THE NEXT BOOK WAS STRANGERS, WHICH TOOK DEAN IN A completely new direction. It surprised those people who believed they could foresee the limited kind of career he would have. And while he was writing Strangers, the world around him was changing. The superstring theory in physics proposed that most elementary particles are one-dimensional and that the universe has ten, rather than four, dimensions. Crack cocaine entered the market, the “Mayflower Madam” was arrested, and Coca-Cola introduced a new formula. AIDS was becoming a national health crisis.
The year that Strangers was published, the space shuttle Challenger exploded after takeoff, killing its occupants. A secret weapons sale to Iran was exposed, implicating John Poindexter and Oliver North. People seemed to accept that there were such clandestine activities among government officials, and Oliver North was hailed by a segment of society as a man of integrity.
In no novel to date had Dean made such an effort to join a disparate group of people as kindred souls, as family in the most transcendent sense. There were twelve distinct characters, each with a detailed history. He had to keep the telling of each tale balanced against all the others as he brought the characters together. Some had repressed memories and the urge to return to where they had been in Nevada on a certain fateful day. Others were already there. The influence of John D. MacDonald, with his emphasis on social commentary and attention to character and detail, was strong — as Dean himself would note.
“Strangers was an attempt to take the strengths of genre fiction — story, pace, vitality of imagination,” he told an interviewer, “and combine them with the strengths of mainstream fiction — layered characterization, tight thematic structure and purpose, a sense of the melodies and rhythms of language, emotional depth, and a multifaceted realistic portrayal of the world in which we actually live.”1
Initially he had ideas about only a few of the characters. “When I started the book,” he says, “I knew there was going to be Dom and Ginger as the two leads. I knew there would be a priest. If Strangers is anything, it’s the equivalent of one of those books like The Cardinal or Miracle of the Bells, a book about faith that takes for granted that we believe in God. I knew that Strangers was going to be about transcendence, about meeting God, except in this case it’s an alien life-form. They really are meeting God. By the time they get to the end of the book and see this life-form, I start talking in theological terms that what this race is doing is essentially God’s work. So I knew I wanted a priest who’d lost faith and who begins to regain it.
“I also knew there would be a professional thief because I needed someone with high-tech expertise. I knew all the characters would have separate and unusual problems. I probably assumed at the beginning there were four, but as it got going, at some point I thought that one of the characters should be afraid of the dark. And then I realized I needed a couple of characters at the place where this happened, so that gave me Ernie and Fay. I knew it was a story about a group of disparate people who come together as a family, and then do for one another what families are supposed to do.”
It took Dean nearly a full year to write this novel. He went through over one hundred fifty titles, trying them and then rejecting them. One title was Gates of Dawn, but he settled on Thunder Hill, based on a location in the book. No one seemed to like it except him. His first draft was eleven hundred pages, with narrow margins. Grann wanted him to cut it to seven hundred, and offered a higher advance for a shorter book, but Dean stood his ground. He managed to revise it to nine hundred forty pages, without cutting out a single scene.
No matter how much work he had done to cut this manuscript, he found that Phyllis Grann wanted still more. Dean asked where she thought it needed to be shortened, and she suggested removing a character or two. He refused. They had all been woven together and no more cuts seemed possible to him.
Grann assigned a new editor to him named Alan Williams. He had been Stephen King’s editor at Viking and had come over to Putnam, where he edited King’s Tommyknockers. Grann was now publisher and was concentrating on other matters. She told Dean that she would still read his manuscripts and make comments, but she wanted him to have someone’s complete attention and she trusted Williams to do the job right. She was sure he could come up with a strategic way to shorten the novel without losing its integrity. Williams set to work.
“I found Dean to be extremely hardworking,” he said. “I had trouble politically with his descriptions of the contras in Nicaragua, and he modified that. Dean is completely professional about his writing, and either agrees with what an editor says or he argues against it effectively. We had a genuine dialogue.”
