IT WAS THE YEAR OF OPEC PRICE INCREASES AND THE HIGH-est rate of unemployment since 1941. In Harrisburg that spring of ‘75, it rained endlessly. Dean and Gerda despaired at the lack of sunshine and remembered California. Gerda said, “Somewhere there’s sun and we’re going to live there.” Since they worked together now — Dean writing, Gerda overseeing the business end of his career — there was no reason they had to stay in Pennsylvania. They decided to pack up and explore other options. Dean knew there was no state income tax in Nevada and that appealed to him. He was more successful now, although still staying just ahead of the bills, and he wanted to keep as much of his money as possible.
They had no qualms about leaving Dean’s father in Pennsylvania. Ray was still living in his trailer, still persuading people to invest in his schemes, and still running around with women. He had his own life and showed no interest in Dean, so in September that year, they left Harrisburg.
“We packed the car and drove west,” Dean explains, “not knowing where we were going to live. Nevada was our first stop. We’d heard that Lake Tahoe was beautiful so we went there. We saw it coming down from Reno, which is the best way to see it, and it was spectacular. The beautiful side is the northern half of the lake, away from all the casinos, but there aren’t many houses, so we started looking at houses in south Lake Tahoe.”
A realtor showed them around and it suddenly occurred to them that Lake Tahoe was a ski resort — with perhaps worse weather than what they had wanted to leave behind in Pennsylvania. They asked about the winters.
“Oh, they’re not bad,” said the man. “Winter is relatively short and it’s the only part of the year you get your precipitation.”
That sounded good, so they found a house they liked, set off the main road, several blocks away from the casinos.
They said to the realtor, “We think this is the place.”
“Okay,” he said. “Do you have a four-wheel-drive vehicle?”
Dean shook his head.
“Well, you might want to consider getting one. They never plow that street in the winter because it just blows over ten minutes later. So everyone who lives up there gets back and forth in four-wheel drive. Some even have their own plows so they can keep the snow down to a reasonable level.”
Dean and Gerda talked this over, decided they had had enough of winter, and left Tahoe for Las Vegas.
“We went down to Vegas,” Dean remarks, “because there’s nowhere else to live in Nevada. The other towns are too small and outsiders don’t fit in.”
Their realtor there was in her late eighties. She sh owed them a one-level ranch-type house with a lease that included an option to buy. They liked it, especially the fact that it had a swimming pool surrounded by an eight-foot wall. One of Dean’s characters in After the Last Race had said that a house with a pool was an indication that one had achieved success, and Dean and Gerda both felt that it was certainly an improvement over their previous living arrangements.
The house was owned by a physician in the middle of a divorce. In the yard were four large desert tortoises that belonged to him. Their droppings were everywhere, exuding a powerful odor, but that would all be removed, Dean was certain, before they moved in. “So I’m feeling really good and full of myself because I’m going to have a house with a forty-foot swimming pool,” he says. “I had never imagined that could happen for me. Then I looked down, and one of these tortoises was taking a dump near my foot. Right then, I should have known there was a serious problem. It was a sign.”
They told the realtor they would sign for the property. Gerda flew back to Pennsylvania to make arrangements for moving the furniture out, while Dean remained at the house. His task was to go out and purchase a bed.
The doctor who owned the house began to show up each day to chat. He often stayed three or four hours and sometimes returned in the evening. Dean was frantic. He was trying to get some work done and this man was taking too much of his time.
“He looked like Lyle Lovett on a bad hair day,” Dean remarks. “He was tubby, with reddish, flyaway hair. He’d just talk and drink sixteen-ounce cans of Coors from his cooler. He talked a lot about this bitter divorce that he’d had. He told me about dreadful things that his wife had done, like taking a sledgehammer and smashing holes in the walls.”
The man kept alluding to how violent his wife was, and then told Dean, “If I were you, I wouldn’t open the door at night to anyone. Maybe I can give you a picture of my ex-wife. Then if you look through the door and see her, don’t open it. She thinks I still live here and she’s threatened to kill me.”
