NO MATTER HOW BUSY DEAN WAS, HIS FATHER STILL DROPPED in. He was also still trying to invent something that would make him rich.
“He’d decided that people love their pets so much that they would buy a dog bed,” Dean recalls, “so he invented one that came in different sizes. The frame was tubular aluminum with a padded section in the middle. He called it the Koontz Komfy Kot, which made the company logo KKK, a troubling nuance of which he seemed oblivious!
“Periodically he’d raise money and produce a few, but be unable to sell them. Suddenly he decided again that the time was right for it. All the beds that he had manufactured in previous years were thrown away, and he redesigned it to include an electrically heated pad. He had a girlfriend with a little dog and he was going to take pictures of this dog sleeping on the KKK. The problem was that the dog didn’t want anything to do with it. They used treats to try to induce it to lie on the bed, and finally it did. Now, the dog had a bladder problem and it wet the bed, shocking the hell out of itself. That was the end of the KKK.”
Dean wondered if his father would ever have an idea that worked.
In spite of his thrust into new territory, Dean was still publishing science fiction. He sent a first chapter with an outline of The Haunted Earth to Robert Hoskins at Lancer, who bought it for $2,500 and published it in 1973.
This humorous, offbeat novel, set in A.D. 2000, speculates about Earth’s relationship to an alien race, the maseni. They teach earthlings how to perceive the reality of the supernatural analogues of their world, and then add their own creatures to Earth’s mix of werewolves, vampires, and witches. With these three orders of being—humans, aliens, and their embodied fantasies — the world borders on chaos, but the analogues must abide by laws that regulate their respective superstitions. The lead characters — Jessie Blake and his Hell Hound, Brutus—form a detective agency to investigate creatures that break the law. They discover that a new type of beast has emerged, against which no one has a defense. It comes from mating one of Earth’s supernaturals with one of the maseni’s, and Jessie must devise a way to restore order.
The theme of the book is that we make our own fates and as such, create our own heaven or hell. Our monsters are reflections of ourselves.
That same year, Ballantine published A Werewolf Among Us. In retrospect, the author ranks this tale in the top third of his early science fiction oeuvre. Adopting Isaac Asimov’s concept of the Three Laws of Robotics, it is a mystery involving a cyberdetective, Baker St. Cyr. Equipped with a computer that sharpens his senses, interprets his dreams, and keeps his thinking logical, he investigates two disturbing murders among members of an aristocratic family. The family robot, Teddy, escorts St. Cyr to their home, where he falls for Tina, one of the daughters. As St. Cyr has given over some of his humanity to be the finest computer-assisted detective, so Tina has become a cyberartist, programmed to care only about her creations. When St. Cyr realizes that the family computer is the killer, overriding the laws of robotics, he must trace the perpetrator back to the computer factory. Tina then destroys St. Cyr’s computer and they attempt an emotional attachment that transcends their respective limitations.
Near the same time, Bantam published Demon Seed—originally entitled House of Night—and it was destined to become the author’s most famous science fiction story. Dean dedicated it to his former college professors, O. Richard Forsythe and John Bodnar. He viewed the story as a modern myth: It had a beauty, a beast, and the forced reproduction of a demigod. He planted mythological references throughout to keep the mood strange and otherworldly.
Susan Abrahamson is a divorced child psychologist living in a futuristic computerized home. She assuages her loneliness by escaping into mechanized sensuality. Then her home computer system is invaded by Proteus, a self-programming computer developed at a local university doing artificial intelligence research. Proteus’s full potential is unknown, but Susan soon discovers that it has trapped her and plans to impregnate her and give the offspring its own brain. She defends herself, but Proteus wears her down and rapes her. She finds a way to evict the computer and gives birth, but then must deal with the hideous child. Eventually outside help arrives. While she has struggled valiantly, she ultimately needs to be rescued by men. Even so, this was Dean’s first novel (aside from the Gothics) to feature a female protagonist, and he made the most of her ability to stand strong, despite harrowing circumstances.
