IN 1980, RONALD REAGAN BECAME PRESIDENT, JOHN LENNON was shot and killed, Jean-Paul Sartre died, and people all over the country wore yellow ribbons to remind themselves of the daily suffering of the U.S. hostages in Iran.
While at work on his next book for Putnam, Dean had the opportunity to write a novelization of a movie for Jove Books, a paperback imprint owned by the Berkley Publishing Group, which in turn was owned by MCA, the corporation that owned Universal Studios. They offered him $40,000 for The Funbouse — the best advance he had received to that point. For this book, Dean used the name “Owen West.” Like “Anthony North,” it conveyed a sense of direction. Berkley’s intention was to launch a “new” horror writer, since horror was a growing market. Now Dean was simultaneously at Berkley, Putnam, Lippincott, and Pocket under four different names.
Larry Block had written a screenplay on which Dean was to base his story, for simultaneous release. Tobe Hooper, director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was shooting the film. “I always thought that transforming a screenplay into a real novel would be interesting and demanding,” Dean says, “so I was motivated by the challenge.”1 He looked over the script, which focused primarily on the horror that happened inside a carnival Funhouse, and began to imagine ways to develop the characters and plot. “I had so much pre-story that I didn’t start to use the screenplay until I had written about four-fifths of the book.”2
Dean knew carnival lore from years of collecting it, inspired by his childhood love of the atmosphere of the Midway. He thought that few American novelists had done much with this subculture with the kind of detail and accuracy he wanted to see. Although much of the story takes place outside the carnival, whenever the Midway is central, Dean fills it with the images he could recall from his own experiences. He presented the carnies as a strong community of outcasts and the freaks as human beings, not merely as exhibits for gawkers, and he defined the barrier that lay between those who ran the carnival and those who attended.
The novel opens with a glimpse into the life of a carnival pitchman, Conrad Straker, whose wife, Ellen, gives birth to a monstrous infant. She kills the child and Conrad bans her, declaring that one day he will take her future children. She marries a lawyer and has two kids, Joey and Amy, while Conrad produces another abnormal child, Gunther, who develops bloodlust as he matures. Conrad then spends years searching the faces of carnival-goers for children that resemble Ellen.
Meanwhile she has become a religious zealot, but her children are compelled to move toward the very things she hates. Joey escapes into a world of horror magazines to make real terrors diminish, while Amy gets pregnant. Ellen drags her to an abortion doctor to prevent her from having a monster.
Joey decides to run away with the carnival, and he encounters Conrad, who knows he belongs to Ellen. Amy arrives there with friends, high on dope. Conrad learns of her relationship to Joey and he lures her and her friends into the Fun-house, where he turns Gunther loose. The three friends are killed, but Amy manages to stab Conrad and rescue herself and Joey.
The film, based only on the carnival scenes, was held back from release, so Dean’s novel went out three months ahead of it. Berkley made it their lead title and gave it an ad budget of $300,000, which included television commercials. It went through eight printings at a rapid pace. This novel was Dean’s second bestseller, but once again, it was under a pen name. It sold steadily — with the expectation of a sharp rise in sales when the movie came out. However, the movie received such negative reviews that it halted sales of the novel. As Hooper had realized it, the film was a typical teenage slasher film with poor character development, predictable twists, and gory deaths. Dean was disheartened. “Instead of serving as an advertisement for the book, the film acted as a curse upon it.”3 It was a year of double-digit inflation, rising oil prices, gas rationing, the government bailout of a major car company, and a dive in the stock market. The whole country was worried about the economy. Dean did not need this kind of setback.
Even so, he went on to write another Owen West book the following year, but it was unrelated to any film.
Shortly after publishing The Funhouse, Dean met another writer, Richard Laymon, who became a close friend. Richard had just published The Cellar, and he thought his work bore remarkable similarities to Dean’s, although his descriptions were more extreme. They met at the house of another writer, Gary Brandner, and talked about their common sense of structure and character. Dean eventually introduced Richard to his British agent, Bob Tanner, and Richard’s success in publishing increased.
Richard was impressed with Dean’s knowledge of the business. “He is the person we call whenever we need advice about our careers. He’s been studying all this stuff from the beginning; knows who’s naughty and knows who’s nice. He’ll tell you who’s incompetent, who’s a crook, who’s a crackpot — and he’ll have colorful stories to back up his opinions.”
