We can imagine him writing in his tablet or reading, seeking escape from the shouts of his father, drunk again, raging at his mother. Perhaps 40 years later, the boy, now an author read around the world, walks with his wife on a warmer hillside, miles away.
He studies the land, envisioning the home he and Gerda will build. Over there will be the bedrooms, the terraces, the gardens. There will be the movie theater, the game arcade, the swimming pools. We can picture him flashing on that mean house of so long ago, and wondering at the roads he has traveled from there to here.
Who knew? Who knew that he would become one of the five or six most popular authors in the world? He just kept at it, and kept at it. He's not going to get dressed up in a three-piece white suit. Applebaum isn't kidding. Koontz published his first book, Star Quest , a science fiction novel released as half of an Ace Double paperback, in It took another 18 years and 54 novels, plus four nonfiction books, before he hit hardcover bestseller lists with the suspense novel Strangers.
Since then nearly every Koontz title released, including reissues of older work, has reached 1 on hardcover or softcover lists, with total sales of over million and translations into 33 languages. Books are everywhere -- tumbling out of shelves, heaped on tables, towered on the floor. In his pink shirt, flowered tie and pinstripe trousers, Applebaum looks like the archetypal book man, a good match for the author he calls "the consummate professional writer.
The writer's history with Bantam harks back to the early s, when the house published two of his paperback SF novels, the now-obscure The Flesh in the Furnace and a prescient tale about artificial intelligence, Demon Seed , that became a hit film with Julie Christie. When Koontz moved to Bantam in late on a three-book contract, he immediately became the house's top-selling author. The real challenge, he explains, is "to set up our booksellers and the readership for a greater degree of excitement, a greater degree of acceptance of Dean.
Applebaum speaks quickly but with the care of a master chef selecting cuts of meat for dinner. His choice of the word "acceptance" is critical. So is his comment that "there's a lot of bias in our snob-driven world of New York book publishing against popular authors" -- a bias, Applebaum says, that has contributed to Koontz being "taken for granted" by the publishing establishment. The neglect, he charges, extends to the press: "He's seldom been written about.
For many millions of his copies, he has labored as an active writer, just writing, writing, and even when he became more popular, still writing a kind of book that a lot of our mainstream book journalists didn't find all that interesting. How curious this is. Koontz's rise from small-town poverty to surfside splendor recapitulates the American dream, while his progression from paperback pseudonymity writing under 10 pen names, male and female to top-of-the-charts fame maps the history of the publishing industry over the past three decades.
Even so, Dean Koontz may be the least-known bestselling author in America -- and in part by his own hand. No one outside California has seen him in person for the past two decades, at least for promotional purposes, because he d sn't fly.
Unlike most other major writers, he has never appeared on the Today show or Good Morning America , because those programs broadcast from New York City.
He granted his first extensive interview to a national consumer magazine -- Rolling Stone -- only this past summer. He spends no time online. And he's recently changed his appearance so dramatically that rumors have floated in Net chat rooms that someone else is writing the new books coming out under his name. He just wants to write his books. It's a very dull, old-fashioned idea. And yet somewhere in there is a great purity. Dean is a very unique individual.
How unique is Dean Koontz? Unique enough to have published 76 novels in a variety of genres, including SF, horror, romance, romantic suspense, adventure, crime, thriller, juvenile and a cross-genre combination that can only be called Koontzian. Unique enough to have revised, years later, several of these books, including an SF novel 55, words long that he rewrote so extensively that the revision ran , words and retained not one sentence of the original.
Unique enough, in an industry where calumnies collect to the celebrated like dust to a mirror, to enjoy a spotless reputation as a decent man, albeit one driven to perfectionism.
And unique enough, in an era marked by handlers and go-betweens, to himself answer the phone when we call to arrange our visit, and to offer to pick us up at our hotel and drive us to his house. It's the sort of California day that can fade the tan off a tour director: cool, even clammy, with gray clouds staining the sky.
Still, we're curious whether Koontz is quite the perfectionist we've heard, so we brave the chill and sit in front of our Newport Beach hotel to see how close to the 10 a. Seconds after the hour a black Mercedes S sedan rolls up. Scrambling inside, we are enveloped by black leather and polished wood and a cockpit's worth of instrument panels. A hand stretches toward us. We look up into sunglasses topped by sprays of eyebrows. The eyebrows are set in a handsome face formed of small features that, despite 53 years of wear, looks almost pixielike.
Gone is the mustache that hyphenated his face for decades. Gone too are the quotation marks of scalp that lengthened over the years, now replaced by a swoop of hair, dark with a hint of silver. Koontz's grip is strong, his smile friendly, his style casual in a sportcoat, open-neck shirt, blue jeans and black kickaround sh s.
Several roads bring us to a gated community. We curve along some blocks to a modest white neo-Victorian that will be dwarfed by the palatial home Koontz is building nearby. Koontz parks in the garage next to another Mercedes and a four-wheel drive. He exits the car and we follow, trying to keep up. He moves quickly, like a boy, and from the back he looks like one, not tall, his figure slight and thin. He leads us to a kitchen that gleams like a display room in a model home.