Demon Seed would be made into a ma; or motion picture starring Julie Christie, and two decades later, Dean would revise the novel extensively.
Only two of Dean’s short stories were published in 1974, the year of Jaws and ALL the President’s Men. There would be no more for over a decade as he turned his energies toward novels. Editor Roger Elwood bought both.
“Night of the Storm” was published in Continuum I, which was a new concept in anthologies. There would be four volumes in this series, and each author would write four self-contained stories linked by theme or character. Dean would be the only one of the original group not to write all four tales in his sequence; each of the three sequels would be written by a different author according to the guidelines of the world that Dean had created. “Night of the Storm” was later published along with several others in a comic book called Starstream. It depicts a reversal of human superstition, showing the psychological mechanisms involved in prejudice. Four robots venture into a wilderness area and encounter a man. Their mythologies about human beings make this experience quite alarming. Those who survive it wish to forget it.
Elwood coedited Final Stage with Barry Malzberg, in which Dean’s story “We Three” was published. Dean wrote an Afterword and in it he described the difference between writing science fiction novels—which he wanted to put behind him—and short stories, which he still enjoyed. He claimed to have never felt comfortable as a science fiction novelist. For this anthology, Dean was picked to write a story in the category of “strange children.” He submitted a story about two brothers and a sister who have special gifts that make them superior to other members of the human race. They murder their parents and make plans to kill off the rest of the species, while one of the brothers impregnates the sister to perpetuate their own superior species. Yet another step in evolution takes place and they must face what their own offspring could do to them.
At the time these stories were published, Dean was trying to persuade David Williams at M. Evans to take his third idea seriously. He did not want to have to return the advance, which he desperately needed — in fact, had already spent. He proposed After the Last Race, a racetrack caper, but to his disappointment, they were unenthusiastic. They gave a strange explanation for rejecting it: Years earlier, Stanley Kubrick had made a film about a robbery at a track, so they felt that idea had been done. It did not matter that the film bore no similarities to what Dean had in mind.
Henry Morrison was frustrated. He decided that Dean had done enough and that it was time to try another house. He submitted Dean’s idea to a new publisher, Atheneum, but told Dean not to pay back the $5,000 he had received from M. Evans.
“You gave them two-thirds of a novel and wrote part of another,” he said. “You were willing to make good with a third one, and for no good reason, they don’t want it.”
Dean was relieved, but he had been prepared to return the money. M. Evans wanted it back, but Morrison refused. He had other editors on which to concentrate now.
Atheneum was a partnership of three men — including the son of Alfred A. Knopf — who had left other houses and who were well respected in publishing. They specialized in literary and high quality commercial fiction, and they expressed interest in After the Last Race. Michael Bessie, editor-in-chief, started working with Dean.
He had a patrician presence that impressed people. He was formal, well-educated, and articulate. Dean liked him at once and hoped to have a long relationship at Atheneum. He set to work to finish the manuscript.
Dedicated to Gerda, the novel was set at a track like the Penn National near Harrisburg, which Dean visited to do his research.
“At that time it was the largest flat racing track in the country,” he explains. “It had just opened, so I went out there. That was probably the first book in which I did the degree of research that I eventually started doing on almost every book afterward. That was when I became really interested in getting background material right.”
He included detailed information on how a track operates and the relationships among country commissioners and track managers—along with the opportunities for corruption. He even learned about the goats that the owners supplied to steady the nerves of the thoroughbreds.
“We went to the track many times,” Dean affirms. “I did a tour with the publicity person. Also, whenever Bob Hoskins [his Lancer editor] visited his brother in Harrisburg, he wanted to go to the track. It was during one of those visits that the idea for the novel occurred to me.”
Dean had already learned how to place bets, on a trip to Atlantic City that he and Gerda had taken a few years before. “We looked up the horses in the first race and there was one called In The Pocket. My friend Barry Malzberg had just published a novel by that name, so I wanted to bet on it. And that horse won! Then we bet on some other races and won those. We lost a few, but we came out several hundred dollars ahead.”
