THEY CALLED HIM THEIR MIRACLE CHILD. WHEN FLORENCE and Ray Koontz had a baby boy, Dean Ray Koontz, on Monday July 9, 1945, they greeted his healthy arrival with great joy. Ray was thirty-five and Florence twenty-nine, which was late in those days for a first child. They had been married for over a decade. Although they were barely surviving on the meager sums that Ray earned in his erratic periods of employment, they had tried for a long time to start a family. They had been told that they might never be parents, but finally they had succeeded.
The Koontzes joined the rest of the country in anticipation of better times. Hitler’s suicide that year on April 30 had preceded Germany’s surrender to the Allies. Truman, blunt and practical, had replaced the more elegant Roosevelt as president, and the rationing of gas, at fifteen cents per gallon, came to an end. With Hitler and Mussolini both dead, Japan was soon to surrender, albeit not before atomic bombs on August 6 and 9 decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Wartime production had ended the Great Depression and its haunting deprivations, and inspired visions of a better life. The culture stood on the brink of a flourishing consumerism, made possible by a burgeoning middle class and a government determined to create an image of prosperity. Life expectancy for men was sixty-three years. The average new car cost around $1,000, average annual wages were $2,400, a new house averaged $4,600, and a loaf of bread cost nine cents.
That same year, Jackie Robinson became the first black baseball player, and The Lost Weekend won the Academy Award for best picture. John Steinbeck published Cannery Row and Norman Mailer’s first novel was The Naked and the Dead. New inventions included microwave ovens, Tupperware, frozen meals, the three-fold sofa bed, and streptomycin. An ideology of benign nationalism formed, even as the government performed clandestine plutonium experiments on unwitting subjects. Naïve optimism had its shadow side, and Dean Koontz’s generation would grow up attuned to both.
In the postwar mid-forties, the economy recovered more slowly in some places than others. Dean’s father had been a miner in Jerome, Pennsylvania, and then had taught shoe repair to inmates in a prison near Huntingdon. Eventually he and Florence moved to Everett, Pennsylvania, where Ray opened a shoe repair shop. The talk was that Everett would become an exit from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the principal route between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. With its gas stations, restaurants, and motels, that meant much-needed jobs for this farm community. There were few opportunities to earn a living one hundred miles west of Harrisburg, the state capital, and the same distance east of Pittsburgh. Turnpike business could mean financial salvation for many young families.
In 1946, Florence and Ray lived in a small upstairs apartment across from the G.C. Murphy store in Everett. Their neighbors were Bob and Marcella Barkman. Marcella would sometimes watch the baby and she remembers Florence as a devoted mother. “She was very thin and frail, but that didn’t deter her from keeping a very clean apartment and a well-kept child,” she says. “On a sunny morning, she would take the baby carriage down a steep flight of stairs and come back for the baby. That had to be quite a chore because carriages were very awkward in those days.” The Koontzes, she says, kept to themselves, except when Ray later came to sell them insurance. “They were quiet people. Mrs. Koontz told me they wouldn’t be able to have more children and I was under the impression she’d had a hysterectomy. I’m sure Dean was very precious to them.”
Eventually it was Bedford, a few miles west, that earned the dubious honor of getting the turnpike business, so Ray and Florence moved there. Bedford was special to Florence. She had visited this well-kept town, with its colonial homes and perfect lawns, during her summers growing up. Her father had built a small vacation home there and had run a grocery business. Two of her sisters lived there with their husbands.
Bedford, with a population of just over three thousand when Dean was born, has an eclectic history. At the foot of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, where peaks soar to over three thousand feet, Bedford had become the county seat. A branch of the Juniata River flowed through the fertile valley. The town was first settled in 1751 as a trading post called Raystown. Eight years later, Fort Raystown became Fort Bedford to honor an English duke. The area soon attracted traders and settlers, many of whom were then massacred by Indians. George Washington camped here with six thousand troops, and decades later as president put down the infamous Whiskey Rebellion. By 1766, citizens had designed a grid of streets named for members of William Penn’s family. The residents, mostly Scotch-Irish or German, worked hard to establish the state’s first steel works. They built a courthouse and jail, then schools and churches. Then came a surprising discovery.
In 1796, a worker bathing a sore limb in the nearby springs and a fisherman taking a drink both experienced the water’s medicinal qualities. Magnesia, sulfur, and other minerals in the water showed wondrous results with arthritis and liver ailments. A local physician set up a health resort, and his enterprise grew into a grand hotel and spa. Eventually the Bedford Springs Resort Hotel attracted eminent visitors like President James Buchanan, who christened it his summer White House. In 1853, he was at this hotel when he received the first message from Queen Victoria in London on the Atlantic cable (which parted after only three days and was not fixed for thirteen years). Several other presidents visited the small town at various times, as did Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. Even John Brown stopped here on his way to Harper’s Ferry. The town had much to be proud of. It mirrored America’s eagerness to mine opportunity, but it also harbored some of the same social biases that would throw the country into chaos by the 1960s.1
There were many families named Koontz in the Bedford area, although none was closely related to Dean’s. His mother was from Pittsburgh and his father from Huntingdon County, to the northeast. “I was always told that the name Koontz is Dutch or German-Dutch,” he explains, “but there was no ethnic tradition in our family that makes this clear. We had no sense of a family past and no one talked about it. My mother’s maiden name, Logue, was probably German.”
Florence and Ray had lived in several small towns in rural Pennsylvania before settling in Bedford. They had met in Pittsburgh, where Florence had been raised with her brother, George, and three sisters — Virginia, Kate, and Betty. They also had a stepsister, Thelma. Florence was five-foot-two, pretty and slim, with a round face, brown hair, and dark brown eyes. Her sisters called her Dodie, but others referred to her as Molly. Her manner was soft-spoken and gentle, her sense of fun girlish, and though she suffered from chronic ill health, she had a store of nervous energy. In high school, Florence had shown real talent with music. She could pick up almost any instrument and, with little practice, learn to play it. Teachers had urged her to pursue a musical career, but inexplicably, she had put those dreams aside. “I never saw my mother play a musical instrument,” Dean recalls. “I never heard her sing around the house. She just didn’t do that sort of thing.” That she had once had such a predilection mystifies him, but in those years of the Great Depression, women often sacrificed their dreams to have security and a family.
Dean’s cousin, Jane Miller, who was nine when Dean was born and who grew up in the same town, remembers his mother’s concern with keeping things neat: “Every hair had to be in place. That’s the way she was. She was also an immaculate housekeeper. Everything had to be scrubbed to perfection.” Jane describes Florence as the diplomat in a family where one sibling seemed always to be squabbling with another. “She was the peacemaker. She could talk to everyone. And she was generous. She’d have given you the last thing she had if you needed it. And honest beyond anyone’s thinking. One day she went into a phone booth and there lay some change. She put it into her pocketbook and wouldn’t spend it, even though she needed it, because she was afraid someone would come looking for that money. She knew what it was like not to have very much. But she loved life. She never complained.”
