DEAN’S 1972 BOOK, WRITING POPULAR FICTION, WAS STILL IN print, but by 1979, he thought the advice was too dated to be of value, so he requested that Writer’s Digest Press remove it from their list. They refused to take it out of print unless he wrote a replacement. Grudgingly he did, because he did not want his name associated with ideas that were no longer relevant. Intending to call it Writing Popular Fiction Today, Dean changed his mind when he realized that the second book would have to be quite different from the first. In the research process, it became clear to him that the market had vastly changed in favor of bestsellers, so he did away with the emphasis on genre.
Again, he used his own fiction, along with that of other writers, to make his points, and he included a long list of recommended writers at the end of the book. In some of his autobiographical references, he mentioned that he regretted starting out so young and that he had started as a genre writer, because now he cringed at those earlier books. He also told harrowing stories from the publishing world.
His chapters included instructions for structuring a story line, developing characters, achieving plausibility, doing research, avoiding pitfalls, and attending to the nuances of grammar and style.
One of the things he had learned over the past decade was that many writers had trouble with viewpoint, so he spent a lot of time discussing it. “Viewpoint is a major problem for a lot of people,” says Dean. “There are even published writers who have viewpoint problems. It’s a hard point to get across. It’s an issue I’ll talk about at writers’ conferences because so few people who want to be writers have any sense that they shouldn’t be shifting viewpoints in the same scene. When you raise the issue, some of them just blink. No matter how many times you explain it, they don’t get it. It always amazes me, because I think it’s a simple idea: You don’t want to be reminded that somebody’s writing this. You want to be conned into believing you’re inside this character’s head, that he’s real — and you can’t suspend disbelief that completely if the writer dances in and out of the heads of every character in a scene. It’s fun to see somebody’s eyes light up when they suddenly grasp that. It totally changes how they think about writing. It makes them realize that character is the essence.”
Many of the writers that Dean was later to befriend had found this book beneficial for learning or improving their craft and, although it is out of print, people still look for it.
The next Leigh Nichols novel for Pocket Books was The Eyes of Darkness. Dean dedicated it to his aunt and uncle — Henry and Virginia Hillegass — and to Gerda’s parents. Although he had left Las Vegas several years earlier, he used the bustling neon city as the primary setting. One of his former college professors, John Bodnar, thought that one paragraph in particular, set in the casino, was near perfect in the way it conveyed motion, mood, and place. He used it in his composition courses as an example of good paragraph development.
Dean makes numerous observations about the city and the influence on its citizens of living in a desert community. He describes how some of the underground criminal activities operate, such as laundering money, hiring hitmen, and purchasing false papers. “Nevada offers more personal freedom than any place in the country, and that’s good, by my way of thinking. But wherever there’s a great deal of personal freedom, there’s also bound to be an element that takes more than fair advantage of the liberal legal structure.”1
He also comments on the loyalty of government officials who place the mission of their agencies beyond the dictates of morality. Politics on both ends take a hit: “Left-wingers and right-wingers differed about certain details, but their only major point of contention centered around the identity of those who would be permitted to be part of the privileged ruling class, once the power had been sufficiently centralized.”2 There is always the potential in a government for its accountability to be diminished, for its motives to be turned away from good toward evil. Dean comments on how desperation to resist a totalitarian state like Russia can turn us into the very thing we want to resist. Without constant self-evaluation, the government (like a person) can, under the influence of fear and hatred, slowly transform into an entirely new and unforeseen entity.
Ultimately this novel is a dramatic tale of the unprotected child, violated not by parents but by the government as a parental symbol.
Christina Evans, newly divorced and the mother of a twelve-year-old boy, Danny, is recovering from his tragic death a year earlier when strange events indicate he may be trying to communicate with her. She has recently launched a successful show in Las Vegas and through that met Elliott Stryker, a widowed attorney. Together they are drawn into a harrowing tale of political immorality. It becomes clear that Christina’s son is not dead, but is being held by a secret government agency and subjected to inhumane experimentation in the name of national defense.