He told Dean that he had installed a steel sheet into the door to protect himself. Dean could see between some of the door panels where the wood had shrunk in the dry air, and there was no steel interior. He was beginning to wonder about this doctor. As he got to know some neighbors, his suspicions were confirmed.
“One day,” he says, “I was edging him toward his car. He’d been through five or six cans of beer. At his car, he opens the cooler, pulls out another can — then sees his watch and says, ‘Oh God, I’m late for an appendectomy!’ He jumps into the car and drives off. I was thinking then that we had made a serious mistake with his house, but I didn’t know how serious until Gerda got back.”
The movers had arrived and begun to unpack when Dean and Gerda noticed odd smells in the house. As more furniture came in, the problem got rapidly worse. Dean mentioned it to a neighbor.
“Oh, I know what it is,” said the man. “They kept forty-two animals. They had desert turtles, dogs, cats, skunks, a raccoon, and two monkeys. None of them was housebroken.”
Gerda called in carpet specialists to see if the rugs could be cleaned. They came and pulled up the carpet and pad all around the house and finally told Dean and Gerda that they would have to throw away the carpet, then sand the entire slab and seal it before laying down a new carpet. Stains from animal waste had seeped into the slab itself.
Dean broke the lease and lost the first month’s rent, but there was no chance they would remain in that house!
They found another realtor, who located an even better house.
“It was really nice,” says Dean. “It had wood paneling inside and was very contemporary. It also had a nicer swimming pool and was on a better side of town.”
There was a little furniture in the house: a bed, two chairs, and a dinette table. The fortyish man showing the house said he was an attorney from Los Angeles whose parents had been living there. He was staying in the house with his nephew and was anxious to get it leased. That was Monday, and Dean arranged to move in on Friday. The lease was signed, and Dean paid a deposit and the first and last month’s rent.
“Friday morning, the moving van arrived at the first house to pack everything,’ Dean relates, “and I drove across town to get the keys from the guy we had rented from. I rang the bell and nobody answered. I knocked on the door and finally this guy opened it about two inches. He’d obviously just crawled out of bed, and it was around eight-thirty in the morning. He looked at me like he didn’t recognize me. I said, ‘We’re moving in.’ He said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s right. I overslept. We’ll be out of here before your truck arrives.’”
Dean went to his car and waited fifteen minutes. The lawyer and his nephew appeared, looking bedraggled. They had cardboard boxes and suitcases, which they jammed into their car. They told Dean they needed to go pick up a truck for the furniture and went speeding off.
Several hours went by. Dean’s movers arrived. He did not yet have keys, but he went to test the door and found the lock broken. He went inside and discovered that there were still clothes in the closet and all the furniture was in place. Dean called the realtor and said, “I’m in this house and they ran out of here to move the furniture, but they haven’t come back. The carpets haven’t been cleaned. Nothing’s clean. What am I to do?”
She said, “Just throw everything out on the lawn and take possession.”
Dean told her, “I don’t feel comfortable doing that. These are not my belongings.”
“You have the lease,” she insisted. “Just toss the stuff outside. They should have known better. They should be out of there.”
“Are you really certain this man owns this house?” he asked.
“What a bizarre question,” she responded. “You’re a very paranoid man.”
“Look,” said Dean. “Something is really wrong here.”
At that moment, a voice behind him asked, “What are you doing in my house?”
Dean turned and saw a man he had never met before, standing with a police officer. He said to the realtor on the phone, “We have a very serious problem here. The police are now here with the real owner, I suspect, to put me out of the house.”
She was flabbergasted. While she was still on the line, Dean tried to explain the situation. He discovered that the two men whom the realtor had been representing were not owners, merely renters who had not paid the rent. This was the day they were to be evicted. In the meantime, they had listed the house with the realtor and had now absconded with Dean’s rent money.
The real owner did not want to lease it to Dean or to anyone. He did not wish to risk repeating this bad experience. Nevertheless, the realtor urged Dean to go ahead and move in, still claiming he had a valid lease. Dean insisted he did not have a valid lease. He felt caught in the middle.