Florence never hesitated to extend herself to someone in need. Once she helped a young woman remain in college by giving her what money she could. For a period of time, she drove a neighbor to the doctor every day, thirty miles each way, and she always listened to people’s problems. She liked to help. Townspeople remember her as friendly and reliable. Nancy Eckard recalls that when she first moved to town in 1962, Florence made her feel that she belonged there and she was quite grateful. “She always gave me a big hug and she always laughed. If she was feeling down, you wouldn’t know it because she’d always have a smile and something nice to say.”
Dean’s father, Ray, was blond, about five-foot-six, with a long, narrow face, hawkish nose, pale brown eyes, and a medium but solid build. He usually made a good first impression, although some people thought him slick. When he met Florence, he liked what he saw and asked her to marry him. These were the Depression years, just before World War II. Florence was just out of high school and had a domineering mother who never failed to browbeat those within her reach. Florence’s siblings were in constant conflict. In the midst of all this, marriage seemed a desirable option. Ray was six years older, with an air of someone who had been around. He claimed to be an inventor with good ideas who would soon become wealthy and keep her in style. Given her circumstances, it was easy for Florence to believe him.
As the country recovered from a brutal recession, the entrepreneurial spirit that Ray Koontz projected was highly encouraged. People with innovative ideas that catered to the middle class were finding a market. It seemed that anyone with a good plan and solid financial backing could make it big. Ray absorbed this optimism from the culture at large. Prone to ego-enhancing delusions, he made getting rich from his own designs his ultimate goal.
Whether Florence truly believed him or just wanted to escape her home, she defied her family’s opposition and married him. It was not long before she discovered that Ray was a dreamer, short on attention and long on problems, who failed to realize his limitations. Florence never discussed her feelings about Ray with her son, so Dean was not certain why they had married. As he observed many anxious years of hardship and stress, he had reason to believe that if romantic love had ever motivated his mother, it had died early.
Dean himself was to become the main focus for Florence. After watching her sisters marry and start their families, she was eager to be a mother. Before Dean was born, she had suffered four miscarriages and had delivered a stillborn son, so Dean’s birth had been especially significant. Although Florence had little money to buy him things, she doted on him in every other way.
As an only child, Dean had both advantages and disadvantages. There were no other children to play with or to help him bear the burden of parental expectations, which meant loneliness and a heavy sense of responsibility. Yet he did not have to share family resources. Being an only child probably helped set his path to success. According to child development studies, most children without siblings develop language skills more rapidly. Being the center of adult attention, they often have a high IQ and a more mature perception and ability to tolerate pressure. Organized, conscientious, persistent, and reliable, they are likely to achieve their goals. Even as they strive for perfection, however, they feel insecure, which inspires a repetitive need to prove themselves. Many of these traits were certainly true of Dean, and the aspirations, doubts, and tolerance for solitude that he developed as an only child were to serve him well as a writer.
Dean’s first home in Bedford was a three-room apartment on the ground floor of a plain, white frame, two-story building on West Pitt Street. Nearby were several small bars. Behind the building was the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River and in front was a busy street that accessed a main highway. Florence had to be diligent about watching her toddler on this stretch of road. (It was nearly half a mile to Juliana Street at the center of town.)
Although the apartment had a sizable kitchen, there were no built-in appliances. It had only a sink, some counter space, and an icebox. Because appliances were expensive, Florence used a galvanized washtub for laundry and baths. She cooked meals on a hotplate and, like most other young families, hoped one day to own a house. Ray’s earnings were meager and he had difficulty keeping a job, but with assistance from Florence’s father, Florence believed that they just might manage it within a few years. In the meantime, she had to make do.
Dean’s earliest memory at that apartment is of a summer day when he was three years old. His parents were sitting with friends on a grassy area in front of the building. Dean went around back to play on the riverbank. As he stood looking into the flowing water, a snake coiled nearby and struck at him. It missed and went sailing through the air, startling him. “I went running like hell, absolutely terrified,” he recalls. Breathlessly he described the incident to the adults, but they only laughed at his cute manner. “Everybody made fun of me. Nobody believed that anything had really happened. I think that’s when I began to distrust adults.”
It was during this time, while Dean was a toddler, that a local football team adopted him as their mascot. These teams, formed in several local towns, were made up of high school graduates and returning veterans. Bedford’s was known as the Blue Devils. Although the league lasted only a few years, hundreds of people showed up for the games.2 Jack Faust, one of the Blue Devils, recalls that Ray Koontz came often with his young son. The team even gave Dean his own uniform. Photos from this period show him in this outfit.
Ray could not have been more pleased. It confirmed his aspirations for Dean. Although he claimed to enjoy being a father, he had difficulty feeling good about himself. Thus, he placed his ambition squarely on the shoulders of his son. He bragged that Dean would become the big, powerful man he wanted to be. “When I was a little kid,” Dean remembers, “my father would tell people that I was going to grow up to be a football star. Even when it became obvious at the age of twelve that I was not going to be huge and weigh two hundred forty pounds, he’d tell everybody, ‘He’s going to be six-foot-two and he’s going to play for the Steelers, and if he doesn’t, he’s no son of mine.’”
In a way, Ray’s prophecy did play itself out in Dean’s adult life, but not as he had hoped. One day Dean would have cause to question whether he really was Ray’s son.
As a child, Dean had a vague awareness that all was not right in the household. Although his father sweet-talked Florence in front of others, his moods in private were often erratic. Despite how little money they had, Ray often came home drunk. Sometimes he disappeared on fishing trips for days at a time. Other times he would stay home and create havoc. At that age, Dean knew only that his father’s behavior made his mother unhappy, so he tried to keep her in good spirits.
“I was a pretty good kid,” he says. “The things I did that got me in trouble were usually stupid, not mean.”
The worst incident he can remember was with a playmate, Nancy Logue, the daughter of the people who owned the apartment building where he lived (no relation to his mother). They were friends of his parents and lived half a block away. Dean and Nancy were both around four when he got into the worst trouble of his young life. “She and I were playing together in her father’s garage, where he had all these cans of paint,” Dean remembers, “and we wanted to see what would happen when we mixed different colors.” As they were about to open the cans, Nancy’s mother called her. She had to leave, but told Dean she would be back soon and urged him to stay.
“So they went away,” he continues, “and I kept working on this paint can with this screwdriver. Finally, somewhere in my dim little kid mind, I realized there might be a mess, so I took the can into their kitchen to open it in the sink. When the lid popped, red paint splattered all over the sink. I desperately tried to clean it up and made an even greater mess. Then I panicked and started to cry. I left the house and went running home.”