From a defecting Soviet agent, the government had learned about a man-made fatal virus called Gorki-400 that destroys the part of the brain that controls the autonomic functions. The secret agency, funded by “waste” from other agencies such as Health and Welfare, is working on an antivirus. When they had discovered that Danny’s blood contained a natural antibody, the officials grabbed him to test the virus. Reinfected fourteen times, he is slowly dying; but as a side effect, he has developed psychic powers. Christina and Elliott rescue the boy, but are forever changed by their awareness of a government that could approve such projects.
Throughout the novel is a sense of a perverse subconscious at work. Elliott kills an assassin and then feels ill at the “warm, animal satisfaction” that he experiences. There is more to this feeling than mere self-preservation, he knows; it is a hint that civilization is a fragile veneer. On the other end of the spectrum is violence-obsessed George Alexander, who runs a clandestine operation and represents the sociopathic forces that run rampant behind a civilized facade. “In this unknown organization, in this secret place, he thrived.”3 The message is clear: The subconscious cannot be controlled. It has its own agenda.
In part, Dean believes this is the nature of organizations. They have the potential to strip individuals of integrity and to provide sanctuary for those without integrity who need (and often obtain) the resources of a larger network to perform their nefarious deeds. Fortunately many such organizations are uneven in their personnel, and there is often a weak link. It is a common theme of Dean’s to have a defector within the renegade agency who becomes guardian of the good, bringing the others down. It is as if Dean hopes for some moral balance in the universe that will eventually force all forms of organized corruption into accountability.
Against the devices of those who participate in the inhuman treatment of a child is the child himself, Danny. He is the defenseless kid against bullies, the child without parental resources, the boy who must develop self-reliance to survive. Danny is Dean, and the unchecked government agency, Ray Koontz, treating the boy as if his life does not matter and aware of the devoted mother who can offer little protection. Danny is on his own and must find a way to transcend the abuse and heal.
The Eyes of Darkness was Pocket Book’s lead title for February 1981. After three trips back to press, 940,000 copies were in print.
Right after this book Dean planned a Leigh Nichols novel to be called The Door to Nowhere, about a man who stands up to an all-powerful, corrupt government, and wins. He never proceeded with it.
Dean’s second novel as Owen West was The Mask. Since The Funhouse had gone into several printings and sold over a million copies, there was every reason to believe that Owen West would continue to be successful. This novel, too, went through several printings, but did not do quite as well. It remained on the bestsellers list for eight weeks. The setting was less exotic and the subject matter more mundane, but the novel contains an interesting autobiographical foreshadowing, and it is the first time Dean used verse from what he called The Book of Counted Sorrows.
The title refers to evil that parades in our midst, “wearing a mask which looks like all our faces.”4 The theme is that dark forces thrive on senseless violence and will perpetuate it through generations until the forces of good stand against it. The cycle of evil is broken by love, awareness, and flexibility.
Dean dedicated it to fellow writers and their spouses Dave and Willa Roberts, and Carol and Don McQuinn. Opening quotes from Poe, and the following line from Chazal set the tone: “Extreme terror gives us back the gestures of our childhood.”
To open the second part, Dean wrote his own poem and attributed it to a nonexistent source called The Book of Counted Sorrows. Seeking verse that would frame the last part of the story, he had found nothing appropriate. “I spent days looking through books of poetry and I couldn’t find what I wanted, so I wrote a few lines.” His verse for The Mask was six brief lines about evil’s guise of normalcy. He had no idea, as he added more verses in subsequent years to this “book,” that he would inspire countless readers to go search for it. By the late nineties, he began to collect all the poems he had “quoted” from this source and finally make plans to publish it.
In a Prologue to The Mask, not typical of Koontz, but true to the style of contemporary horror, a young girl named Laura cleans a cellar as penance. She gets trapped by a fire and dies a terrible death, blaming her mother.
The story itself begins with Carol and Paul Tracy, a professional couple preparing to adopt a child. Carol had given up a baby when she was fifteen and suffers from depression and guilt. She is pessimistic, while her husband is an optimist — a typical Koontz character polarity. While they are in their lawyer’s office, lightning hits the building, a storm-shattered tree crashes through a window into the office, and their application gets lost. Carol believes some force is trying to hinder them.