Dean also liked to talk to him about politics: “Dean always seemed to have the inside scoop on military and political matters. He used to scare the hell out of me with tales of how close we came to a nuclear exchange with the U.S.S.R. under the Carter administration. He does seem, in real life as well as in his books, to get a kick out of scaring people.”
In the meantime, Dean worked hard on Whispers. He had read numerous books on abnormal psychology, although his goal was to describe a psychotic condition that he believed was unique. He wanted it to be different from what he had seen in the books, but still possible. That meant he had to know as much as he could about the dynamics of the human mind and the potential effects of a horrendous childhood.
He also wanted to use California itself as a character. Undeterred by the fact that many good writers before him had already done this, Dean decided that since his experience of California was different from anyone else’s, his descriptions would be different as well. He spent a lot of time exploring the meaning of life among people in the southern part of the state. As he and Gerda drove hundreds of miles to get a better sense of the varied terrain, Dean was impressed with the array of geological and sociological patterns he found. People seemed fundamentally different from those he had known back East. Everything here — the land, the people, the politics — seemed to offer a wealth of background for a novelist. He felt as if he had hit the proverbial gold mine. His and Gerda’s favorite spot was the Monterey Peninsula, especially the town of Carmel.
Between travel, research, and structuring a novel unlike anything he had written before, Dean exhausted himself. During the last few months of writing, he worked twelve or more hours per day, seven days a week to keep control of the story. Toward the end, that meant losing several nights of sleep as he worked round the clock. He polished each page, one by one, and when he was finished he had lost ten pounds.
Whispers begins with a quote from Dickens that sets forth the theme: “The forces that affect our lives, the influences that mold and shape us, are often like whispers in a distant room, teasingly indistinct, apprehended only with difficulty.” He uses this to refer to a psychodynamic notion that pathology can be passed down through generations, blurring its origins to the point that, while cause and effect are still at work in a repetitive manner, it becomes difficult to pinpoint the exact person responsible for the damaging chain of events. Goodness and evil both speak in whispers, and both of them shout. One may pass for the other when evil entities walk in the guise of human beings. Each of Dean’s characters is affected to some degree by this idea, and his intent is to show that explanations (and sympathy) can be found, even for the most evil among us. If we dig deeply enough, there is some logical reason for their atrocities.
The novel was dedicated to Rio and Battista Locatelli, friends from Las Vegas, and it continued with the cross-genre style that Dean had started four years earlier with Night Chills. In Whispers, he wanted to take that technique even further. While there were certainly horror elements, Dean blended them with police procedure, romance, and psychological suspense. To add foreshadowing and atmosphere, Dean returned to his ideas about earthquakes in a new way: There is a feeling that the “Big One” can happen at any moment. Life can change dramatically in a matter of minutes, and this awareness affects people at a subconscious level. This mirrors the murderer’s potential as well. Thus, while Dean had been unable to publish his earthquake novel, he managed to use some of that research in this novel.
Having threaded the Freudian perspective through much of his science fiction, Dean worked even harder to draw out the implications of Freud’s notion of subliminal subconscious influences on behavior. He still believed, along with many other novelists trained in Freudian-based literary theory, that Freudian psychology had accurately mapped the essence of evil back to the way children are raised. Blame for destructive behavior lies squarely on the shoulders of parents and culture. More than any novel he had written to date, Whispers relied heavily on the Freudian dynamic, yet it was also the last novel in which Dean would stick closely to this idea. Having scrutinized it so thoroughly, he began to see cracks in its facade.
Dean also included a fair amount of social commentary throughout the story, a technique learned from John D. MacDonald. He touched upon class systems, obsessive book reviewers, the foibles of Los Angeles, the ineptitude of big government, and the loss of self-responsibility — all issues that got under his skin to one degree or another.
His protagonist is once again a woman, but she is modeled on him. Hilary Thomas, twenty-nine, is a successful Hollywood screenwriter. She has had to overcome an abusive background to attain success. Talking about it helps resolve issues that block her, although she fails to look at what drives her to work so incessantly. She tends to imagine worst-case scenarios, feels insecure about her success, and fears that her father’s madness has somehow infected her.
A prominent businessman, Bruno Frey, whom Hilary recently met at a vineyard, attacks her with the intent to kill. He is the lunatic passing as a normal person, deceiving most people with whom he has dealings. Frey believes that Hilary is the reincarnation of his mother. She manages to kill him, but he returns. She calls the police and one of the officers, Tony Clemenza, falls in love with her and helps her to solve this bizarre mystery.