His mother was entertaining Louise Kinzey from nearby Schellsburg when she saw Dean coming down the street, spattered in red. She was sure it was blood. In terror for his life, she ran to him. Dean blurted out what he had done and then knew he was in trouble. “When she discovered the red stuff was paint,” he says, “and that I had made a mess at someone else’s house, she was horrified.” Florence dragged him into the house and heated water for the washtub. Then she pulled off his pants, threw him over her knees, and spanked him. She wanted to wallop him good, but Louise urged her to go easy. The boy had meant no harm.
“That’s the only spanking I ever got that I can remember,” says Dean. “I’m sure my mother never hurt me, but I loved her so much that earning her displeasure was punishment enough. You just never wanted her to look at you and think, ‘Oh, how could you do that?’ It was too awful.”
On top of troubles with her marriage — and perhaps because of them — Florence struggled with serious health problems. Dean’s cousin Jane remembers that Florence always had some kind of ailment. “She got phlebitis all the time,” Jane says. “She would have to keep her legs elevated.”
The worst problem was her high blood pressure, which made her perspire profusely. “Her blood pressure was only partially controllable,” Dean states, “and she would break into these sweats. This sounds unbelievable, but she would sit at the kitchen table and go very pale. Her heart would accelerate into the two hundred range. She would be in a desperate state, with sweat pouring. She’d take a washcloth and blot her face and arms and wring it out in this basin. She’d fill the basin with sweat, two or three inches deep, until the trouble passed. I remember it clearly because it’s so traumatic to see your mother suffering like that.”
Dean was only four when Florence was rushed to the hospital in Pittsburgh one winter for the first of several treatments. The doctors there decided on experimental surgery to reduce her blood pressure. Unsure what would happen, they cut nerves along the spinal chord in hope of relieving the stress, but the only effect was to further debilitate her. She nearly died and had to be hospitalized for ten weeks.
Ray was unable to care for his son, and since no relatives could take Dean in for that long, Florence’s good friend Louise Kinzey volunteered.
“She’s very nurturing,” says Dorothy de Grange about her Aunt Louise. “Her door was always open to anyone and everyone. She took care of people.”
Louise lived only a few miles to the west and Florence had often taken Dean there for a visit. Louise liked Dean — had once saved him from that serious spanking — and she and her husband, Bird, were happy to help. Their grown daughter, Pat, was on her own and Tom, their son, was leaving for the army. There was plenty of room for a little boy.
“They were two of the kindest souls you’d ever hope to know,” Dean recalls.3
So Ray, whose primary concern was how he would get his own needs met while his wife was away — including making a pass at a sister-in-law — dropped Dean off at the Kinzey home and left. No one realized it at the time, but this was to be one of Dean’s earliest transformative encounters — someone who would have a significant impact on the direction his life would take. Dean found himself with a warm, stable, and loving couple who paid him a lot of attention.
“He was a sweet little boy,” Louise remembers. “We just fell in love with him.” She even devised an affectionate moniker: “We nicknamed him Butch.” (Much to Dean’s chagrin, his cousins adopted the nickname for most of his childhood.)
The Kinzeys lived in a white weatherboard house with a wondrous wraparound porch. Although it was too cold to use the backyard swing, Dean recalls how the ceaseless snow that winter left delightful drifts that “seemed as high as the Empire State Building.” Inside, knickknacks, glass figurines, and interesting clocks decorated the orderly house. The smell of furniture polish and home cooking, the sound of laughter, and the constant warm embraces gave Dean the feeling that he was home — in a better home. He felt secure there. “I found stability.”
Dean stayed in the bedroom that Pat Kinzey had vacated. It was a dormer room with a sloping ceiling, which seemed quite magical to him. The bed, dresser, and table were painted gray, and a reading lamp was hooked over the bedframe. Louise came in every night to tuck him in.
She believed that children should eat something before bed, so she served her own favorite dessert. “I got lots of cherry ice cream sodas,” Dean remembers. As he sat in bed eating his treat, Louise introduced him to the children’s classics that she had read years earlier to Pat and Tom. “He loved being read to,” she recalls.
“I think that’s where I started getting this love of books,” Dean says. He associated the magical tales with warmth, security, and loving attention, or, as he puts it, with “salvation.” Louise always kissed him good-night and he went off to sleep with exciting plots and characters fresh in his mind.
During those ten weeks, Ray stayed away. “I never saw his father from the time he dropped Dean off to the time he picked him up,” Louise states. But Dean did not miss him. He helped feed the hunting dogs that Bird raised and, to his heart’s content, looked through comics from Tom Kinzey’s collection. He discovered Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, Mutt and Jeff, Nancy and Sluggo, and Felix the Cat. Although his parents would never approve of wasting time and money on comic books, Dean probably benefited. Children who read comics get early practice using their imagination. They learn to fill in the missing action between frames, attribute different dialogue sounds to diverse characters, anticipate plot, generalize from characters to their own concerns, and synthesize story lines. With comics, the mind is compelled to pay attention rather than conditioned, as with many television programs, to be passively entertained.4
Louise kept Dean fully supplied. As she baked cookies and made him delicious healthy meals, she watched him with a mother’s caring eye. “I felt as if I had done something for him,” she says. It may be that the character Mercy Ealing, the image of grace in the form of a cookie-baking rancher’s wife in Dean’s novel Sole Survivor, has something of Louise Kinzey in her.
Finally, when Florence was out of the hospital, Ray arrived to retrieve his son. Dean wanted to see his mother, but he did not want to leave the Kinzeys. “He cried when he left,” says Louise. Yet he took with him a deep love for stories that could be read and savored during good times and bad, that could take him into a more exciting world. “I remember that time as being magical and wonderful,” Dean affirms.
Since Florence still needed time to recover, she took her son for two months to the home of her sister Virginia, who lived in Bedford. Aunt Ginny had two daughters, Jane and Shirley, who were several years older than Dean. “I slept in Janie’s room,” he explains, “and my mother slept in another room while Aunt Ginny took care of her. She took a long time to recover.”
Jane can remember how excruciating the experience was for Florence. “She was in so much pain, she couldn’t stand the sheets on her back.”
“Even after the surgery,” says Dean, “my mother continued to have these attacks. Her back thereafter carried enormous scars. My mother was an indomitable kind of person, but she was frequently ill and I think that’s one reason she stayed with my father. Maybe she wondered, if anything happened to her, what would happen to me?”
Dean never knew his father’s parents because they had died before he was born, but his maternal grandparents were part of his life. His grandfather, John Logue, was a large, good-hearted man who fancied himself a carpenter. As a younger man, he had built a vacation home with a garage just off U.S. 220 in the outskirts of Bedford, and had taken his family there during the summers. While Dean was growing up, three of John Logue’s daughters lived in town with their families, so he moved into this little house.