He looked outside where his and Gerda’s belongings were sitting in the truck. They had no place to go. They had just lost a lot of money. The realtor was refusing to take responsibility for representing the renters as the owners. In the end, with no other options, Dean and Gerda went to a hotel.
When the realtor stonewalled them on the following Monday and refused to return any money, they looked up the “For Rent” ads themselves. No more realtors. They called on one and a woman who answered the phone told them she had a house for them, but they would have to follow her because it was hard to find. She told Dean to meet her on Las Vegas Boulevard North at a particular intersection. “Just tell me what you look like and what you’re driving and I’ll find you.” As strange as this all sounded, he decided to follow her instructions.
Dean and Gerda waited in the car for some time, and at one point, Gerda said, “That Cadillac has driven by twice before, and each time it goes by it slows down and that woman gives us a looking over.”
Dean saw a heavyset woman in a Cadillac rounding the corner. A few minutes later she came by again and slowed almost to a stop. She looked them over again. Dean opened the door and waved at her. She pulled over and parked in front of them. “She had set up the meeting so that she could just leave if she didn’t like the looks of us,” Dean recalls. “She spoke to us there on the street for a few minutes and then took us to see the house. It was a good house, although not as nice as the other, but by this point we were desperate. We wanted to get into a home and then figure out what we were doing, so we took it.”
The house was owned by comedian Rip Taylor, who lived two blocks over, around the corner. The large, jovial man with a long mustache stopped by to negotiate, carrying a little poodle. “He was hugely charming,” says Dean. “We chatted and then signed the lease, and he left.” About fifteen minutes later, Taylor’s assistant arrived with a bottle of wine and a bouquet of flowers for Gerda. During that year, they got to know the comedian a little and went to see some of his shows.
However, being in this house did not put an end to their strange encounters. They now seemed to have a ghost.
“We had a weird experience in that house,” Dean relates. “In this one bathroom, Gerda and I kept finding folded twenty-dollar bills on the counter. We’d each think it was the other who was leaving it lying around. One day I asked her about it and she said, ‘I thought you were leaving them.’ Now, either we’re completely insane or something odd was happening there.” Dean wondered whether it might have been his mother attempting to take care of them. “It happened about a dozen times. It wasn’t a fortune. We never really figured out whether one or the other of us was just being forgetful, but it was more fun to tell it as a ghost story.”
They rented the house for most of that year. Dean wrote, while Gerda took classes full-time at the University of Nevada. “I took carpentry and art courses,” she says, “because we were going to remodel and sell houses. That’s what people did there.” She learned how to use a table saw and even built a cabinet herself. Dean set about learning all he could about the city of Las Vegas. He set The Eyes of Darkness there, and part of Shadowfires and Dark Riverd of the Heart.
“There’s lots about the place that I find fascinating and admirable,” Dean says, “but you could never get a car fixed and expect that anything would get done right. In those days, the owner of the gas station might not be there six months later. Everyone was so transient, and those that weren’t treated everyone else as if they were. Vegas is different now. Back then it was about three hundred thousand people — now it’s over a million — and it was a very fluid environment.
“The desert there has an impact on you. Right around your houses, it’s tropical, but the town sits in such a broad valley and sprawls so much that there are big tracts of land that are nothing but undeveloped dirt. I love the desert, but it was hard to take it long-term, especially in its Vegas form.”
At one point, Dean started what he projected would be an eight-hundred-page historical novel on the State of Nevada. “It’s unfinished and may never be finished, but I have massive amounts of research material. I put it aside because I didn’t think I was capable of writing it. Someday I might. It will be historical in the sense that it will relate to the history of gaming in Nevada, but it may go back no further than the 1950s.
“Nevada has an interesting background. It’s been written about endlessly, but I’ve never read anything that I thought really captured the feeling of the place. In that sense, it was like carnivals, which drove me to write Twilight Eyes.”