Eventually, with the help of an attorney and a psychiatrist, they figure out that Bruno had a twin with whom he had formed a single personality housed in two separate bodies. Their mother had been raped and impregnated by her father, and she in turn had abused and warped her sons. For complicated but believable reasons, she had lied about having had two children and had then raised them as one. Her punishment for them whenever they failed to behave as a single entity was to keep them locked in a roach-infested cellar, where they heard the “whispers” of the roaches crawling around. They had been told they were the offspring of demons and were never to have sexual contact with women, so they had grown up sublimating their sexual energy into weight training, which had made them powerful. However, they had continued to see their mother returning after her death in the form of women they met, like Hilary. Motivated by hatred, they had killed twenty-three women before Hilary had stopped their rampage. Tony and Hilary have to kill the remaining twin in self-defense.
On many levels, the novel is about betrayal, but particularly the betrayal of parents. The twins were abused by their mother, who in turn had been damaged by her own father. Those who should have been protective had become forces of destruction. It was toxic intimacy at its worst, the most extreme consequences of family dysfunction that Dean had yet portrayed.
“I can’t understand betrayal,” he says. “The most important thing we have is our relationships, and they have to be based on trust. Betrayal of trust is emotional suicide.”
One flaw in this novel is the degree of explanation indulged in by characters who otherwise give no clue that they can be as sophisticated about complex psychological conditions as Hilary and Tony seem to be. Even a seasoned psychiatrist, when faced with a condition that had never before been documented, might have a more difficult time piecing it together than they do. At certain points, these characters seem to be merely mouthpieces for Dean to work out the case. There is no doubt that he did intensive research, and he puts much of it into the novel, but as with most novelists working within a strict cause-and-effect framework, the explanation becomes pat. It is therefore less interesting as a possible case than it is as a revelation of Dean’s own perspective — that he spent so much effort on this particular aspect of abnormal psychology. By offering an excuse for their viciousness, he shows some sympathy for the killers, as if they are less to blame for their violence than are their mother and grandfather’s abuse and religious delusions. It could suggest that Dean was seeking ways to rationalize his father’s behavior, or even to give himself some leeway should he see signs of Ray’s influence on him. Yet he never felt easy with excuses, and soon left this Freudian viewpoint behind.
The problem is, when such a causal chain is set up as it is in this novel, blame does not start with the grandfather. Someone must be responsible for his delusions and abusive ways. If his own parents were to blame, then he is as much a victim. The other real issue with a Freudian approach, which Dean could not long tolerate, was the diminishing of personal responsibility. As bad as his father and the Frey twins were, Dean himself believed that there was some degree of choice in what they did. Blame could not wholly be placed elsewhere. As well as it might work in a story to tie up loose ends, it did not work for Dean in real life. His own difficulty with Freudian theory itself began as a whisper, a feeling of discomfort, that would eventually urge him to dismiss much of Freudian theory altogether. By the time he wrote Intensity in 1995, he would express a great deal of anger about social institutions that incorporated this approach into their practices. He would also present his belief that evil cannot be so simply explained.
Dean turned in a thick manuscript. It was a testament to his ambition to do bigger and better books. He expected Phyllis Grann to be pleased, but instead she asked him to cut it in half and make it as lean as The Vision.
Although he disliked confrontation, Dean refused. “How I knew that book worked, I’m not sure, because I hadn’t had anything that had worked at that level before, but I knew it was right.” His agent advised him not to be stubborn, but Dean stood his ground. “I know what’s going to ruin a book and I know what’s right with it. So I said no, even though I desperately needed the money.”
Grann did not feel the book as it stood had much chance of having a paperback or movie sale, so there seemed no point in putting a big advertising push behind it. She would publish it, but without fanfare. She paid an advance of $25,000 and set the print run at 7,000. Whispers was published in May 1980.
Dean could not believe that her perspective differed so much from his. He wanted more support, but his editor resisted. She seemed to want him to deliver only one type of book rather than branch out into something new, which she considered risky so early in a career. Readers come to expect something from a writer, she felt, and they should not be disappointed. “She’s brilliant at doing certain things better than anyone,” Dean says, “but she couldn’t see why I should do anything different. I admire Phyllis enormously, but it seemed to me that I had to push her every step of the way toward the career I believed we could build together.”