Williams made suggestions about tightening the structure and phrasing, some of which Dean accepted, but the revision did little to shrink the manuscript. Strangers went into print close to the form in which Dean had handed it in. He collected a smaller advance than if he had cut to seven hundrd pages, but he still ended up with more money for a single book than he had been paid to that point: $275,000.
After the editing was done, Dean’s film agent called him one morning and insisted that he could not sell a book named Thunder Hill. He wanted a new name that afternoon. Simultaneously, the novel was going to be shipped to the book clubs and also needed a new title that day. The pressure was on. “I sat at the typewriter and tried to think of something,” Dean remembers, “and I couldn’t come up with a thing.” Finally he just decided to go to work on a new book and within five minutes had the perfect title: Strangers. “It just worked well on a lot of levels.”
Dean dedicated Strangers to his British agent, Bob Tanner, for his enthusiasm.
“When I pick up a copy of Strangers,” Tanner said, “and see that dedication, I hold my head high. Everyone likes to be associated with a winner.”
Dean recalls that Grann assured him of a minimum printing of 75,000 and an ad budget of $75,000. The first printing was set at 45,000, with a laydown date of April 18. Both the Literary Guild and Doubleday featured it as a main selection. The book went through several printings until it actually hit 75,000.
On May 11, Strangers landed on The New York Times bestsellers list at number fifteen. Publishers Weekly showed it at number twelve. This was Dean’s first official hardcover bestseller in this country, and he and Gerda were thrilled. Dean had proven wrong all those people who had insisted that he was not the type of writer who could pen a hardcover bestseller. Now he could set his sights even higher. It was one thing to get on the list. It was another to reach the top. His editors attempted to dissuade him from setting himself up for disappointment, but he was determined to keep going.
For this novel, Dean researched phobias, the impact of sophisticated cultures on inferior ones, and brainwashing techniques, as well as the details necessary to develop authenticity in the character backgrounds: the history of the Nicaraguan conflict, the varieties of Jewish cooking, and the medical art of the aortal graft (although when a physician friend invited him to come and see such surgery in action, he declined). Dean wanted to emphasize the characteristics that humanize: courage, compassion, empathy, and sacrificial love. He opened the novel with quotes about the abiding force of friendship.
The novel begins with the disintegration of a number of lives that hold promise. Dominick Corvaisis, a bestselling writer, is driven by uncharacteristic bouts of terror and somnambulism. He feels a sense of being invaded, which is somehow related to the moon.
Simultaneously Ginger Weiss, a Jewish cardiovascular surgeon-in-training with a brilliant future, begins to experience fugue states and panic attacks. She consults a hypnotist, who advises her about the Azrael Block, used by the Soviets, which prevents someone from recalling damaging information. The hypnotist then is murdered. Ginger reads Dom’s novel and knows that she must find him.
Back in Elko, Nevada, the place that all of these characters have in common, ex-marine Ernie Block, owner of the Tranquility Motel, is experiencing nyctophobia — fear of night — and feels drawn to a piece of land not far from his motel. One of his employees, Sandy Sarver, has the same obsession, and her problem is that she has suddenly become highly sexual after a life of near-frigidity.
In Las Vegas, Jorja Montatella’s daughter, Marcie, is inexplicably obsessed with the moon and terrified of doctors.
Farther away, a young priest in Chicago, Brendan Cronin, has lost his faith. When his superior sends him to care for dying children, Brendan miraculously heals people. He believes this comes not from God but from a force that is urging him to go to Nevada.
Jack Twist (reminiscent of Michael Tucker from Dean’s caper novels) is an ex-Ranger who had been betrayed by his government. After risking himself in Central America to rescue political prisoners, he was left behind to be tortured. While he was gone, his wife was beaten into a coma. Embittered, Jack exploits his skills to become a professional thief, using the money to keep his wife in an expensive care facility. When she dies, he finds some mysterious photos in his safe deposit box, which lead him to Nevada.