The next day, she accidentally hits a fifteen-year-old girl with her car. The girl suffers from amnesia, but no one comes forward to claim her as family. Carol feels responsible for the girl, and begins to hope she may adopt her. While this is going on, Carol’s seventy-year-old friend, Grace Mitowski, has dreams forewarning of danger to Carol. Grace also receives a mysterious warning call from her deceased husband and meets a reporter, long dead, who describes a series of murders from the forties. He tells her that she is not just Grace Mitowski. She is the reincarnation of the aunt of a girl, Laura, who has reincarnated several times since 1865, each time trying to kill her mother before her sixteenth birthday. Grace’s part is to break the cycle. She realizes that Carol is taking this girl to the mountains, so she and Paul race after them.
Although the plot is typical of mass market horror novels of the time, the characters show several Koontz trademarks. The novel is set in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Dean and Gerda had lived, and makes references to Shippensburg. Carol had been physically and psychologically abused as a child, but through her exposure to Grace, becomes a caring person. Paul is an English teacher and writer with a guilt complex about leisure activities.
Most interestingly, Dean writes about a mysterious phone call from the dead that warns and protects Grace from imminent danger. Eight years after writing this, Dean himself would experience something eerily similar.
His emerging skepticism about Freudian interpretation creeps in via the reporter, who claims that he had written his articles from a psychoanalytic perspective, but now believes that the real story went much deeper. “I wrote it up as a tangled, Freudian puzzle … But all I ever saw was the window dressing.”5 There would be no more novels told quite like Whispers.
That same year, Thomas Harris published Red Dragon, a thriller about tracking a serial killer. Phyllis Grann sent it to Dean to read, hoping he might want to write something like it. Instead, it made him more aware of what he did not like about the way evil was explained in most thrillers. He began to reexamine his ideas about Freudian characterization.
“I began to feel that you can’t explain human behavior this way,” he says. “It would be nice if you could, because it has this sort of pat quality to it. I’m not saying that Freud is entirely wrong. But as a writer, I started pulling back from Freudianism because I felt it didn’t describe true human motivation and behavior. I read Red Dragon, which was excellent in many ways. But I didn’t want to write something like it because there were things that I found terribly wrong with it. I didn’t like the pat explanation for why this guy became a serial killer. Then I had to ask, why does Red Dragon bother me so much when I’ve done the same thing, motivated characters in the same way, and when I’ve read and loved other books that endorse the same psychological theory? Over the years that followed, I kept gravitating toward better ways to get at character. Then one day, I made a conscious decision to approach character in a different way. Great characters were written before Freud ever came along and they didn’t follow a Freudian model, so how was characterization approached then? I began to reread Dickens again.
“I found characterization in those novels was completely different from what it became in our century — and it worked better. Character was revealed by actions; free will existed; the heroes and villains were not concretized by their past experiences. In Dickens, life is a test. As you go through it, character is built out of adversity, not diminished by it. Look at Pip, for instance, who takes a hell of a long time in Great Expectations to come through adversity and become a better person. He causes most of his own disasters, but by the end has reached this understanding. Dickens also has this metaphysical thread. When you go back to the age of Dickens, the possibility that there are dimensions beyond our own was just a given. It was a subtext in virtually all writers of that era. Faith. That plays into my own personal beliefs. When you give the character a spiritual dimension, suddenly you discover that he or she evolves differently — and more interestingly — from the way he or she would evolve if you wrote from a postmodern perspective with a belief in a godless world.
“So I had this revelation: Good and interesting characters grew not out of flashbacks to how they were formed by their childhood experiences. Good characters evolved out of basically two things: their actions and operative beliefs. We develop a sense and understanding of the person by what they do and think, which come not so much from backstory but from the dramatic events of the front story.”
Dean realized that critics expected to be shown what in a character’s childhood formed him and motivated a specific action, yet he believed that readers could understand the character best by simply watching him make choices and take actions to resolve his problems, the way Dickens revealed Pip or David Copperfield. He decided to do more of that in his own work.
In the spring of 1981, Dean was among the Shippensburg alumni to be nominated for the Jesse S. Heiges Distinguished Alumnus Award. By that time, Dean had been published in fourteen languages. He was asked to come to Pennsylvania to accept the plaque, but deadlines intruded, so he received the plaque by mail.