Dean liked his grandfather’s humor, but remembers his grandmother as more of a “dragon lady.” She frightened him. Apparently she bothered his grandfather as well, for at a time when divorce was rare, John Logue obtained a legal separation and lived apart from her.
“She was a holy terror,” Dean says. “She’d come right at you like a giant bird. Nothing ever satisfied her. She did not show affection. She was stern, domineering, and glowering. I never saw my grandmother laugh.”
His cousin Jane affirms this: “She looked real sweet, but she wasn’t. She was not a nice person. Whatever she wanted, she expected you to do it. She was very firm.”
“All I remember of her,” says Dean, “is that I never liked to be with her because it was like being put through the third degree. Even when I was a little kid, if she was in the room alone with me, she’d just start lecturing me or hectoring me. She was a very threatening figure.”
It makes some sense that, after living with such a mother, Florence might marry a man with Ray’s problems. People unaware of covert psychological traps can inadvertently attract someone just like the very parent they desire to escape, especially if they marry before they have much self-awareness. It is not what they want, but it is the energy pattern with which they are familiar. At a young age, Florence had learned to adapt to a demanding, self-centered person. With the additional negative charge of sibling conflicts, she was bound to be subconsciously attuned to anyone who might recreate patterns of tension and chaos. Although Ray had seemed to Florence to promise a way out, he ended up reproducing the feeling of being home: her attempt to escape had led right back in. This is the classic pattern of unresolved, self-perpetuating need that prepared Florence to become the enabling partner of an aggressive alcoholic. Her mother had made a strong subconscious impression, but Florence might have been happier with a man like her father. That he was nearby was a source of relief and consolation.
Dean enjoyed his Grandfather Logue’s company, watching him putter around, and listening to his stories as they sat together on the porch. Unfortunately this relationship was short-lived. When Dean was eight, his grandfather had a stroke. After a brief hospitalization, he died.
Grandmother Logue lasted a while longer, living with her daughter Betty in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then with Virginia in Bedford.
Before he died, Dean’s grandfather invited Florence to move into his summer house, while he moved into a smaller house that he had rebuilt next door. It was a step backward for her. She had to move in because she and Ray could no longer afford the rent on their apartment. The house was situated on the other side of town, along a gravel lane known then as Spring Street. It faced the expansive state fairgrounds, which were surrounded by woods, with mountains as a backdrop. Between the front of the house and the busy highway was a gas station and a restaurant shaped like a giant coffeepot. Not far away was a neighborhood known as Tiday Town, the most depressed economic area in Bedford. This was the “wrong” side of the tracks, a fact that Dean was to realize only later when he went to school. All he knew at the age of five was that his mother was happy to have her own home, and that there was more fun to have here than in the cramped apartment.
In his earliest years here, Dean learned the joys of even the harshest winters. He was awed after a snowfall by the open white fields, front and back. “On the fairgrounds there was all this snowy wilderness and even behind our house was open land. I used to love being out in the snow.” Even when he moved to California as an adult, fond memories of snow infused his novels. “I’m always writing snow scenes,” he says. And the fairgrounds in summer, with its weeklong car races and carnivals, were to play a significant role as he grew up.
Perched on the side of a hill, the small two-story frame house had clapboard siding and a tarpaper roof. Upstairs were two bedrooms, while downstairs a kitchen and living room occupied the main level. From her meager resources, Florence bought inexpensive furniture and hung framed photos and prints to make the place homey. The bathroom was an outhouse, while water for drinking, bathing, and cooking came from a kitchen hand pump. In one corner of the kitchen was the cellar door, where Florence hung calendars from the bank. Down those stairs, a crudely dug out basement housed a kerosene water heater and a coal-burning furnace, which was prone to dangerous flue fires. On the assumption that hot air rises, a single register on the main floor was supposed to warm all the rooms.
The house was not quite to standards. The roof leaked and the furnace failed to heat much of anything but the chimney. Up in his confining second-floor room at the back of the house, Dean learned every year just how cold a Pennsylvania winter could get. “God bless him,” says Dean of his grandfather, “but he wasn’t much of a builder.”
Dean depicted this house vividly in his 1995 novel, Strange Highways, the title story of a collection by the same name. It is the childhood home of Joey Shannon, who reluctantly returns to it only after his parents have died. As Joey walks around inside, he reexperiences the place: “He carried his suitcase to the second floor. A short, narrow hallway with badly worn gray-and-yellow flecked linoleum led from the head of the stairs to the bathroom at the back [in real life, installed years later]. Beyond the single door at the right was his parents’ room. … The single door on the left side of the hall led to his old bedroom. … The house was so small, humble, narrow, plain …”5 The only fictional addition to this house is the bedroom in the basement for PJ, Joey’s brother, who grew up to become a psychopathic killer.
By the age of ten, Dean had the responsibility of keeping the kerosene heater going strong, and each week he walked to the nearby gas station to purchase five gallons of fuel. Eventually his chores extended to filling the glass kerosene jug that hung upside down over a wick ring, making sure the jug dripped properly so he could light the wick. “I was certain I would set the house on fire,” he says. Sometimes it took him as long as ten minutes to work up the courage to perform this daunting task.
The basement disturbed him, and it would one day become associated with his father in one of Dean’s most frightening nightmares. There was just something about it that made him anxious. It is no wonder that in Strange Highways, Dean uses this crude cellar as a metaphor of forces that influenced the older brother’s demented character. Shannon had slept near the furnace all during childhood and his personality was seemingly shaped by something from hell.
Even worse at times was the outhouse in back, which served as the only toilet for five years before indoor plumbing was finally installed. Between winter’s ice and summer’s spiders, Dean learned to hate the ordeal. In the house, he bathed in the galvanized washtub, set up in the basement and filled from a hose attached to the water heater.
Despite these problems, Florence kept her new home spotless. Everything had its place and she tolerated no mess. Dean came to associate order and cleanliness with a highly moral personality, and many of his principled characters would possess his mother’s sense of tidiness. (Roy Borden’s mother in The Voice of the Night is an exception; in her this trait signals her emotional sterility.) The Koontz family lived a mile from Aunt Ginny and only two houses from Aunt Kate, which made Florence happy. She visited her sisters often and depended on them when things got rough.
And from time to time, things did get rough. Although Ray’s smooth manner and golden tongue had once won her heart, Florence had learned the exhausting reality of living with a mentally unstable alcoholic. Sometimes Ray was sweet to her, but other times he seemed to resent her existence. He often blamed her for not making things better for him, although it was only her resourcefulness that stood between him and living on the streets. On the surface, things seemed tolerable to others — just the problems that the average family had — but her sisters suspected that the situation was darker than Florence would admit. Ray was known for the fights he provoked in bars, so there was reason to believe he might be violent at home. Seeing Ray’s drunken flares of temper, they asked Florence if he ever beat her, but she always denied it. He might throw chairs or raise his hand to strike her, she said, but he did not hit her. Virginia, at least, was skeptical.