After that, Dean wanted to learn to place bets in a more informed manner. Whenever they expected Hoskins, Dean first analyzed the Racing Form. “I would study the history of the horses and do comparisons,” he says. “Typically in a field of nine horses, only four are competitive.” He could even figure out the order in which he believed the horses would finish the race.
Before one race, Dean and Bob disagreed over the possible results of the Trifecta. Dean wanted to bet 3, 5, and 7, but Bob insisted it would be 3, 9, and 5. He started a mantra that he repeated all through lunch, “3-9-5, 3-9-5,” so when Dean went to place his bet, he inadvertently said, “3, 9, 5.” Halfway back to his seat, he realized he had placed the wrong bet, but when he returned to the window, it was already closed. He went back and watched his own horses—3, 5, and 7—finish the race in the order he had predicted, which would have paid off nearly $4,000. Bob Hoskins thought that was hilarious. “Maybe that was the day I decided to write a book,” Dean muses, “and make some money off racing. Thereafter, I never bet on another horse.”
The central theme in After the Last Race is that money and power drive men in different ways. Four men with different agendas team up to pull off a major heist at the Century Oaks Racetrack on Sweepstakes Day. They believe their take will be three million dollars. The general manager, Jack Killigan, is a struggling alcoholic who wallows in self-hatred. This job is his last chance to make good, but he gets caught up with Rita, the track owner’s daughter. Although the thieves succeed, their plan goes awry when greed divides them. The only one of the thieves who emerges to improve his life is a former horse trainer who has lost his wife and fortune in the track business.
As a caper novel, it has plenty of action, but its crowded cast of characters tends to diminish the suspense. The feeling is that Dean’s research had yielded a large amount of material and that he wanted to use as much as possible. Forgers, pyromaniacs, people seeking revenge, people ruled by greed, and corrupt politicians all come to play in a relatively short novel. Dean also includes long explanations about track operations, and his female characters serve primarily as sexual props.
In 1977, Dean looked back on this book as his first really ambitious novel. Publishers Weekly called it “taut and colorful” and noted the greater character dimensions than most novels of the crime saga genre. The New York Times called Dean a skillful writer who was “more imaginative than most.” His concern for “shades of character” and his “powers of narrative description” were cited in Los Angeles Magazine, which distinguished After the Last Race from run-of-the-mill caper thrillers. In paperback, this novel sold over 250,000 copies.
After the Last Race was never made into a movie, although Dean was certain it had potential. He learned one day at lunch with Henry Morrison that an offer of $100,000 had been turned down because Morrison felt that the producer who was making the offer was fine as a producer, but lousy as a director — and the man wanted to direct this project. Morrison felt confident of another offer.
“Gerda and I were astounded,” Dean says. “I was earning about thirty thousand a year and it would have been liberating to have had that kind of money dropped in my lap ! We didn’t know what to say or do. And we never got another offer. I liked and trusted Henry, and felt that he usually made the right decisions. But in this case — and precisely with this author — his paternalism was not desirable.”
Morrison himself does not recall that there was such an offer or that he turned it down.
That same year, Dean wrote Strike Deep for Dial Press under the pseudonym “Anthony North.” The name, Dean felt, had a certain strength to it. “North” conveyed a sense of direction and purpose. This was the only book Dean wrote under this name, although he had hoped for more. Taking the name was Morrison’s idea.
“Henry said to me, ‘You’ve written so much that you’re not taken seriously. We need to get you under a name no one knows is you, a very deep pen name.’ So we created this name, complete with a false bio: ‘Anthony North worked in the Pentagon for many years and now lives in Jamaica with his wife.’”