The following year saw the publication of The House of Thunder with Pocket Books, by Leigh Nichols. It was dedicated to Gerda. Dean later expressed his opinion that this was one of his lesser efforts as Leigh Nichols, and it is one of the few long novels that he wrote from the third person, single character point of view. It is a basic Cold War, brainwashing plot, involving romance and international intrigue.
Susan Thornton awakens in a hospital with amnesia. A handsome physician, Jeffrey McGee, attends her, yet things happen that make her believe this is no ordinary hospital. Four men from her past appear to her — men who years earlier had orchestrated the university-hazing death of her Jewish boyfriend. Susan begins to believe there is some conspiracy to drive her mad, so she escapes from the hospital — only to find herself in a town that seems as unreal as a stage setting or a dream. Her tormentors keep finding her and referring over and over again to the “House of Thunder” — the caves where her boyfriend had died, promising that her fate will be the same.
Ultimately Jeff rescues her and reveals that she is in Russia, where a model American community has been developed for training agents to be Americans, for assignment in deep cover espionage operations on U.S. soil. Many Soviet agents, he explains, have already been successfully placed in high positions in the American government. They are trying to break Susan down to learn secrets she has as a result of her position as a physicist in Milestone, a Defense Department think tank. Milestone is trying to render all nuclear weapons useless and thus hinder Russia’s drive for nuclear superiority. The story ends with the question of whether a new world order will eliminate the need for such an evil system as the Soviets have, which symbolizes the loss of free will and humanity.
This novel fared poorly at Pocket Books, but it became a number one bestseller in paperback when reissued under Dean’s name years later.
Back at Putnam, Dean was preparing to write his next novel under that contract. Despite the disagreements over Whispers, he wanted to get back on track and deliver a book that would continue to build his career with this publishing house.
“I had gotten $25,000 for Whispers. I knew in paperback it would earn a lot of royalties, so I wanted to get a better advance for the next book. Phyllis Grann would not offer a big increase unless I wrote a monster novel — a real horror novel. I didn’t want to be perceived as a horror writer. On the other hand, as a reader, I loved monster stories, so I thought I’d take a shot at it.”
Dedicated to Gerda, Phantoms begins with quotes from The Book of Job and Dr. Faustus, both of which refer to larger dimensions. Before Part Two, Dean quotes Charles Dickens to the effect that each time we believe we know the truth about reality, mysteries will arise to put us in our place. This novel was published in March 1983, with a paperback six months later.
Phantoms was set in a fictional town called Snowfield, California, a mountainous area where the primary attraction is skiing. The off-season population is around five hundred. Jennifer Paige, along with her younger sister, Lisa, return from out of town to discover that all the residents have been killed in some mysterious manner — or have simply disappeared. Jenny calls the county sheriff, which brings Tal, Jake, and Bryce to town. They team up to investigate this eerie mystery, finding more bodies. A chemical/biological civil defense unit (CBW) is called in, complete with soldiers and scientists.
In the meantime, Timothy Flyte, a British scholar and author of The Ancient Enemy, has proposed a theory about mysterious mass disappearances of human colonies and even whole species throughout history. He links them to an ancient shape-changing life form from the dinosaur era, an amorphous mass that devours people quickly and can change its shape at will. The thing does exist and it ultimately proves to be the presence in Snowfield. The most fearsome aspect of the creature is that has absorbed intelligence from its human prey … and also human evil. It thrives on an image of itself as Satan incarnate.
Although touted by critics as a classic horror novel, due to the mood that Dean established, the presumably supernatural elements were actually closer to science fiction. The nature of the beast had a logical explanation, rooted in the natural world, and it was destroyed through the resources of technology. Analog recognized that fact: “This book looks like supernatural horror, but it isn’t,” said their reviewer. “Slowly it emerges that here is a science fiction novel.”6
The novel addressed the overriding metaphor of the sanity of order versus the insanity of chaos, paralleled by the madness of the characters that the creature uses to perform its destructive acts. The thing is the incarnation of Dean’s fear of his father, enlarged into something more ominous and engulfing. It captures his feelings of being linked to a man with an antisocial personality disorder, driven by unquenchable need. Yet it is also the product of human society — it is what humankind has made it.