We indicate that we'd enjoy a diet cola and he hands us a can and a glass along with a square black napkin to place under the glass.
Most of them consider him to be the oracle. In the living room we settle into an armchair across a coffee table from Koontz, who camps on a sofa.
Behind him looms a huge copper-relief wall depicting a scene from ancient China. The furnishings are tasteful and spare. Nothing looks out of place. The room is so quiet we can hear the whish of the tape revolving in our recorder. They showed me different worlds. A writer was the greatest thing you could be. Koontz recalls that he wrote his first stories at age eight. He is perched on the sofa now, his arms and legs crossed as if to say that he's willing to talk about his private life -- in fact he never dodges a question -- but he d sn't have to enjoy it.
We're wishing he would relax when a flurry of golden fur bounds into the room. The writer unfolds into a welcoming embrace and a big grin, Koontz pets Trixie, his golden retriever of six weeks, like a security blanket. We sense another presence and swivel to see a slim woman with soulful eyes. She is Gerda Koontz, the author's wife of 32 years, whom he first dated back at Bedford Pa. High School. Gerda offers a quick hello, then retreats, as if she sensed that Koontz could use a moment's reassurance.
Indeed, like Koontz's mother, Florence, who died young but lived long enough to protect her growing son from the worst furies of his father whom Koontz calls a "sociopath" , Gerda has nurtured Koontz and his talent from the get-go.
It was she who allowed him to jump-start his career by offering, after the publication of Star Quest , to support him for five years as he wrote. One witness to those years of struggle is science fiction writer and critic Barry Malzberg.
In , Malzberg tells PW by phone, Koontz submitted two novels to the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, which, for a fee, critiqued and considered for representation work by unknown writers. Malzberg, then a "fee man" at that agency, says that he read the manuscripts, "rather liked" them but "bounced" them. Koontz's experience isn't anomalous. Malzberg adds, "And guess who bounced a story by the year-old Stephen King?
A few years later, Malzberg, by then editor of the influential SF magazine Amazing Stories , published a story by Koontz, and the two men, and their wives, became friends. So in , when Malzberg ran into a jam as editor of the Harlequin Discovery Program, dedicated to publishing first novels, he turned to Koontz: "I was to commission four novels," Malzberg explains.
I asked Dean if he could write one, pseudonymously. His books have also been major bestsellers in countries as diverse as Japan and Sweden. Dean Koontz was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He graduated from Shippensburg State College now Shippensburg University , and his first job after graduation was with the Appalachian Poverty Program, where he was expected to counsel and tutor underprivileged children on a one-to-one basis.
His first day on the job, he discovered that the previous occupier of his position had been beaten up by the very kids he had been trying to help and had landed in the hospital for several weeks.
The following year was filled with challenge but also tension, and Koontz was more highly motivated than ever to build a career as a writer. He wrote nights and weekends, which he continued to do after leaving the poverty program and going to work as an English teacher in a suburban school district outside Harrisburg.
I used to write from outlines. But when I wrote Strangers, which ended up having an enormous cast and being about a quarter of a million words, I decided not to do an outline and just start with the premise and a couple of interesting characters. I decided to wing it, and it was the best decision.
I start with a bit of an idea, a central theme, a premise, and then I think about it for a little while—not for weeks and months, but days—and then I begin. If a character comes alive, I let the character move the story along.
This is the hardest thing to explain to young writers. You tell yourself that you know exactly who a character is and try to make that character conform. If you give the character free will, the character becomes richer, more layered, more interesting. I lead an unusual life. I keep a yellow, lined notepad to put down reminders, and I wrote the line down.
And even though I never write longhand because I can barely read it, I found myself continuing to write, and hours and hours later when I stopped, I had the first chapter of the book Odd Thomas.
But I wrote eight Odd Thomas books. I usually get up at five in the morning, get ready for the day, walk the dog, read the Wall Street Journal. I rarely have lunch, because if I eat, I get furry-minded. All I can say is, it works for me. I never run into that.
And I think it all has to do with this way of working. How have you successfully navigated all the big changes in the publishing business? One of those was to let the paperback business basically die. A lot of publishers never quite grasped the rise of ebooks.
Last year, my agents made the argument that I would probably sell more books with Amazon than with anybody else.
And one of the key things was its marketing proposal. We looked at eight publishers and some of them came with a one-page plan. Others came with eight or 10 pages. The Amazon plan was around 30, and impressive and thoughtful.
So we did a contract for five books. How do you keep up that constant learning? I never got caught. When I was writing science fiction and fantasy, I had to have some basic scientific knowledge, but I could also just make most of it up.
So I started doing research, and to my great surprise, I found that learning about something new and being able to make it part of the story, to impart it in an entertaining way, was something I greatly enjoyed. I got interested in some pretty complicated things, like quantum mechanics, and I found that the more I taught myself, the more story ideas would come to me. Is that true? Or I may go and sit with them. But I always read and vet the research myself.
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