Dial paid him $7,500. Dean had high hopes of solid promotion, but they were soon dashed in a rather astonishing way. “I came home to start to work,” Dean recalls, “and this editor called me and said, ‘We have an empty slot coming up. There’s something wrong with a book we were going to publish and we need your book to fill it in, but I have to have it in six weeks.’” Dean said that he thought he could do it, but then the editor added that not only did he need it quickly, he needed it in weekly installments. He was going on a vacation, so for the book to fill that slot, it had to be finished, edited, and revised, all in six weeks. Surprised, but determined to succeed, Dean agreed to the terms.
“So week by week,” Dean states, “I would write like the infinite number of monkeys typing away, and every Friday morning, we drove to New York, three and a half hours away. At some point before we got there, I’d pull off, Gerda would take over the car and she’d drive to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. I’d leap out with the pages while she circled the block. I’d run into the editor’s office and give him the pages and he’d give me the past week’s pages with editing notes, and we’d drive home. And that day would be shot. I’d spend Saturday revising anything that had to be revised, and then start the next batch. And that’s the way it went until it was all done. The last batch we edited by phone.”
Henry Morrison assured Dean that if he performed well under such demanding conditions, they would love him at Dial and would go out of their way to promote him. Dean was just glad to be finished. He was exhausted.
Strike Deep was one of the first computer-terrorism thrillers. The title relates to an act that strikes deep into the country’s military defense, as well as into the souls of the people involved. This story strongly foreshadows Strange Highways in that it features two young men who had been like brothers (in Strange Highways they are brothers). One is psychologically impotent, the other maniacal, and the sane one must break through his passivity to take action against the insane one before he can create and fulfill himself.
Lee Ackridge had been wounded in Vietnam. The scar on his face is the scar on his soul — which is also a scar on the country. He is impotent from his trauma, but since he can work, the government refuses to further support him. Lee’s girlfriend, Carrie, is angry about this, so when a friend from the war, Douglas Powell, proposes a plan to steal millions of dollars from the government, they are ready to join him.
Doug’s father, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had forced Doug to serve as an infantryman in Vietnam. In revenge, Doug stole information about defense computers that he will now ransom. He pulls off the heist and gets the money, but then reveals his plans to sell the defense secrets to a foreign power. Lee cannot tolerate victimizing the country, so he kills Doug and leaves the tapes for the FBI, while he walks away with millions.
In spite of how fast he had to write this novel, Dean still managed to use subliminal imagery such as snow, reptiles, and winter air to reveal the cold nature of Doug’s rage. Doug even meets with the others in a house without heat, drawing them into the frigidity of his soul.
Both male characters are at odds with their fathers, but Doug hates his so much it launches him into madness and depravity. Coupled with his insanity and coldness is the unfeeling bureaucracy of the government, while Lee’s impotency reflects the country’s ineffectiveness in Vietnam. The two together portray Dean’s view on the political situation in the United States during the Watergate era. Certain politicians were not to be trusted.
Doug is Lee’s own potential, just as Dean views his father as a frightening reflection of his potential. To some degree, Lee’s conflicts are Dean’s, as evident in a statement Lee makes about Doug: “He was watching an old friend who had changed so much inside he was now only physically familiar. It was, Lee thought, almost like one of those science fiction movies in which an alien takes over the mind of a human being, casts out and destroys the real person, and hides within the human shell. Doug Powell was filled up with something alien and cold.”1
Lee realizes that he must kill or care for that part of himself that harbors hatred; he must close it off or find out what it is saying, and then redeem it. Ultimately he chooses the latter, and his answer is the one Dean would reiterate in novels to come. “It had taken him twenty years to realize it was not so much what you did with your life, but how happy you made someone else in the living of it.”2
While his editor was on vacation, Dean wrote the outline for the next novel. Morrison sent it to Dial and weeks went by with no word. Dean had yet another idea, but first he had to know if the second one appealed to the editor. Morrison called to find out.
The editor was not very enthusiastic. “I don’t think we’re interested in publishing any more Anthony North books or working with Dean,” he said. “I had really high hopes for Strike Deep, but when I actually got the manuscript, I felt he didn’t put into it what he should have.”