A note to the reader at the back of the book indicates that Dean’s research was based on real material: mysterious disappearances of groups of people that have never been explained. As a boy, he had been fascinated by this phenomenon. As he explains in the note, he had read about the missing colony at Roanoke Island, the vanished Anjikuni, and the three thousand lost Chinese soldiers. At last, he had been able to draw on these puzzling cases.
When he delivered Phantoms, Dean felt it had come out pretty well, considering it was not the type of story he had wanted to write. When Grann did not like it, he was surprised. “She said it was too genre,” he remembers. “She published it with about five thousand copies.”
The Los Angeles Times called it “first-rate suspense.” The reviews in both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly were highly positive, while Analog noted that the horrific elements of this story were “of the bludgeon, with precious little subtlety.” As he read the novel, the reviewer said, he kept thinking, “What a movie this would make!”
It took over a decade, but in 1996 Miramax got a film of Phantoms into production, starring Peter O’Toole as Timothy Flyte.
When Phyllis Grann decided to publish Phantoms as a genre novel, Dean determined to drop some of his pseudonyms and focus on writing under his own name. He wanted leverage to get his hardcovers onto the bestsellers list as well, which meant writing a more ambitious novel. He later joked that Owen West had died tragically, trampled by oxen while researching Quackzilla, a novel about a giant prehistoric duck. Other pseudonyms eventually had similarly bizarre endings.
“I had a third Owen West book finished, Darkfall, but I decided to kill Owen because my other books for Berkley were bigger paperback bestsellers than his. We put Darkfall, which originally was to be called The Pit, under my name. Phyllis wanted to publish it in hardcover, but I resisted. My agent was pushing me and I said, ‘No, I’m not doing another book for hardcover until I’ve written something for which I can demand serious treatment.’ Darkfall was not that book. I said I was going to write something on spec and it was going to be as ambitious as I can make it. I would take no advance and would risk all on the finished script. That was Strangers.”
Darkfall was published as a paperback by Berkley in October 1984. W.H. Allen and Company in England had released it in hardcover six months before the U.S. release, with Dean’s preferred title, Darkness Comes. Dean considered it more a horror story than other novels he had written, but its frame was that of a police procedural, and it included a love story between its two principal characters. It was a Doubleday Book Club featured alternate, and spent six weeks on the paperback bestsellers list, reaching the number ten position.
Dean dedicated the novel to neighbors, thanked Owen West, and included several poems from his Book of Counted Sorrows to set up the theme of encroaching darkness. The action is set in Manhattan during the winter.
Police detective Jack Dawson, widower and father of eleven-year-old Penny and seven-year-old Danny, is partnered with cool, competent, and beautiful Rebecca Chandler. He is intuitive and compassionate, with an open mind for the supernatural, while she is more skeptical. They investigate a series of murders in which the corpses appear to have been bitten by small animals. Jack identifies the likely suspect as Baba Lavelle, a Haitian voodoo Bocor, a priest who uses black magic against his enemies. He warns Jack, whose righteousness alarms him, not to interfere. When Jack persists, Lavelle targets Jack’s children. Jack entrusts them to Rebecca, with whom he has begun a close relationship. He then confronts Lavelle, armed with the knowledge that righteousness and courage have a certain power over evil. After a life-and-death struggle, Jack ultimately wins.
In this novel, Dean posits two levels of darkness: the ordinary absence of light, and the more intense manifestation of Satanic evil. One is passive, the other malignantly active. At this point, Dean viewed evil as a reservoir of enormous power, the accumulation of the petty evils done by people. Lavelle was able to do his work effectively because he had discovered in Manhattan a full supply of the right kind of lethal energy from all the crime, domestic violence, exploitation, and rampant psychopathology. “This was where the air was flooded with raw currents of evil that you could see and smell and feel if … you were sensitized to them.”7
This evil can be countered by the crosscurrents of energy from predominantly good souls, which were also numerous in the city. The more powerful and aware, represented in Carver Hampton, the Houngon, or priest of white magic, have a responsibility to actively resist. Jack, as the Christ figure who casts the demons from the soul of his city and sends them back to hell, is the role model. He is an everyday person who does what he knows to be right. Righteousness itself is a state of grace achieved through years of virtuous living, of consciously choosing good over evil in the temptations of daily situations. Heaven and hell are not mythical. They are dimensions of human reality created by us.