As it turns out, the army is behind these strange occurrences. It had brainwashed these people to make them forget witnessing a UFO landing in Nevada the previous summer. When it fears that the effects are wearing off, the army decides to resubmit everyone to another session, because exposure to an enormously advanced culture might propel the human race into a sense of wretchedness from feelings of inadequacy (one of Dean’s early science fiction themes).
The colonel in charge, Leland Falkirk, is a masochistic, paranoid victim of child abuse, so he wants nothing to do with aliens that might invade him. He thinks the witnesses should be killed. He is sure that they, along with the scientists on the project, have been changed into something alien. A general, Miles Bennell, feels differently. He is the one who lured the witnesses back to Nevada, unaware that Falkirk intends to kill everyone in the facility, including himself, with a nuclear device.
As the various characters come together at the Tranquility Motel, they realize that they had been quarantined and brainwashed. Gradually some of them remember a spaceship. Ginger, Dom, and Brendan recall that they had actually entered the landed craft.
Ginger, Dom, and Jack penetrate the military installation where the spaceship is kept. Bennell explains that the aliens on board have died, but that they had been ambassadors of an advanced godlike species, offering gifts of healing, psychic phenomena, long life, and kindness. Their own trip had been a brave sacrifice to bring the good news, a sacred responsibility to bind intelligences across the universe, like archangels bestowing blessings. Dom recalls that two of the aliens had been alive the previous year and had passed their powers on to those humans they had met.
Falkirk announces that they will all die. Dom and Brendan use their psychic abilities to disarm him and then neutralize the bombs, but Falkirk shoots himself to escape contamination. Dom and Brendan decide to pass the powers they have received to others, thus giving hope to the human race for transcendent possibilities.
They had needed one another to solve the mystery of their individual lives and to defy the army — a power far greater than any one of them could have handled alone. They are the foundation for an evolution that will join all humans as one large family. “No more would people be strangers, one to one another, not anywhere on earth. … They stood at the gates of a new dawn.”2
The strangers from another planet had joined these strangers on Earth, and this first contact had dissolved boundaries and replaced them with ties of love. All strangers, no matter what species, have within themselves the ability to bond.
“I think it’s healing,” says Dean, “that people come together who don’t know each other and who have a shared mission to form some sort of community. That has power, because we all wish we had relationships like that.”
The character of Dom seems to be based on Dean himself, except that Dom experiences large-scale success with his first novel. He is a writer who subscribes to many publications and who views all new experiences as material for his fiction. He lives in Laguna Beach and, despite success, worries that he is headed for a great fall. (Dean confided to many friends that no matter how well he did, he feared that it could all be taken away: “once poor, never rich.”) Dom uses an IBM display-writer, has high standards, and places enormous value on friendship. He agrees with Robert Louis Stevenson that “the important thing is the well-told tale, not he who tells it.”3
Falkirk represents the repressive, paranoid side of our culture, while those characters willing to explore, even at risk, are the heroes who take us all into richer possibilities. It is a mythological enactment of our most basic fears and hopes. It becomes clear that humankind’s need to dominate and enslave, to impress simplistic philosophies on the entire human race, must collapse in the face of extraterrestrial beings that speak of contact with God and show good evidence in their abilities.