Grann asked him who he wanted her to send the manuscript to for blurbs. Dean did not want to bother anyone. The only quotes that carried weight were from successful writers, and he figured that those people got swamped with requests.
Grann insisted that she was sending it out anyway, so it might as well be to someone Dean admired. He named two of his favorite suspense writers, John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard. To Dean’s delight, both of them responded. However, MacDonald’s came in too late to use on the hardcover, and when Berkley used it on the paperback, they misspelled his name through eleven printings, despite Dean’s dogged attempts to correct them. “I kept saying, ‘He’s not Ronald McDonald’s brother!’ It was so mortifying to me.”
MacDonald evaluated the novel as “a solid piece of work, good craftsmanship. The shelves fit together and the hinges work. Whispers is all I ask of a book and precisely what I find less of with each passing year.” Suspense writer Elmore Leonard called it “a winner.” He thought it was a thoroughly engrossing story.
Reviews were generally positive. Ellen Dyer in the Dade County Sentinel called Whispers “a nonstop, can’t put it down mystery. One of the best.”
However, there were reviewers who thought that the case was unconvincing. They accused Dean of having an unsophisticated grasp of Freudian theory.
“I’d done a lot of reading, and I’d thought there was no reason this couldn’t happen,” he insists. “Given this pressurized environment and the logical reasons behind the mother’s madness, this was how these kids might have turned out. Then about six months after the book had been published, a case came up in England involving two women who had a similar condition. Neighbors of this family had thought there was only one girl, but there were two, and they were twins. The mother had given them one name and had raised them as one girl. They never both went out with her at the same time. After their mother died, they took a fancy to a truck driver and started harassing him. That’s when everyone found out there were two of them. They didn’t like to be any distance apart. If one went out on the porch and stood by the outer wall, the other would be standing by the inner wall. When they cooked dinner, they both had to hold the pot at the same time, things like that. It was very strange.”
The next step was a paperback auction. The rumors in the industry that year were that books were taking a dive in sales. Publishers Weekly and The New York Times reported the grim figures and predicted disaster ahead for the industry, especially for the big houses. In part, this was due to astronomical advances paid to leading writers and buying frenzies that escalated the price of reprint rights. High advances meant high advertising budgets and potentially lower profits. When some of the big money books failed to pay off and the romantic historical saga collapsed altogether, these events had a heavy impact on how much publishers were willing to spend on lesser-known writers.
Berkley, via Roger Cooper, bought the reprint rights to Whispers. “Roger Cooper was a big supporter of mine. It took nerve for him to buy it competitively at Berkley after Phyllis Grann [Cooper’s boss] had said it was lacking — and then use it as the lead title of the month.”
The film rights were also sold for $250,000 to independent filmmaker Gabriel Katzka. (Ultimately it went to Cinepix and was produced in 1990 as a direct-to-video film starring Victoria Tennant, Jean LeClerc, and Chris Sarandon.)
First printing in paperback was set at 700,000 and successive reprints ran the figure to well over a million. Now Dean finally had a bestseller in his own name. Things were moving well.
Shortly after the novel was published, he had lunch with Putnam-Berkley executives at an American Booksellers Association conference. He mentioned that he hoped his next step would be a hardcover bestseller. To his surprise, they tried to discourage such ambitions. “They said, ‘You’re not a hardcover kind of writer. You’re a paperback writer. You’re going to have a lot of paperback bestsellers.’”
That was not what Dean wanted to hear. It was the same kind of idea that his former agent had implied — that he was limited and would do best to admit it and work within his limitations. Once again, he had to fortify himself to move ahead on his own steam. The lack of support for his vision disappointed him. At least he had Gerda, who insisted that Dean could do whatever he set his mind to do. She helped him to continue to believe in himself.
Writing Whispers had a significant impact on Dean’s personal life in several ways. First, he felt completely exhausted. Something about the book had demanded a lot from him, physically and psychologically. It had been ambitious and had required a lot of research and mental structuring, but there was something more. As letters from fans arrived, Dean began to understand: “I realized that through the surrogates of fictional people, I was at last untying psychological knots related to my childhood.” Readers pointed out how his characters each had an unhappy childhood filled with abuse, but while immersed in writing, Dean had been unaware of the ubiquitous nature of this theme. He was working something out through the book, and when his characters overcame their problems, he was working his way toward hope. It was not long before this movement through dark shadows into optimism became a consistent rhythm in his writing.