Voodoo, like Manhattan, is employed symbolically as a single source from which both good and evil arise. It is a weapon of ambiguity, channeled into malignant or benign purposes, depending on the person who uses it. “Many substances can be used by both the Bocor and the Houngon to obtain very different results, to work evil magic or good.”8 This is a metaphor of the family, from within which a person can become good or bad, depending on the way the various influences are channeled.
The way to resist evil, according to this story, is to band together in caring for one another: “… that’s what keeps our minds off the void,”9 says Jack. That is what gives meaning and substance to life. It is our cohesive energy. Without love, there is only chaos.
That same year, the fourth Leigh Nichols book for Pocket, Twilight, was published. For this one, Dean received $100,000, his first six-figure advance under a pseudonym.
Single mother Christine Scavello and her six-year-old son, Joey, encounter an old woman who insists that Joey is not what he seems to be and that he must die. This woman, Grace Spivey, continues to harass them by killing their dog and sending members of her religious cult, The Church of the Twilight, against them. She believes that Joey is the incarnation of the anti-Christ who must be destroyed, and her most potent weapon is a giant sociopath named Kyle Barlowe.
Christine hires a private detective, Charlie Harrison, for protection. After some pretty harrowing action, he finally takes Christine and Joey to his cabin at Lake Tahoe, where a blizzard threatens. Grace’s people follow them, driving Christine, Charlie, and Joey into the wilderness and finally into some caves. Christine and Charlie are wounded by gunfire. Grace traps them and commands Kyle to kill Joey, but he cannot. When Grace tries to do the deed herself, a providential flock of strangely aggressive bats attacks and kills her. Christine and Charlie both suddenly experience doubts about Joey, but dismiss them and decide to get married. “It ended in sunshine, not on a dark and stormy night.”10
This novel is about the ambiguity of reality and the malleability of the human mind. Suggestions can affect one’s perceptions and interpretation. Christine and Charlie both waver in their convictions that Joey is just a little boy, as do members of Grace Spivey’s church. It requires a firm commitment to keep one’s perspective intact, given the way the evidence can be alternately interpreted. Yet Dean takes religious fundamentalism to task, making it part and parcel with the evil in the world. “Those who fear the coming of all hells are those who should be feared themselves.”
Grace’s church seems to embrace entropy as a sign of divinity, although it is actually the force of decline and ultimate chaos in the universe. Grace revels in her madness, whereas she had once valued cleanliness. The grimy rectory of her church, Charlie thinks, contains not just ordinary urban decay, but is like rot, a reflection of the minds of the people there. The image of what this cult represents frightens him.
Joey is like Dean — a young boy devoted to his mother, who never gets into trouble or complains. He does not have a good male role model, and he has the potential to be a devil — the influence of his father, Lucius (Lucifer), or an angel — the influence of his mother.
The novel plays with ambiguities. Its theme might be that sometimes we don’t heed the message because the messenger repulses us; truth might have unpleasant proponents and falsehood seductive qualities.
Dark Harvest published a limited edition of this novel in 1988, illustrated in full color by Phil Parks. Berkley reissued it in 1990 under Dean’s own name as The Servants of Twilight, which was also the name of the film from Trimark Pictures, released in 1992.
Dean also published an essay in The Basics of Writing and Selling Fiction, entitled “When Should You Put Yourself in an Agent’s Hands?” in which he lists clear guidelines as to what makes a good and bad agent. He relied largely on his own experience to that point in his career.
1Dean Koontz writing as Leigh Nichols, The Eyes of Darkness (New York: Pocket, 1981), p. 165.
2Ibid., p. 207.
3Ibid., p. 249.
4Dean Koontz writing as Owen West, The Mask (New York: Jove, 1981), p. 161.
5Ibid., pp. 221–222.
6Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact (January 1984), p. 164.
7Dean R. Koontz, Darkfall (New York: Berkley, 1984), p. 110.
8Ibid., p. 139.
9Ibid., p. 219.
10Dean Koontz writing as Leigh Nichols, The Servants of Twilight (New York: Pocket, 1984), p. 418.