As years went by, Ray drank to excess and had an increasingly difficult time holding down a job. He would get himself into trouble or confront the boss and get fired. He wanted to go into business for himself, so he opened a shoe repair shop and bragged around town that he would put the town’s other cobbler, Ross Cerra, out of business. In fact, it was the other way around, although Jane Miller remembers that Ray was quite skillful. “If he would have stayed with that,” she claims, “he might have succeeded, but his head was full of scatterbrained ideas. He didn’t do anything for very long.” Ray also tried an army-navy store for several months, but soon gave up on that.
Other times, he talked acquaintances into investing in some ill-fated project. He worked best in sales because he was gregarious, persuasive, and in his good moods, a lot of fun. He visited people around town, particularly in the bars, and set about seducing them. As he bought rounds of drinks, he described grand schemes of what he would soon achieve. Since there were many stories of people successfully launching such ventures — the Holiday Inn franchises, Levittown’s modular homes — and since Ray seemed so confident, even visionary, people were easily suckered. Yet his personal problems only worsened.
Ray liked to gamble. Often what little money he managed to make was lost on cards or racetrack bets before he could bring it home. He might lose his entire salary in one game, yet still expect his wife to put food on the table. From an early age, Dean recalls their constant arguments over money. Finally Florence issued an ultimatum: Either Ray contribute a minimum of fifty dollars every week to the household or he had to leave. Ray resisted, but when she stood her ground, he complied. It seemed to Dean that his mother provided an anchor that his father desperately needed, despite how much Ray fought it. The rounds of anger and threats were endless, but Florence remained firm. Even so, she always tried to keep Dean out of the way.
“On some level my mother must have thought that sending me to my room when all this raging was going on downstairs hid most of it from me,” Dean believes. “She must have thought that I just didn’t understand the full awfulness of the situation. Or she might have thought that in spite of all this, I loved my father. We all supposedly loved our parents, no matter what they did to us. Not to love them was incomprehensible.”
So Dean remained in his room and worried. Sometimes he stared at the doorknob, waiting to see it turn, expecting his father to come in and grab him. He plotted elaborate ways to escape, or read comics to keep his mind off what was happening downstairs. In the summer, he sometimes went out his window onto the roof of the back porch, jumped to the ground, and ran to the property’s edge. Even then, he could still hear them arguing.
Ray’s drinking eventually worsened into frightening but predictable behavior. “When the car started coming up the hill,” Dean recalls, “you could tell he’d been drinking because he’d be driving too fast and — boom — Mom would get me upstairs and into my room with the door closed. Then I would hear them arguing downstairs. Once in a while I was present, and my mother would use the fact that I was there to control my father’s outbursts. ‘Look what your son is seeing you do,’ she would say to him. ‘Do you want your son to see you doing this?’ He’d be in this shaking state of rage and he’d look at me. A couple of times he came at me, but she interposed herself.”
Other times, Ray changed his tactics. He would try to get Dean to side with him by offering him a dime or quarter, which infuriated Florence. “I remember her saying, ‘You can’t buy your son!’ Then she’d pull me away from him. The actual physical violence never got bad with me, but the threats were continuous. When you’re a kid you think, well, some night he’s going to go over the top. I’d see him threatening my mother and I’d think he might do something extreme.” The suspense of what could happen was unrelenting.
“I often think about this relationship,” says Dean. “My father had big hands and he would push my mother up against the wall and stand with his fist over her. I think on some level, he was afraid of her. I don’t know why, because she was small, but she would glare at him so intensely and get this set to her jaw. I don’t know whether he hit her, because I was sent to my room so many times, but he never hit her in front of me. There were bruises, but she would explain them away with, ‘Oh, I fell down,’ or ‘I bumped into something.’”
As Dean got older, he became more aware of the frightening quality of some of his father’s moods, such as Ray’s restless depression. “It had a wildness about it. He’d get in a brooding state and he’d go on about how there’s no one to turn to in this world and nobody cares. He would never say he was going to kill us, but he’d say we’d all be better off if we weren’t here. He’d say things like, ‘There’s no future for this family anyway,’ and you knew what he meant.”
This kind of brooding made an impression on Dean. In one of his Gothic novels, he later wrote, “The person who is mad … might not look upon death with the same viewpoint as the sane. The madman … might very well see death as a new beginning, a chance to start over.”6 A psychiatrist would one day tell Dean that he was fortunate to have escaped.
“Those were the times, I think, when my mother was most afraid of him,” he says, “but even then she would say to him, ‘You’re talking nonsense.’ She’d get combative. I used to be afraid sometimes. She was not argumentative by nature. She was actually quite a gentle person, and as a kid it scared me when my father got in these moods and my mother would argue with him. Instead of being conciliatory, she would stand her ground. Yet I look back on it now and think it might have been a very smart thing to do. Trying to gentle him down, trying to commiserate with him, might have actually made things worse. She might have had some native sense of good psychology when she ridiculed these moods.”
His mother’s way of dealing with Ray’s latent mental illness turned up decades later in Dean’s novel Cold Fire, in the scene where Jim Ironheart begs Holly Thorne to be more conciliatory with a seemingly maniacal alien being. Holly refuses, insisting on firmness as the best way to treat instability.
“That was how she always handled my father,” says Dean of his mother. “Sometimes, when he was not getting the ‘poor Ray’ consolation that he was looking for, he would storm out of the house. As a consequence, my mother’s handling of his moods had the beneficial effect of causing him to leave in his worst moments.”
Between spells of “reptilian coldness” and forced joviality, Ray went through religious phases as well, feeling noble but misunderstood, and seeming to think that obeisance to God would put things in order. “He’d go through these sporadic religious periods during which he would quote from the Bible. That was always when he was at his worst. He never went to church, but when things got bad he’d start reading the Bible and he’d force me to read it.”
At any moment, Ray might burst into tears. Or he might sit without speaking, giving Dean the feeling of a crouched predator, “full of slyness and patience and grim need.”7 Dean thought that Ray even took secret delight in the degree of chaos he created around him. The long-term dread, the sleepless hours, the concern for his mother left Dean exhausted and depressed. “Life with him was sometimes a quiet hell, sometimes a shrieking Bedlam.”8 Dean craved some semblance of stability, even the stability of a foul mood prolonged. At least it would have been more predictable.
Florence was clearly distressed. “I saw her cry at times,” says Dean. “It was usually when he was supposed to come home for something and didn’t show. For instance, relatives would be visiting and everybody was getting together somewhere. He wouldn’t show up to drive us there and it was humiliating for her. The family knew what the problem was. Then he’d come home late and I’d hear these fights and he’d slam out, and maybe not come home the next day. I’d hear her crying then, but she tried to do it in private.”