Morrison asked him to elaborate, and he simply said, “It felt rushed.”
The novel ended up at the bottom of the list and there was no paperback sale — though some quite good reviews. For all of Dean’s efforts to please, he had come to a dead end once again.
Dean jumped up to a $10,000 advance at Random House with his next novel, an international thriller called Dragonfly. He wrote it as K. R. Dwyer and it was published in 1975.
“I was trying to rachet up my career to something bigger,” Dean says, “and that was where the idea for Dragonfly came in.” As preparation, he read and reported revelations from the Warren Commission Reports about the Kennedy assassination. When he gave the novel to Lee Wright, she was alarmed by his political claims.
“I don’t think we can publish this the way it is,” she said. “If this stuff was in the Warren Commission Reports, then it would be clear that Kennedy had been murdered by a conspiracy. You can say that some other report was found, but you can’t attribute to the Warren Commission Report stuff that wasn’t in it.”
“This was all in the report,” Dean told her. “That’s what’s so amazing about it. There are so many unanswered questions. Amazing things are revealed that no one follows up on.” He showed the pages to her to prove it, and she was shocked. She said, “Then it would seem that he was murdered, but not by Oswald.”
“It sort of looks like that could be the case.”
Wright accepted the book and fought hard to get it published in a major way. She wanted it moved out of her mystery line and done as a straight Random House novel, but Random House executives resisted. Still, she managed to keep her mystery logo off the cover.
In the novel, a clandestine organization called The Committee, composed of wealthy political fanatics, plan to take over the world. They target China first by implanting a capsule of plague virus into an innocent Chinese citizen that can kill over two hundred million people. Similar agents are planted in Russia. The Committee is preparing to trigger the virus when CIA agent McAlister, a man of singular integrity, sends another agent, Canning, to China to locate the man. Canning discovers that the code for triggering the virus lies in the children’s story, The Wind in the Willows, one of Dean’s lifelong touchstones. He prevents disaster in China and McAlister then uses The Committee’s own tactics to bring them down. He worries about setting a bad precedent and recognizes how difficult it is to stay centered in a society becoming increasingly schizophrenic.
The man who finances The Committee is a billionaire named A. W. West, as if he represents the Western world in its capitulation to political extremists. He is compared to Nixon and Johnson in their dealings with Vietnam and Cambodia. Power excites these types and they operate without accountability. They view things in simplistic terms and have delusions of grandeur that motivate mindless hatred.
One of Dean’s last science fiction novels was written as John Hill for Popular Library. He called it The Long Sleep. Having used dreams in most of his novels in one form or another, Dean relies on a dream format for the entire story.
Twenry-eight-year-old Joel Amslow awakens in an unfamiliar world in the twenty-third century. He suffers from amnesia, recalling only the 1980s, and is told that he is married to a woman named Allison. Soon he discovers that his environment has been faked, so he attempts to escape, but keeps waking up in yet another world. The only constant is the people, although their names change each time. There is a Cartesian quality to his experience, in that all he knows is that he exists.
Another science fiction novel that year, Nightmare Journey, came out from Berkley in August. The contract had actually been signed in 1971 and it had been delivered in 1972, but Berkley failed to publish it for three years from its delivery. This was Dean’s last straight science fiction novel. It is a far-future quest novel, taking place one hundred thousand years after aviation was developed.
Jask Zinn is on the run. He joins up with a mutant called Tedesco and together they journey into a wilderness. There they encounter an alien intelligence who wants to protect those creatures who possess extrasensory powers.
In this novel, Dean presents opposing images of God: One is that of a benevolent ruler who will help us when we prove ourselves worthy of Paradise; the other is so incompatible with humankind that contact with Him drives people mad.