Dean and Gerda made friends with several interesting people. The woman who found them the house was a character, and they learned a lot from her about how the city worked. “She and her husband owned sixteen or eighteen houses all around town. Her previous husband had been a pit boss at one of the major hotels. He’d told her on his deathbed to marry the handyman who took care of their properties. So she did. She was a real wheeler dealer. She would buy and sell houses for people for cash. I was with her one day when we were looking for houses to buy. She arrives and I get into the car and there’s this grocery bag on the floor. She says, ‘Oh, just put that between your legs or hold it on your lap for me.’ So I do. We go to a couple of different places and she makes one more stop. She says, ‘I have to take that bag of money to this guy.’ This bag sitting on my lap weighs twenty pounds and it’s full of cash! She says, ‘Honey, a lot of people here have so much cash because they’re in the business and they get part of the skim. They build up all this cash and they need to spend it, so sometimes they spend it on houses.’ Then she would tell me how a house would remain on the tax roll in the name of the original owner and would change hands a number of times on private documents, but nobody ever changed the deed. It would be sold for cash in a private sale and people wouldn’t report having received the cash, and the other person bought it with money he hadn’t paid taxes on. So everybody was happy.” She was only too happy to explain how the economics of the city worked in her circles.
After nearly a year, Dean and Gerda bought their first house. It was just up the street from where they were renting, and they stayed where they were while they hired a contractor to remodel the house they had purchased. Yet they never moved in, because events took place that soon inspired them to move on to California.
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” says Dean, “and I witnessed a major crime.” The investigation moved slowly, and given the nature of the crime and the way everyone in that town seemed to know everyone else, Dean and Gerda decided they would feel safer somewhere else. Their friends hated to see them leave, but agreed that they should.
While Dean lived in Las Vegas, he sold The Key to Midnight to Pocket Books. He also had two novels published, Night Chills and Prison of Ice. It was the year of the nation’s bicentennial, and Jimmy Carter was elected president. The film Rocky inspired audiences everywhere. MIT constructed a functional synthetic gene and the U.S. Air Force Academy admitted women for the first time.
Night Chills was Dean’s second novel for Atheneum. He dedicated it to Gerda. Set in a small town in Maine, its primary theme was subliminal manipulation as a tool of totalitarian control. It presents the logical consequences of a potential social danger, the dark side of technology, and the making of evil minds. Gerda had spent hours researching these topics in the library, marking what she thought Dean should read. In an Introduction, Dean talks about the realities of subliminal and subaudial manipulation as a threat to human freedom and privacy. In the hands of ruthless people, these techniques can pose a genuine social danger. All of the devices that he includes in the story, except for the drug — which made subliminal manipulation far easier — are real. The best defense, the author implies, is being informed. To emphasize this threat, he includes his nonfiction sources. In a letter to a friend, he mentioned that this novel was a “clarion call to civil libertarians.”
Dean uses an unusual technique in the way he structures this tale, alternating chapters in the past and present until the time lines eventually merge. The action moves at a crisp pace. The protagonist, Paul Annendale, is a thirty-eight-year-old veterinarian and widower. With his two children, Rya and Mark, he goes to Black River, Maine, to see Jenny Edison, whose father, Sam, has made a study of fascism. They get caught unawares in an experiment set up by three power-hungry men who have placed a drug in the town’s water supply to test how well they can control minds in a limited area. Eventually they hope to control large populations.
To cover his presence as an observer in this town, one of these men, Ogden Salsbury, poses as a social scientist, but gets involved with the female residents to gratify his sexual cravings. Young Mark Annendale catches him about to perpetrate a subliminally orchestrated rape, and Salsbury orders the mind-controlled police chief to kill the boy. Rya witnesses this and tries to warn her father, but so many people are under the drug’s influence that her entreaties fall on deaf ears. Eventually they manage to turn the experiment around to save themselves and eliminate the perpetrators. Jenny and Paul, grieving over Mark, decide to get married. They use their love to heal.
This story is about the potential monster within — what the subconscious can motivate us to do. Salisbury’s uncontrolled libido had fed his abusive streak. As the monster who appears to be normal, he is the very incarnation of the Freudian theory that the id can have a destructive influence. Even while undetected, it can be quite active in its greedy pursuit of gratification. Each of the three villains is a sociopath of some kind, out for his own advantage with no concern for what happens to those he exploits.