Second, he began a brief correspondence with John D. MacDonald. “He wrote five or six letters after Whispers,” says Dean. “Some were long letters, and he’d write like he was my uncle. I don’t think he knew how much I’d published. He’d explain to me how the business worked. He’d tell little stories that were priceless, like when he started breaking through in the fifties. Cosmopolitan and The Saturday Evening Post had syndicated some of his novels, and he told me a story where this editor — who bought from him regularly — sent a manuscript back and told him he’d missed the boat this time. John put the manuscript aside for six months and then went back and read it again. He read the note and felt the editor was totally wrong, so he composed a cover letter saying he’d spent the last six months considering the editorial suggestion. He sent the same novella back and said he’d revised it, and they bought it. He was operating on the belief that the editor would not remember the story well enough to recognize there had been no changes — or would not even read it this time! John used the story to show me what editorial advice is often worth. I’m sure he knew the level of his impact on me. He had to see it in reading what I do. Character is everything in MacDonald and that emphasis ultimately became everything in my writing, too.”
The third effect on Dean’s life was to make him switch from his old IBM typewriter to a computer. This was not an easy thing for him to do. Once he felt comfortable with something, he did not like making any changes. Yet Gerda pressed him on it. She told him she had counted the number of sheets of typewriter paper he had gone through while writing the novel, and had then divided that by the number of finished pages in the script, to discover that he had done thirty-one drafts. That was a lot of paper! She urged him to consider joining the computer age.
Dean knew writers who were using computers, but he was afraid it would change for the worse how he wrote. “When I really saw how many times I was going through stuff,” he admits, “I had to break down and buy one. Yet I was so spooked about the new technology, anything that would separate me from the writing, so instead of buying a computer with software that you loaded into it, I bought an IBM displaywriter. They were dedicated word processors that came with the program already in them and had more flexibility for processing because it was the only task they were designed to accomplish. I loved this big clunky thing. It had a daisy wheel printer and I’d be so amazed how fast it could type. I held on to that until I finally became annoyed with how slow the printer was.” He eventually changed to a more sophisticated IBM computer.
Dean did not follow the method that many writers used of writing a fast first draft and then going back and polishing. Instead, now that he had more time to do so, he polished his work one page at a time, obsessively, inching through the book.
“I go through a manuscript, slow page by slow page. Every page may be revised as few as twenty times or more than a hundred! Then at the end of every chapter, I print out and read it, because it looks different in hard copy. I pencil the changes in and then go back and include them. Then I go on to the next chapter. When I reach the end of the book, I don’t go back to line-edit because I’ve done this endlessly while working page by page. It’s the only way I know how to write. I really think it’s why I improve. It’s the endless focus on sentence by sentence, page by page, that keeps me so tightly fixed on character and language. I wouldn’t get that if I were writing a swift draft and then going back to repair.
“My attitude is that when you write a quick draft, you’ve made a huge number of decisions that you are then reluctant to change. Whereas if I move slowly through it, there are all kinds of directions this story could take — and because I’ve moved slowly, I don’t have to make those decisions for weeks or months, which gives me time to think. I have no trouble keeping the spontaneity because the story in my mind becomes extremely plastic, and where it’s going is not determined until the characters take it there. That keeps it exciting. I never know what’s going to happen next, and so many possibilities arise.”
Although he wrote outlines in his early days as a writer, and often sold his books from the outlines, he began to rely on them less and less. After 1984, he dispensed with them altogether.
“I almost never make a note while I’m working. I just let it cook in my head. There are rare occasions where I’ll write a note and put it on my desk. Then it gets lost under all the other notes and eventually gets thrown away. There’s even something about notes that inhibits me because I have to go back and reconsider. Better that I leave it all in my head.
“You may ask me one day what page I’m on and I’ll be on forty. Then talk to me three weeks from now and I’m on forty-two. And then maybe you’ll talk to me a week later and I’m on page seventy because the stuff has been moving better. It moves through at a very uneven pace.
“I build a book the way a coral reef is built from the millions of dead bodies of marine polyps. There are all these words and phrases that get cast aside, little dead calcareous skeletons of ideas and images, and what builds up is the top of the coral reef — the finished book. That’s the only way I can work. I found very early on that if I go through and write a first draft, the temptation is to let that stand. I’d have made major decisions, and it’s human nature that you’re now going to try to make that book work as best you can within those major decisions. You’re not going to rip the guts out of it and start all over again. You’re going to improve only that draft. It’s limiting and I won’t do it that way.