Nevertheless, Florence was committed to this marriage, for better or for worse. She had made a bad choice, but she was determined to make the best of it. There were still many good things to be had in life. She had a child to look after and for that she was grateful. Having Dean around mitigated the tension.
In the early fifties, no one called it codependence. Alcoholism was not even viewed as a disease. It was a sin, a weakness of the will, a personal failing that embarrassed the family and was kept private. Partners of alcoholics often fell into patterns of unintentionally enabling their spouses to keep on some destructive path. They learned to block the pain and adapt to the abuse. To hide their fear and anger, they put on a public face. Often they became compulsive, for instance developing an obsession with neatness, as a way to retain some feeling of control. They also experienced stress reactions, such as migraines or high blood pressure, because they spent so much energy denying how bad things really were. They lost sight of their own needs. To many of them, the family unit was sacred. Often they feared being abandoned, or blamed themselves for the situation. It would be decades before anyone could show these people a way out.
The children of such self-destructive partnerships also suffered, and often developed a pervasive sense of insecurity. Forced into collusion and unsure what might happen, they learned to mistrust others and even to mistrust themselves. They carried the family shame and felt different from other children. They lived secret lives. Their own needs got shortchanged as family resources supported the alcoholic. They, too, developed a powerful need to keep control of their lives.
For a son with an alcoholic father, it was difficult to grow into the apparently toxic space of manhood. That was not the parent with whom he wished to identify, and his aversion forced him to seek alternative role models, act out, or remain stunted in a childish identity. Dean and Florence both bore the consequences of Ray’s abuse, but Dean found ways to avoid falling victim to it.
Ray’s drinking got so bad that he would often disappear for several days without notifying his wife. Although Dean liked this because there was peace in the house, Florence would get the inevitable call from a local bar to come and pick up her inebriated husband. Since Ray had the car, she had to walk. “Usually it was midnight or one in the morning, when a bar was closing,” Dean recalls. “They would say something like, ‘He’s here and he’s unconscious on the floor.’ My mother would get me up, and we would have to walk to wherever this bar was. It might be a mile, it might be two or three. So we’d go load him into the car and drive him home.”
Back at the house, Florence supported Ray. “He would lean on her and stumble and fall, and she would get him up and get him inside,” Dean remembers. It was classic codependence — rescuing Ray ensured that his behavior would continue. No matter what she might say or how angry she got, Florence showed her husband that he could count on her support. She would always bring him home. Even after Dean got his driver’s license in high school, he and his mother were still rescuing Ray. They would go together to get him, and Dean would drive his mother’s car home.
“I think some part of my mother always believed that things might straighten out,” Dean muses, “that somehow she would bring him around. Of course, that never happened and never could happen because whatever was wrong with my father was probably genetic. There was no way that he was going to change.”
It would be more than four decades before Dean would hear an official diagnosis of borderline schizophrenia, but Ray was a classic example. That particular diagnosis is not used today, but in the past, it referred to a person whose behavior resembled schizophrenia across many traits, but who was not fully psychotic. This condition is now more commonly called “schizotypal personality disorder” and, like schizophrenia, is an organic disease.
According to standard psychiatric manuals, such people display a pervasive pattern of peculiar ideas, behaviors, and appearances. They may believe that their own whims will make something happen; they may have bizarre preoccupations, and be suspicious or paranoid. They fear not being accepted. When unconditional approval is withheld, they attack those from whom they need affirmation. They seem to know instinctively how to hurt the other person.
Often they over- or underreact to a situation and may exhibit excessive anxiety. Chaos frightens them, though they generate it, and they may look to religious dogmatism for gaining control, or make vague threats about ending it all. Generally they are highly excitable, with shifting and unpredictable moods. Concerned about their health, they suffer bouts of hypochondria or fear that they may be dying. They experience difficulties with family relationships, financial planning, and holding a job, and they blame others for their problems, but they function well enough to avoid being locked up. Their thinking is rigid and simplistic. Above all, they want the world to be ordered in a certain way, and feel extreme frustration — even despair — when it does not support their vision. At best, they interpret the world through some imaginative metaphor that has only the barest connection to reality.
Before the biological and genetic components of this illness were understood, society viewed the disorder as a character flaw — something to be feared. Like alcoholics, such people were considered immoral or weak. This is the type of person from which many fictional psychopaths are drawn, and Dean’s villains, not surprisingly, often fit this pattern. The one who most closely resembles what he saw in his father shows up in his 1983 novel, Phantoms. Fletcher Kale, who murders his family, is not fully a psychopath or a sociopath, but when triggered in just the right way, has the potential for violence. He has vitality and “more than his share of shallow charm.” He has no opinions on issues of substance, his religious phases are misfortune-inspired, he’s impulsive and unreliable, cheats on his wife, lies, exaggerates, overspends, and “knows he’s going to be rich one day but [he] has no specific plan for acquiring that wealth.” He worries only about his own needs. He’s one of those kinds of people who are “not burdened by remorse, morality, love, or empathy. Often they led lives of acceptable destruction.”9 Although most criminal types will protect friends and family, a sociopath has no such allegiances. Anyone who gets in the way is a potential victim.
In the case of Ray Koontz, who exhibited all of these traits, antisocial elements were strongly present in the form of violating commitments to those around him who did not support his perspective. He also attacked in others those traits in himself that he despised, such as weakness, insecurity, and lack of manliness. Sometimes he was compliant, at other times demanding. He often viewed people as intruders, or blamed them for things he did not like. Their concerns meant nothing to him. The way Dean saw it, Ray only went through the motions of having feelings. He was of some peculiar alien breed. If he hurt someone, he felt no remorse.
Forever searching for his niche, Ray was certain that one of his ideas would make him rich; but restless, irresponsible, and unfocused, he met only short-lived success at best. To his mind, he simply had not been given a chance; it had nothing to do with his inability to concentrate or to hold his temper. Oversensitive and irritable at home, he reached for friends to build safety around himself, but usually ended up hurt and distrustful from some minor slight. As a result, he became deceitful and cunning. Acceptance to him meant total devotion. All or nothing. Any little event had the power to trigger a crisis, which sent him out to the bars.
To make matters worse, he instigated lawsuits against anyone who seemed to have offended or hampered him. He thought it would one day make him rich. Over the years, he totaled half a dozen cars and sued the other driver each time. Every fender-bender had to be handled by a lawyer, even though they were often Ray’s fault. He had little luck with this pursuit, but once, when Dean was in grade school, Ray hit a truck and broke his back. He sued the company and won a settlement of sixteen thousand dollars, despite the open beer cans littering his car. Getting money from this accident only reinforced his belief that lawsuits were effective, so he continued to use them.
