pending catastrophe, Odd enlists his girlfriend, Bronwen, attempting to avert the disaster and, in the process, discovers increasingly disturbing details about the man. In the end, Odd prevents a mall disaster but is injured. After several weeks of being tended in the hospital by his girlfriend, he reluctantly realizes that she is a ghost and comes to terms with her death.

Koontz published the final novel in the seven-book Odd Thomas Series, Saint Odd, in 2015. Traveling back to Pico Mundo where his journey began, Odd Thomas once again narrowly escapes the satanic cult's attacks on his quest to reunite with his soulmate. The novel won the 2015 Goodreads Choice Horror Award.

Principal Series Character:

• Odd Thomas, a young short-order cook, can speak to ghosts and other psychic manifestations, such as bodachs, spirits that presage death and disaster. He attempts to lead a quiet existence in Pico Miundo, California, with his girlfriend Bronwen, but his ability, accompanied by prophetic dreams, leads him into danger, often on behalf of endangered friends.

Bibliography

Ali, Muhammad Ilham, et al. "Thrilling Encounters in Social Settings: A Retelling of The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz." Tamaddun, vol. 23, no. 1, 2024, pp. 98-113. doi.org/10.33096/tamaddun.v23i1.705.

"Books." Dean Koontz, 2024, www.deankoontz.com/books/all-books. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Greenberg, Martin. The Dean Koontz Companion. Berkley Trade, 1994.

Hoppenstand, Gary, and Garyn G. Roberts. The Early Thrillers of Dean Koontz : Essays on the Evolution of a Writer, 1966-1997. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2023.

Koontz, Dean. Writing Popular Fiction. Writer’s Digest Books, 1981.

Kotker, Joan G. Dean Koontz: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press, 1996.

Ramsland, Katherine. Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography. Oxford UP, 1997.