“One of the advantages to working like this is that it forces me to take time with the plot. I may be worried about a plot problem in some later chapter and by the time I get there, it’s often resolved in my mind, or the plot has changed to slide around the problem. What happens is that my subconscious has been working on it, whereas if I’d just written the novel quickly, I might have reached for anything to patch the problem. By taking time, you discover better ways to go with the story.
“When it’s really working, it flows. It feels like you are the character. Getting inside any character is what really excites me. I almost cross into a virtual reality experience. I can easily laugh when a character is having funny thoughts, or I can reduce myself to tears in a scene that’s meant to affect the reader emotionally.”
Dean’s agent sent copies of Whispers overseas, and Bob Tanner, managing director of W.H. Allen publishing house, but also head of the International Scripts agency, took it with him on a trip. “I started reading it in bed in my hotel and could not put it down. I telephoned the agent in London and bought it the next day.” He later submitted the novel to the Book of the Month Club Best Novels of All Time list.
A year later, he met Dean and Gerda for dinner, and Dean asked Tanner if he would like to become his subrights agent in Britain. He readily agreed. Their business relationship lasted several years, and Dean recommended other writers to him during that time — and still does. When Dean changed agents, they remained friends and Dean dedicated his 1985 novel, Strangers, to Tanner.
Around the time that Dean was working on these books, he and Gerda bought a house near the city of Orange. The roomy, two-level Tudor tract house had recently been built and was situated on Brambles Way in an upscale equestrian community called Orange Park Acres. “Everyone had horses except us,” Dean recalls. Initially they had leased the house, and when the owner decided to sell, they bought it. They immediately got to work installing hardwood floors, new bathroom tiles, built-in cabinets, and a library. They covered the floors with Chinese area rugs and Dean had a locking wrought-iron gate installed on the front porch. He had acquired some twenty-five thousand books by now and needed more space. He and Gerda each had an office, both of them lined with books. “When we were decorating, we looked for things we’ve always admired. We got a good mix of European and Oriental, which is one of the most interesting mixes if everything goes right. And we wanted Southwestern in the sunroom.” It felt good to at last have the money to turn their home into what they wanted. They were now in their mid-thirties, still young enough to start a family, but ultimately they decided against it.
Being so involved with caring for his father, and having done so much reading in aberrant psychology, Dean was increasingly concerned that his father’s illness might be genetic and might then skip a generation and manifest in their children. They also had seen the many heartaches that friends with children had endured. They liked their life as it was. It seemed better to continue as a couple and devote their energies to building Dean’s career. He was on the brink now, with Whispers. Things could get better, but there was still a lot of hard work ahead. There were also some setbacks.
Lippincott wanted another book from Dean, so he turned in The Voice of the Night as his second book under the David Axton contract, with a third one promised. He had mentioned in a letter to a friend that his next David Axton would be The Hour of Courage, but that book was never written. He believed that The Voice of the Night was one of the most seamless books he had written thus far. “That was a book I had the time and the growing skills to do the right way,” he says.
He had long wanted to write a novel about a boy with a poor self-image. “I believe I needed to write about the pain of being a social outcast at fourteen,” Dean writes. “[Colin] is exactly like I was as a boy.”4 When he finished, the story had taken shape as he had envisioned it. He had known he was writing about the duality of human nature and the capacity for good and evil within every person. He had also realized that the boy would have to shed his innocence and grow up. For this book, Dean used a brief outline, but the story moved along so quickly, he could have done without any notes.
Dean’s first editor at Lippincott, David Bradley, had left. When the new editor read the manuscript, he told Claire Smith, “We can make this a bestseller. This has what it takes. We can make this big. He just has to work on the ending.”
Dean was excited at this news. Whispers had not yet been published and he was unsure how it would perform, given Putnam’s low-key response. Then he heard what the editor had in mind.
Dean had finished the novel on a somber note and Lippincott wanted it to be more upbeat. “Here’s what’s so nuts about this business,” says Dean. “They said, ‘Throw away the last third and write it this way and we’ll make this book a bestseller. Otherwise it’s totally unpublishable.’ But it can’t be that extreme a choice!”
Dean was disappointed. “To have changed it as suggested, I would have completely destroyed the book. I would have watered down the characters, the theme. No way.” Once again he stood firm. He was learning. The editor stood firm as well, so Smith took it to another publisher, Doubleday, and they liked it the way it was written.