“I had a terrible time getting done with Night Chills,” Dean recalls, “struggling to make it work. When I finished it, I wanted to be sure they would do something with it, but the rumor in the industry was that Michael Bessie was going to leave the company.” They had not done a very good job of advertising After the Last Race, and he was not so sure this novel would fare any better. Dean went into the office with the manuscript and said to Bessie, “I don’t want to put you on the spot, but everyone is hearing that you’re going to leave, and I have something in this box that you might like to have. I’m not going to tell you what it is. I’m just saying, don’t make me deliver this and then leave me in Pat Knopf’s hands, because he doesn’t like my stuff.”
Bessie assured him it was just a rumor. Dean gave him the manuscript and they went to lunch. The following day, Bessie issued an official statement that he was selling out to Pat Knopf.
Dean was stunned. “He had to know that when he induced me to give him the manuscript. So it was never edited; it was published exactly as written because they never assigned me another editor. I wanted to repay the advance and get the manuscript back, but they would not sell. Pat Knopf had a cover designed but did no advertising. He sold the paperback rights to make what money he could out of it. I had put a lot of work into the book, and I think it could have been a bigger step up for me than it was. They published only five thousand copies, and I was devastated. It seemed a betrayal.”
The novel nevertheless received strongly positive reviews. From The Boston Herald it got “convincing, gripping, well-researched. His writing is almost too good for escapist fiction.” The Minneapolis Tribune noted the urgency of its message: “Koontz not only makes his tale believable, he makes it seem inevitable.”
In this novel, Dean was beginning to develop what he called a “cross-genre” approach. “It has a little science fiction, a little horror, a lot of mystery, suspense, a love story, but it’s told from a mainstream point of view. It has mainstream sensitivity, which means the characters are psychologically deeper and the book has dramatic structure at many levels.” From science fiction he got ideas; from horror, mood; and from suspense, he derived a sense of quick pacing.
His editors at Atheneum did not understand. Their only concern was how to market him. If he pursued this style, there was no way to comfortably label him. There was no shelf in bookstores for “cross-genre” writers. Nevertheless, he was determined to develop his own unique approach, and he continued to include these multiple strands in his fiction, even in his pseudonymous work. His style grew stronger with each novel. Yet he was not long for Atheneum.
The other book went to Lippincott. David Bradley, a writer from Dean’s hometown, was an editor there. One day, Claire Smith sent him a manuscript by a writer named David Axton. “She sent over this book to us,” Bradley reports, “and said it was by a prolific writer, but we weren’t supposed to know who it was. I thought he sounded a lot like Brian Coffey and I knew that Coffey was Dean Koontz, so I acquired it. The book was clean. We didn’t do a lot of editing, but I learned a lot from working with him. He was a pro.”
The original title of this novel had been The Edgeway Crisis, and the pseudonym under which it was previously intended to be published was “David Haggard.”
The novel was meant as an homage to Alistair MacLean, a master of the suspense genre that Dean had been reading and author of such adventure classics as The Guns of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra. Dean wanted to see if he could write something similar. He understood that the focus should be on tension, pace, and escalating difficulties. The characters had to be simple. To keep the story moving, he minimized the technical details of such things as submarines and engineering, sometimes finding what he needed in educational books for children, as well as more sophisticated resources.
Dedicated to Dean’s high school English teacher, Winona Garbrick, Prison of Ice was about a team of scientists who volunteer to plant bombs on an iceberg. A worldwide drought threatens crops, so they hope to prove that they can tow large icebergs to drought-stricken coastlines to irrigate the land. To complicate matters, an earthquake isolates them on a giant slab of drift ice with a psychopathic killer bent on revenge. The bombs are set to explode at midnight. Bad weather prevents rescue. Then a Russian espionage submarine comes into the area, captained by a man who has lost his son and who recognizes an opportunity for redemption. He organizes a dangerous rescue. While the team attempts to board the sub, the killer makes his move. The team fights him off. When the ordeal is over, they have all changed for the better.
In this novel, Dean offers his understanding of heroism: There is heroism sought, which is a certain selfish proving of oneself, and heroism unsought, which is the willingness to put one’s life on the line to help others. It was the second form that would become a focus for him as his fiction steadily moved away from an emphasis on plot and toward more focus on character motivation.