This novel was an extension of Dean’s science fiction work, coupled with a new spirituality that linked aliens with God in a profound enlightenment. It was a far cry from Dean’s angry atheism in which God was depicted as a worm that needed to be crushed. And it was most definitely not horror, although Dean was beginning to be typecast as a horror novelist. He disliked the label. In an interview with the Daily News in Los Angeles, he categorically stated, “I don’t write horror novels. To me, at least, horror deals with the supernatural and everything in these books can be explained rationally. But I suppose there’s another kind of horror, the kind that deals with shock and sustained tension. That’s closer to what I do. I got the publisher to change the word ‘horror’ on the cover of Strangers to terror.”4 Dean felt that his novels were not straight horror, though they appealed to fans of that genre. He did not find much hope or optimism in most of what passed as horror fiction, and the nihilistic tones clashed with his own sense of purpose as a writer. He also knew that to succumb to a category and keep turning out the same sort of tale meant losing his edge, his desire to keep exploring fictional worlds of greater complexity and depth. “It’s the challenge of pushing one’s own outer limits that keeps writing fresh and exciting,” he said.5
The thing underground, where one might expect evil to originate, turns out to be a source of joyful enlightenment, the salvation of humanity. Along with that metaphor, the desert, too, is not what it seems: Rather than being barren, it is full of promise. This plays out the notion of the “golden shadow” — that our fears of the dark sides of ourselves may be in part justified, yet within that subconscious cauldron lies the potential for something good. As a civilization, we may have repressed the very things that could benefit us. Emphasis on the rational makes us suspicious of the paranormal or metaphysical; these things get dismissed, even ridiculed to the point that we lose contact with them. Yet their magic may yield the very thing we need to continue to progress spiritually and psychologically.
In a letter to a reader, Jeff Stevenson, Dean explained the place of God in his fiction at that point: “I’m a heavy reader of science books and articles, especially modern physics, and one cannot be aware of many recent developments in physics and still cling happily to agnosticism or atheism. As one famous physicist has put it: We are peeling away the mysteries of the universe, one by one, faster and faster, and to our surprise, through the final transparent layer, we are seeing not a void but the face of God.” He goes on to point out that he is “writing books that are, at root, both optimistic and crammed full of faith.”
Strangers was a finalist that year for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
Reviewers were picking up on Dean’s cross-genre techniques, recognizing science fiction, horror, romance, adventure, espionage, suspense, and mystery all rolled into one. For some, that meant a lack of focus, while others applauded Dean’s attempts to be a pathfinder. Many noted the strong characterizations, and Dean himself stated that “with Strangers I became convinced that character is the soul of fiction.”
To Dean’s delight, John D. MacDonald wrote a blurb: “I thoroughly enjoyed Strangers. You can’t call this science fiction, nor is it merely spooky — it is a contemporary novel of manners and morals and politics and freedom. This is a book with a capital B.” They exchanged letters once again before MacDonald died later that year.
A few reviewers complained that the book was too much like Steven Spielberg’s film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. One critic mentioned its weak ending, while another said the resolution, after such a long buildup, happened too fast. Overall, however, most reviewers were enthusiastic.
The reviewer in The San Francisco Chronicle called it “one of the best mystery/suspense novels of all time.” In The New York Times, it was dubbed “an engaging, even chilling book.” The Library Journal review said that Dean’s “ability to maintain the mystery through several plot twists is impressive,” adding that it may be “the suspense novel of the year.” Even more complimentary was the Ocala Star Banner: “Strangers is so hauntingly beautiful that it should catapult Koontz into the ranks of the greatest American authors of all time.”
In December that year, Berkley published the novel in paperback and it climbed even higher on the mass market list, to number twelve. Editor-in-chief of the fantasy line, Susan Allison, was impressed with Dean’s input on cover design and his knowledge about the business. “He’s wonderful to work with,” she remarks, “which is not to say he doesn’t want things done properly, but he’s always been considerate and professional. He knows what works for him and what doesn’t, so his suggestions are sound. He doesn’t just express whims. In my experience, his ability to deal with his career as a career without losing track of the fact that his primary job is to write the words on the page is unprecedented.”
While working on the cover, Dean became acquainted with cover artist Don Brautigam from New Jersey. They went on to do over thirty covers together, but Strangers was their first. “Dean was one of the first authors I’ve worked with to compliment me on my covers,” says Brautigam. “And he’s one of the few who offered ideas that were commercially viable. He has a good marketing sense.”
Brautigam worked on the limited editions that were yet to come, and Dean would dedicate Mr. Murder to him and to illustrator Phil Parks.
As Dean’s success made an impression on a wider audience, there were those who had known his past work in science fiction and his more recent novels in horror. They approached him to help them nurture a new organization that was just beginning to form: Horror Writers of America.