Lisa Drew, who had edited Alex Haley’s Roots, was Dean’s new editor. She offered an even better advance for it and signed him up to write another. Dean came out ahead, but “it was dispiriting because I had been able to take more time on it and had known it worked well when it was finished. The tone was consistent throughout, and the prose tight. To have someone build me up with talk of bestsellerdom and then pull the rug out from under me — that was really hard.”
He had previously decided against publishing anything more under the Brian Coffey pseudonym, but he needed a different name than his own for this book, so he called once more on Coffey. Dean thought this was better than starting out with yet another pen name, although this was also the last Coffey book he would write.
The novel called up memories of adolescence for Dean. His protagonist, fourteen-year-old Colin Jacobs, is lonely, afraid of the dark, and feels like a misfit. He does not mix well or enjoy sports. Cursed with the ability to see how things can change for the worse, he seeks absolute clarity on good and evil. He wants to know that evil abides only in those things that he can readily recognize as monsters, but also suspects that the world does not deliver this simplicity.
He would do anything to be transformed into someone else. His room, with its books about monsters and other worlds, has become his refuge. He has a father who expects him to pursue masculine activities, like fishing, and who has been verbally abusive to Colin’s mother. Colin has learned to flow with life, because resistance involves pain. He fears isolation, is insecure, and finds within the monsters of fantasy fiction a way to deflect his attention from the abuse in his home. He sees life in simple, innocent terms. To him, size equals strength — and success — so as a scrawny kid, he feels he does not have much going for him. When a more popular, athletic boy, Roy Borden, befriends him, Colin is thrilled. He is willing to do anything to keep this unexpected and unprecedented friendship, even tolerate Roy’s unrelenting vulgarity and his perverse attraction to death. Roy makes Colin feel that he will finally be on the inside, moving in the right circles. This is his dream.
Roy claims to have killed some boys, and when he makes Colin his blood brother, he tries to get him to become more like himself. He wants to invade Colin’s soul and transform him, just like the vampires that Colin reads about. Although Colin had once wanted to move in circles like this, with friends like Roy, it seems to be more than he had bargained for. When they exchange blood, Colin concentrates on the pinprick, “trying to sense that moment when Roy’s blood first began to creep into his own veins.”5
Roy wants Colin to help him derail a train so they can watch the people aboard die. Colin realizes that Roy is sick — an abnormal person who appears to be normal, a monster in human form — and when he tries to withdraw, he elicits Roy’s deadly assault. Colin ascertains that Roy’s claim to have killed two boys is factual, and realizes that he is in serious trouble. This is real evil and he is in danger. He needs help, but his parents are divorced and he does not want to escape Roy at the cost of moving away to live with his father. Thanks to Roy’s manipulation, however, Colin’s mother has grown suspicious of his activities, and since he has a penchant for horror stories, he believes she will dismiss his claims as wild imagination. He is on his own, unprotected. He feels a terrible sense of abandonment, “that no one in the whole world cared or would ever care enough about him to really find out what he was like and what his dreams were. He was an outcast, a creature somehow vastly different from all other people …”6
Then Colin meets a girl, Heather, who likes him and who feels as awkward about herself as he does about himself. It surprises him, which is the same way Dean felt about Gerda: She is so attractive, how could she possibly not be perpetually and utterly confident? Colin and Heather quickly develop the kind of rapport Dean felt when he met Gerda. She is easier to talk to than any girl he has met before. Heather likes him because he doesn’t talk about guy things and because he really listens.
He tells her about Roy and she agrees to help set a trap, despite the obvious risks. First, Colin finds out that Roy’s mother had beaten him after he had accidentally killed his younger sister, and that her unrelenting hatred and abuse had made him into the unfeeling monster that he is. Colin feels sorry for Roy but continues with his plan. They rendezvous in a decrepit old house — a symbol of their decaying relationship — and Colin tricks Roy into confessing on tape that he had killed the other two boys and intended to kill Colin. For Colin, it is an important step toward manhood. He once had been cowardly, but putting himself at risk to get this information makes him feel better about himself. Size does not equal strength. Roy is weak in another way and Colin is stronger than he had realized. He is able to stand up against Roy’s dementia.
Roy is an interesting figure in this book. Paired with images of predators, such as the shark on the fishing boat in a scene between Colin and his father, and with the vampires in Colin’s fantasy world, Roy closes in without warning. With his “quicksilver morality,” he represents internal chaos — what Colin fears. His name is close in spelling to Ray and he exhibits the manipulative, sociopathic quality hidden within Dean’s father. Although Dean takes pains in this novel to deny that Roy’s madness is genetic — he claims that Roy’s mother’s treatment had been responsible — there is something deeper at play.