There is good indication that Ray’s illness had a predominantly genetic source, exacerbated by stressful situational factors. He was from a troubled family. Although his father, who had died relatively young, had owned a successful restaurant and a shoe repair shop, the family was plagued by other problems. Ray’s mother apparently had died quite young and his father had married Mabel, Ray’s stepmother. Over the years, several family members exhibited signs of instability.
One brother, Faye, committed suicide in his late thirties. Dean was around three or four at the time. Ray also had four half brothers, one of whom was a musician who, in his late fifties, also committed suicide. He had been part of the Big Band era and had succeeded so well that he refused to wear the same white shirt twice. “He peaked early and then had difficulty holding a job,” says Dean. “His life was like my father’s in many ways — one degree of chaos or another — and he seemed to have difficulty functioning. I think his wife divorced him and it wasn’t long afterward that he killed himself. Like my father, he might have needed that stable person to rely upon.”
Another of Ray’s brothers, Danny, had died as a teenager. Mabel had become a Christian Scientist and when Danny was stricken with appendicitis, he did not get the medical care he needed. After he died, Mabel switched her faith.
Perhaps as a result of his drinking or his mental problems, Ray grew increasingly distant. Although relatives remember him being happy when Dean was young, Ray eventually withdrew from his family. He preferred bars or fishing holes to being at home.
His few attempts to take Dean fishing served only to widen the gap. On such trips, Ray always had a buddy or two along and plenty to drink. Since they liked fishing at night, it meant camping out. The whole experience seemed gruesome to Dean, who was six at the time. “That was a big deal, to take me fishing,” he says. “I hated fishing. It was so boring. You just sit with the pole. I didn’t want to bait the hook, so he ridiculed me. And when I didn’t want to sleep on the ground, he and his friends made fun of me. Then we went home and he said to my mother, ‘I’m never taking him again. He’s a sissy.’”
Dean wrote about this experience in The Voice of the Night. Fourteen-year-old Colin has to go on a fishing trip with his father, who is divorced from his mother. He dislikes the bloody brutality of the men who revel in the gore of a gutted shark, and the experience leaves him shaken and nauseated. His father disapproves, insisting that Colin is trying to embarrass him — and he nearly disowns the boy. Colin does not share his father’s love of the sport, and the realization that they are so different leaves him feeling vulnerable.
A year later, Florence encouraged Ray to try one more time to invite Dean along. “I guess she thought it was a good thing that fathers and sons do something together,” he muses, “so he took me fishing again. I didn’t really want to go and it was the same story all over again, and that was the end of that.”
Following this inability to engage his son in the one activity that he loved, Ray withdrew. Dean was not the son he wanted and he made little effort to be involved with Dean’s life. If Dean was in a play at school, he ignored it, as he did with Dean’s birthday. Even at Christmas, when the bars were closed, he usually just slept in, leaving Dean to open his gifts with his mother. When Ray did get up, he started drinking. “The worst thing I can remember about Christmas day,” says Dean, “is that he’d make eggnog, and that was just a cover for all the whiskey he’d put in.” As father and son, they just did not get along.
Yet there were normal aspects to Dean’s childhood. The fifties image of the ideal family included a dog, so along came a black and white mongrel pup named Tiny. Dean loved this companion, but as the dog grew increasingly less tiny, he became difficult to control. He liked to dig, and he was energetic and untrained, so he had to be chained in the yard. One day as Dean played with him, Tiny exuberantly wrapped his chain around Dean’s neck and trapped him on the ground. It nearly asphyxiated him. His mother rescued him just in time and insisted Tiny had to go. Dean was heartbroken.
A few years later, they tried a two-year-old terrier mix named Lucky, who had a nervous stomach and regurgitated at every opportunity. She eventually became ill, which meant vet bills that strained the family budget, so Florence had her put to sleep. There were no further experiments with having a family pet.
Another typical childhood experience was church. Florence took Dean to the Saint John’s Reformed United Church of Christ on a regular basis, although Ray refused to accompany them. “I was impressed with the minister there,” says Dean, “Reverend Harry Carolus. He initiated all kinds of programs for kids. So every Sunday I would get dressed up in my one set of good clothes and go to Sunday school and church.” In junior high, Dean took a confirmation class and joined the Church, although his future interest in religion was to take a very different turn.
In Dean’s 1974 novel, After the Last Race, one character, Annie, describes her home life in the way that Dean’s might have been in the days of fifties ideologies: “I was raised in a home that was about as traditional, conservative, all-American, live-by-the-rules as you could find. I grew up thinking the world was fair, that God was good, and that you could always trust the government.”10 As a boy, Dean believed in the benevolence of authority and was raised to respect it.
This was the influence of his mother and those members of his extended family who compensated for Ray’s poor fathering. Although some thought Dean would grow up to be just like his father, others nurtured him.
One of the most important figures of Dean’s childhood was his uncle Ray Mock, who was married to his mother’s sister Kate. At five-foot-seven, he was a stocky man with a pleasing round face, a brushcut, and a receding hairline. He had served in World War II, and when Dean was a boy, worked as a truck mechanic. Until Dean was thirteen, Uncle Ray and Aunt Kate lived two houses away and had a son, Jim, who was nearly four years older than Dean.
Looking back, Dean thought that Kate seemed to suffer from a bipolar disorder, which sometimes made things difficult. “Aunt Kate could be real sweet,” he recalls, “and the next time you saw her, she was just like my grandmother, a real dragon lady. She was so erratic. I don’t think my Uncle Ray had a whole lot of pleasure going home.” When Aunt Kate was in her darker moods, Uncle Ray seemed like the classic henpecked husband. He hung his head and did what she asked.
As a result of their mutual misfortunes in marriage, Uncle Ray grew close to Dean’s mother, and he treated Dean as his own son. “I think there was a thin line always being walked there,” says Dean, “because Uncle Ray paid more attention to me than my father did.”
Uncle Ray was fun-loving. For Dean’s entertainment, he devised games, such as sneaky ways to get a beer when Kate was not looking. Once when all the relatives came together for the annual fair, they decided to have a seance. Uncle Ray put a shuffleboard puck on his knee under the table to provide the spooky knocking sound that everyone expected. Dean loved these pranks.
“Ray Mock was the kind of person who drew everyone,” says Nancy Eckard, who became his daughter-in-law. “He did things for Dean that Dean would have wanted from his father. Ray loved kids. He had a following. He handed out candy to every kid in the neighborhood.”
Uncle Ray provided for Dean the kinds of adventures fathers give to their sons, especially as his own son Jim became a teenager. One thing he liked to do was brew peach brandy. Late in the summer, he would pick Dean up and take him around to neighbors to collect discarded peach peelings. “He knew everybody who had peach trees and who canned them or made peach jelly,” says Dean, “and he’d arrange to get all their peelings. Then we’d take them back and put them in these big drums and add some yeast and sugar and put the lid on. We’d be in this oddly lighted basement, brewing this stuff together, and there was a hushed quality about it, because Kate really wouldn’t want him to make it. It had this sort of mystical aura. But when the fermentation process started, you had to be careful because the brew could build so much pressure that the cap exploded off the drum. I can remember comic moments when I’d be going down into the cellar and I’d hear this BOOM and I’d see peach peelings all over the ceiling. It was great fun.