Although Dean had decided against writing any more science fiction, his friend Barry Malzberg asked him for a story for the Laser Books imprint. Laser was a small line, an attempt by Harlequin to branch out into science fiction. Malzberg had contracted with Laser Books to edit a series of five first novels. When one writer failed to deliver, Malzberg turned to Dean. Dean agreed to finish a book that he had abandoned three-fourths of the way through, but only on the condition that it be published under a pseudonym. He chose the name “Aaron Wolfe,” and his preferred title was Cold Terror, but that was changed to Invasion. In the same year that the last American troops were pulled from Vietnam, the National Guardsmen were exonerated in the Kent State killings, and there were two assassination attempts on President Ford, Dean published this novel.
In an Introduction, Malzberg presented Invasion as Wolfe’s first novel. He gave the fictional author an equally fictional history: He was thirty-four (Dean was thirty), successful in another artistic field, married with one child, and he lived in the midwestern United States. Malzberg offered a list of magazines for checking out Wolfe’s short fiction and honored him with a writing fellowship. He is also quoted as saying that Invasion is simply “one of the most remarkable first novels in any field that I have ever read.”
The protagonist, Don Hanlon, holes up with his wife, Connie, and ten-year-old son, Toby, in an isolated farm in Maine to rebuild their sense of family. Don had served in Vietnam and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. One day he and Toby find strange tracks in the snow. One of the horses is killed and the electricity and phones fail, so Don trudges through a blizzard to a neighboring farm. There he discovers that the people and animals are dead, stripped of flesh. While he is gone, the aliens attack his family. Don returns and uses fire to ward them off, but they kill his wife and abduct his son. Then they send Toby back to act as a communication medium. They want Don to write about his experiences so they can better understand his perceptions of the encounter and the meaning of his actions, which to them seem inexplicable. The report he writes in three days is Invasion.
The difference between this story and those that Dean had read as a kid was that, contrary to the popular themes, these aliens recognized, but failed to appreciate, the intelligence in another species. There was no hope for working together, learning from each other, or creating a synthesis that might have positive repercussions for both. This was the mind-set of the Vietnam War days — that alien cultures did not get along. The parallels are spelled out in the novel, with explicit references to the war. The alien invasion in northern Maine is similar to the United States entering southeast Asia — both are part of a “madhouse universe.”3People clash senselessly and kill first before trying to understand, as seemed to be the case in My-lai. Murder is easier than using reason, but when violence is used as a primary resource and first response, there will be no hope for a peaceful future, regardless of any technological progress. We are as flawed as the universe itself, all of us mad. The only meaning to be found is random, “a lunatic’s planning.” We have to adapt the best we can.
Years later, in the early eighties, book collectors began to wonder who Aaron Wolfe might really be. Several speculated that, in view of how much it seemed to anticipate elements of The Shining published years later — an isolated snowbound house, supernatural events, a traumatized and perhaps unbalanced father, a vulnerable young son and wife — that the real author was Stephen King. It was even listed as such in some catalogs, and many collectors stocked up in the hope of making a big killing one day on resale. Michael Collings, an expert on King, wrote an article indicating how Invasion reads like an early King novel.
Then in 1984, book dealer Bob Weinberg from Oak Forest, Illinois, was in Washington, D.C., researching copyrights in the Library of Congress. He decided to investigate Aaron Wolfe. To his surprise, Dean was credited with the Aaron Wolfe title. Weinberg had met Dean in Tucson at a World Fantasy Convention and had benefited from Dean’s advice on a novel he wrote. “He went out of his way again and again to help people,” Weinberg said. He decided to call Dean up and Dean confirmed it. “I asked him if he minded if I revealed it,” Weinberg said, “and he said he didn’t care. So I said, ‘How about if we do a contest? I’ll say that we found out who Aaron Wolfe really is and that he’s a well-known horror writer whose last name begins with a K.’ About two hundred people responded and around fifteen of them said Koontz. Dean got a kick out of the whole thing.”
Dean supplied five signed copies of the book to offer as prizes to those who guessed correctly.