Dean had distanced himself from his father, especially as Ray continued to make trouble for him. He did not want to think of himself as Ray’s son. Nor did he want to believe that sociopathic evil could be genetically transferred. Yet the emphasis on toxic intimacy, whether between Roy and his parents or between Roy and Colin as blood brothers, points toward a deeply personal fear. Roy claims that he wants Colin as a friend because Colin is like him. At first, Colin is pleased, but later he comes to fear the part of himself that attracts Roy and mirrors Roy’s overt behavior. Roy seems to have infected his thoughts, changing him from within, where he has no firm defenses.
Clearly Dean pondered the possibility that being related to Ray Koontz may have invested him with a darkness that he could not easily dismiss. He did not want to be vulnerable to subtle inner corruption. Developing a character like Colin, who gets close enough to evil to be its blood brother — to see within himself the “voice of the night” — and who then defeats its attempt to infect him, offered Dean some consolation, if not catharsis. The suspicion, the thing that made Dean want to dismiss genetic transmission of evil, was that Ray’s child could have been someone like Roy. Colin feels the pull toward it and even allows himself to open up to the point of using vulgar language and having vulgar thoughts about his mother. Yet he resists it.
Dean would do more with this theme in later books, particularly with characters like Roy Miro in Dark Rivers of the Heart and P. J. Shannon in Strange Highways, but it seems clear what Roy represents: “You’re exactly like me,” he tells Colin. “You can’t bear the idea of losing control of yourself.”7 Roy interprets this fear to mean that one has to become a predator and a manipulator. Colin is unwilling to believe that this is his only alternative.
Both Roy and Colin are presented as unprotected children, one of whom went bad and the other who feels the potential for it — the “voice of the night” — within himself. “It was within everyone, whispering maliciously, twenty-four hours a day, and the most important task in life was to ignore it, shut it out, refuse to listen.”8
The Voice of the Night did well in print, but it was not until Dean reissued it under his own name in 1991 that it sold over two million copies. That year, it hit number one on The New York Times bestsellers list and stayed on the list for nine weeks. There were several film options on it, but none came to fruition.
The next novel that Dean planned as Brian Coffey did not get published. He called it Dangerous Timed. “That one was about a female real estate agent,” says Dean. “She takes someone to see a house, and the pool-maintenance man is there. He develops an attraction to her and starts sending her flowers. It escalates until he becomes obsessive. It was the story about how she dealt with that. I always wished I’d have written it, because it would have been one of the first stories of that type, but now stalker stories have been done to death. Because it would have been primal, simple, and fresh at the time, it probably would have been made into a movie and probably would have been quite successful. But I was doing so many different things then that I just couldn’t fit everything into my schedule.” He decided, instead, to focus on the books at hand.
When he had some spare funds, Dean started to repurchase the rights to some of his earlier novels. “I started it fairly early. Something would go out of print, and I would rush in to revert the rights. Then, when the contracts contained no reversion clauses, I started to buy the rights back. I bought back the three Michael Tucker novels and The Face of Fear. When Lancer went bankrupt, I managed to get those books back, too.
“I had this feeling that I was circling around stuff that had the potential to get more successful. I was getting higher advances. I had this sense that if I could just find the right material and handle it the right way, we could have a breakthrough. If that happened, I’d never get the rights reverted in these old books because they would be too valuable to the publishers who owned them. It was a stretch for us to afford all these repurchases — often paying back the full advance I had originally received. But we had faith in my future.”
Every writer he knew thought Dean was out of his mind. “Then you wrote those books for nothing,” they said to him. “You’re giving them back the money.”
Dean’s only response was that he believed he could one day resell the rights for more than he had paid back.
There was something else at stake as well: “I was trying to change my image and I thought I had to get some of the books out of print permanently.”
1Dean Koontz writing as Owen West, The Funhouse (New York: Jove, 1980), p. 328.
2Ibid., p. 330.
3Ibid., p.331.
4Dean R. Koontz, How to Write Best-selling Fiction (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1981), p. 70.
5Dean Koontz writing as Brian Coffey, The Voice of the Night (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 80.
6Ibid., p. 218.
7Ibid., p. 53.
8Ibid., p. 339.