“I think in some ways, Uncle Ray knew that I had no father and he tried to make sure there was a male in the family with whom I could do a little bonding; I wouldn’t have thought of it in those terms, but if I was around and he had an errand, he’d come by and see if I’d want to go with him. I always would. We’d talk for hours about stuff that was going on. Sometimes he’d stop at this one bar and have a draft and I’d get a Coke. It always made me feel like I was grown up, and no matter where we went, everybody liked to see him.”
Ray Mock proved to be a positive figure in Dean’s life. “I think he had an impact on me. I’m sentimental and so was he. We both cry easily. I’d like to think there’s a good deal of him in me.” Dean later dedicated his 1997 novel, Sole Survivor, to this man. To some degree, Uncle Ray also influenced the character of Joe Carpenter’s father in that novel and of Marty Stillwater in Mr. Murder. “When I have a male character who is good-hearted and good with kids, I would say there are elements of my Uncle Ray in him,” Dean affirms. “Marty Stillwater is probably the ultimate example of a male character who is tough in everything but when it really comes down to it, he’s soft-hearted, and that aspect is definitely from my Uncle Ray. He was a funny guy, absolutely one of the most sweet-tempered people you’d ever meet in your life.”
Nancy Eckard adds a significant observation: “Flo and Ray were so much alike in the way they treated people, in their kindness, their humor, and their upbeat personalities. My husband Jim made the comment more than once that his dad should have married Aunt Dodie.”
Dean also spent a lot of time with his mother, talking and playing card games. When they could afford a television set, they watched that together. Before Dean’s grandfather died, the three of them often sat on rocking chairs on the porch, just passing the time in lazy conversation. Or Florence would take Dean over to Ginny’s or Kate’s. “I spent a lot of time sitting in the kitchen, the only kid present, listening to adults talk. I used to love that. It could be why I like writing dialogue.”
His mother also took him visiting. When she could get the car for a Sunday outing, they might drive all the way to Pittsburgh to visit Uncle George, or to Lancaster to see Aunt Betty’s family. Eventually Florence got a cheap used car of her own, and these trips increased in frequency. Her old Studebaker wheezed and rattled but never broke down. About once a month when the weather was good, they would get in and drive.
Dean loved his mother’s company. “I can remember being in that car when I was seven or eight. When we were on the road, there was no danger that my father would show up. We were free. Maybe this is where my love of the highway comes from. I can get in the car and drive for eight, ten, twelve hours, and love every minute of it. I just love being on the road and seeing new places.”
Without realizing the connection, Dean included this feeling of safety as part of Chyna Shepherd’s character in his 1996 novel, Intensity. “Chyna says the only peace she had was on the road, going to and from somewhere,” Dean notes. “As long as I was in the car, there was no chance of my father being around and we were safe.”
One of Dean’s favorite places to go was Jerome, where his parents once had lived. It was an hour or so west of Bedford. His mother had friends there named Helen and Steve Harmon. Steve had been a coal miner, but as a young man had come down with rheumatoid arthritis that crippled him. Yet he did not let his handicap depress him. Dean found him delightful to be around, and he and his wife and two daughters seemed straight out of those fifties television shows that featured perfect families. Although Ray claimed that Steve Harmon was actually his best friend, Florence could rarely get him to give up fishing to join them for a visit. He went once or twice and never went back. Dean did not mind; he liked having Stevie’s full attention.
“When I first knew Stevie,” he recalls, “he hobbled with a cane, but you never heard him complain, never a peep, although he must have been in terrible pain most of the time. He was a very gentle person, always in good humor, despite suffering. He was a very appealing person in his basic manners, the kind of person you like as a kid. In a strange way, he always reminded me of Uncle Ray. They were both gentle and both had a good sense of humor. They never strained to be liked — but everyone did like them. They had a good handle on life and had a fairly humble sense of themselves. They actually had a little bit of a physical resemblance, too.” Stevie, as much as Uncle Ray, influenced the way Dean developed the character of Joe Carpenter’s good-natured, long-suffering father in Sole Survivor.
“I was so impressed with Stevie. In later years, he wore leg braces and had a torturous time getting around, but he just would not give up.” Dean watched this heroic response to a difficult situation and wondered how he himself would act in such circumstances. It inspired him that Stevie and his wife remained cheerful and warm. “They were very solid people, and for me to see him always keep his good humor and never get angry or blame anybody for it — in that sense, he was a model for me, a model of a survivor. Of not letting life get you down no matter what happens. That’s a gift to everyone around you. I think probably there’s a lot of Stevie in Regina in Hideaway. Regina has this leg brace and a deformed leg and hand, but she’s a totally positive person. She was a character I just adored writing about. She has Stevie’s indomitable spirit and his good heart. She has her conversations with God all the time, and it would never occur to her to move away from faith just because she’s got these afflictions.”
Some of Stevie also went into the character of Joel Tuck in Twilight Eyes. Despite Tuck’s alarming physical handicaps, he retains a sense of dignity and compassion that defies expectation.
Florence Koontz, Stevie Harmon, and Ray Mock together had a decidedly significant influence on Dean. In them, he saw people who did not feel victimized just because things were not going well. Life went on and one made the best of it. Love and caring went a long way toward making difficult situations tolerable. Being close to his mother and to the people she befriended provided Dean with important resources for defying the prophecy of those who believed that he would grow up to be just like his father. From people who modeled a positive outlook, he absorbed the attitudes he would need to make his own way. Even as a young boy, he was developing a strength of character that would stand him in good stead.
1Ned Frear, Bedford County: A Brief History (Bedford, PA: Frear Publications, 1985).
2According to Ned Frear, publisher of the Bedford Gazette.
3Martin Greenberg, Ed Gorman, and Bill Munster, The Dean Koontz Companion (New York: Berkley, 1994), p. 21.
4Gianni Rodari, The Grammar of Fantasy, translated by Jack Zipes (New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1973), 1996.
5Dean Koontz, Strange Highways, in Strange Highways (New York: Warner Books, 1995), p. 5.
6Dean Koontz writing as Deanna Dwyer, Legacy of Terror (New York: Lancer, 1972), p. 88.
7Dean Koontz, “Beautiful Death” in Beautiful Death, edited by David Robinson (New York: Penguin Studio, 1996).
8Ibid.
9Dean R. Koontz, Phantoms (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Berkley edition, 1983), pp. 60–61.
10Dean R. Koontz, After the Last Race (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 42.