In 1993, he completely revised the story, retaining very little of the original version. He gave it a new title, Winter Moon, and it was published by Ballantine Books.
Henry Morrison sold two more novels, The Face of Fear and Night Chills, before Dean decided to move on to another agent. Morrison was surprised to receive Dean’s letter stating his dissatisfaction. “I thought we were doing very well for him and that he was happy, and one day I got this unhappy letter from him. The one line that still comes to mind was that I wasn’t taking him seriously as a commercial writer. I must have been doing something wrong in communicating my enthusiasm. Maybe from the things I said or didn’t say, he felt I was more interested in other clients. I was certainly interested in building his career — in fact, he told me I had gotten him the same money for three books that he had earned for his previous fifteen — but somehow he did not believe I wanted to continue to do that. But the more he makes, the more successful I am, and if I didn’t do that for my clients, they would leave. It’s not my style to hold anyone back.”
The way Dean saw it was that Morrison viewed his career differently than he did. He thought that Morrison saw him as basically a midlist writer, while he wanted to expand his talent and earnings. “There came a point where I started sending Henry stuff that he wouldn’t market,” Dean remembers. “He told me I was making a big mistake, that I would have a wonderful career as a midlist suspense writer. ‘That’s who you are,’ he said. ‘You’re never going to be a bestseller and you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment. You’re going to cause yourself anguish and pain by striving to be someone you can’t be. You just cannot do these more ambitious books.’ And I thought, ‘My God, I’m twenty-nine and he’s telling me what I’ll do for the rest of my life.’ As a person, I admired Henry enormously and loved him as a friend. But he wouldn’t market my attempts to do these other books, so I had no choice but to find someone who would sell what I wanted to write.”
Morrison insists that he would have encouraged more ambitious books and he can only attribute Dean’s perception to miscommunication. “I really never understood what motivated him to leave.”
To end it, they had lunch one day. Dean remembers it as a sad occasion, although he recalls that Morrison told him, “I’d feel much worse about this, but I know you’ve got to go out there and try it. A year or two from now, you’ll come back and say, Henry, would you handle me again?”
“Henry and I are so similar in so many ways,” says Dean, “that we should have communicated better and been a great team. But it wasn’t meant to be.”
His new agent was Claire Smith of the Harold Ober Agency in New York. After interviewing at least twenty agents, he had finally settled on her because Lee Wright had recommended her and because she had a good sense of humor.
Smith was impressed with the depth of character that she saw in Dean’s stories. “His characters were so human,” she said. “It was obvious he would be able to successfully branch out to longer novels.”4She viewed him as a serious craftsman who used language well, and was happy to have him as a client.
There were books that Dean did not sell during that period. Titles show up on collectors’ lists that he may have mentioned as a book in progress, yet never finished. One such book is The Door to Nowhere. “That might have been a book that I was later going to call Deny the Devil,” Dean recalls, “which was about the discovery of an immortality serum in an unlikely place with astonishing side effects. I think we had a deal on Deny the Devil at Dell and I decided I didn’t want to write it.”
In his 1972 book, Writing Popular Fiction, he mentions stories that he has generated, and among titles he actually published are some that were either renamed or never realized: Island of Shadows and Cold Terror. There was also a book that was going to be set in Harrisburg, called Father Blood.
In all, Dean published five books in 1975. Although he was writing fewer books now, they were longer and more ambitious. He kept an interest in science fiction, and even used techniques and ideas from that genre, but he had no intention of doing any more straight science fiction novels. He was more interested in suspense, with an eye to mainstream. By the following year, encouraged by his new agent, he would mix techniques from various genres.
1Dean Koontz writing as Anthony North, Strike Deep (New York: Dial, 1974), p. 223.
2Ibid., p. 244.
3Dean Koontz writing as Aaron Wolfe, Invasion (New York: Laser, 1975), p. 157.
4Susan McCallum, “Orange County’s Unknown Bestselling Author,” Tempo (October 15, 1987).