He also uses the iceberg as a suggestive metaphor, in that he makes it clear that the most dangerous part is submerged — like the psychopath. The bombs about to detonate represent the person who can be triggered just below the surface to explode. As one character points out: “And if you’re schizophrenic … you might not even realize there’s a killer in you.”1After being set adrift, the scientists had attempted to dig up the bombs but were unable to get them all — just as they cannot ferret out the danger in their midst — or potentially within themselves.
As a side note, Dean uses one character, Rita, to describe what writing a book is like to him. “Writing the first third of the book, you’re having a sexual experience. But you lose that feeling … In the second third of it, you’re just trying to prove something to yourself and to the world. And when you get to the last third, it’s simply a matter of your own survival.”2
“I struggle with doubt with every book,” Dean admits. “About a third of the way into the book, I believe that it’s a gigantic mistake and if I finish, it will ruin my whole career. By the time I get to the end of it, I’m a wreck. Only when the letters start to come in from readers do I realize that it worked the way I had hoped.”
In 1995, he revised this book for Ballantine. While it remained essentially the same story, he changed some of the stereotypes. Rita was less the object of every man’s desire, and all explicit sexual references were toned down or removed. Dean developed the characters more fully, updated cultural and technological references, and diminished the sharply drawn dualities between such traits as optimism and pessimism. Heroism gains a more spiritual dimension, and schizophrenia is no longer associated with psychopaths.
From Las Vegas, Dean and Gerda decided to go to southern California. The woman who had rented them Rip Taylor’s house in Vegas, and who took charge of selling the house there in which they had never lived, had a friend in Orange who lived in a nice apartment complex, Las Verandes Apartments on East Adams Street. They agreed to take an available unit there. They would rent for a while, see how they liked living there, and then look for another house.
Being close to Hollywood, Dean got firsthand knowledge of the production of his 1973 science fiction novel, Demon Seed. An MGM production released by United Artists, it was directed by Donald Cammell. Robert Jaffe and Roger Hirson wrote a screenplay from the novel, and Julie Christie and Fritz Weaver were cast in the primary roles. Marlon Brando had expressed interest in playing both the husband and the voice of the computer, but the producers felt that his quirky style might distract viewers from Julie Christie. Sir Lawrence Olivier was also considered for the voice, but his schedule could not be coordinated with theirs. Finally Robert Vaughn was selected, and Gerda wrote in a letter back to Bedford, “I think he does a superb job.”
The special effects relied on innovative technology, such as a wheelchair with mechanical arms. “It’s such a menacing machine,” Gerda writes, “that it’s difficult to believe it wasn’t created by MGM’s technical staff.” She also noted that the laser beam used to attack a character was real — and dangerous. The director of photography had been the cameraman on Jaws, and his expertise, Gerda thought, “added immensely to the film.” The ninety-five-minute film opened on April 1, 1977, and received an R rating for its sexual content.
Daily Variety gave the film a favorable review. “Excellent performances and direction from a most credible and literate screenplay … the film may well become highly controversial. … the ultimate climax is staggering.”3 The Hollywood Reporter called it one of the most fantastic films since 2001: A Space Odyssey, citing its “excellent use of kaleidoscopic visuals” and credible computer technology.4Years later, however, Video magazine thought it was the most distasteful movie in the past twenty years because it was based on torture, rape, and subjugation. The reviewer did not pick up on Dean’s emphasis on the capacity of the human spirit to endure and triumph, to desire transcendence.
Bantam reissued the novel as a movie tie-in, bringing its total in print copies to over a million.
It was the first real film that had been made from one of Dean’s novels, and although it was not the last, it was the last one he would like until he himself became deeply involved in the process.
Los Angeles would offer opportunities for other types of writing projects, but Dean was also about to launch a few more pseudonyms.
1Dean Koontz writing as David Axton, Prison of Ice (New York: Lippincott, 1976) p. 162.
2Ibid., p. 145–46.
3Daily Variety (March 28, 1977).
4Hollywood Reporter (March 28, 1977).