It had all begun with the germ of an idea mentioned by Robert R. McCammon to Joe Lansdale at a World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa. McCammon had wondered why there was an association for mystery writers and for science fiction writers, but nothing for horror writers per se. “I just thought there should be some sort of community or town hall,” he says. “I thought people would work together toward some kind of fund to protect writers and help new writers.”
Horror had been gaining popularity since the mid-seventies and some science fiction writers had viewed it as a new medium for making important statements about society. The science fiction field had become stale, some felt, and horror appeared to be a new and exciting outlet. “A lot of people were doing unique things,” says Lansdale, “particularly in the short story. It was an opportunity to use fiction to say something.” Neither considered himself strictly a horror writer, but McCammon had written a vampire novel, They Thirst, and Lansdale was gaining notoriety for his offbeat stories in Western horror, such as The Magic Wagon. McCammon started a newsletter for a group he called H.O.W.L. and from that had gathered a list of names. He gave them to Karen Lansdale, Joe’s wife, and she sent out form letters to ascertain interest for a more official organization. She received just over one hundred enthusiastic responses.
“We agreed to drop the catchy, but nonprofessional H.O.W.L. in favor of something that we felt gave our organization more credibility,” says Joe. “Its purpose was to help further the writings of those people in the field, to gain respect for them.”
Joe called Dean to ask him to participate. “I’m sure I was glib,” Joe says, “and he’s not that hard to manipulate.” Dean liked Joe’s dry, bantering sense of humor, and they began to talk more frequently. Finally Dean was persuaded to accept the position of president, since his name had influence and would bring respect from publishers and critics. Even though Dean was fighting to keep from being cast as only one type of writer, he agreed to get involved for other reasons. He had been a member of Mystery Writers of America without being typecast, so he thought he could do the same with horror. Little did he realize how strongly people would associate him with the horror genre afterward.
Dean had helped many aspiring writers with advice and financial assistance. He had even connected some with publishers and agents. He did not view writing as competitive, and thought that those writers who were able should hold out a hand to those coming behind, just as people like Robert Silverberg had done for him early in his career.
“I’ve always believed we owe it to one another to help each other whenever we can. That’s one way to make the field in which you work the highest quality.”
At the World Fantasy Convention in Tucson, Arizona, in 1985, the planning committee for the Horror Writers of America organization came together to meet. Joe Lansdale, Rick McCammon, and Melissa Mia Hall formed the membership committee. McCammon agreed to edit the newsletter and there was talk of best-of-the-year awards being set in place by the following year. The organizers were hesitant about this aspect, but knew that other organizations had them and the issue would have to be raised.
The first official meeting was scheduled for Providence, Rhode Island, in 1986. Dean did not attend, but it was clear to everyone that he would serve as the first president. John Maclay published one thousand copies of a booklet called The Monitors of Providence, devised by Richard Christian Matheson and J. N. Williamson. Dean wrote a segment of a twelve-part story that included sections written by such writers as Dennis Etchison, Robert R. McCammon, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. He brought humor to a lackluster story that seemed to struggle and go nowhere. It was about a boy and his parents who could never quite figure out what had gone wrong in the pristine town of Lovecraft, although it had something to do with hamburgers. Clearly it was difficult to bring together such disparate styles and have any sense of plot, tension, or focus.
The first officers elected to the organization in 1987, its first year, were Dean as president, Paul Dale Anderson as vice president, and J. N. Williamson as secretary-treasurer. Joe Lansdale took office later in the year, while Karen Lansdale happily shifted her responsibilities to Dean. He devoted twenty or more hours a week to the project, with Gerda’s help, and over the first year, paid over $8,000 worth of expenses so that the organization would have a solid financial base from which to begin. “Dean did a tremendous amount of work to put it together and keep it going,” McCammon claims. “He got it through a difficult period. Lots of letters came in demanding things. I didn’t know how he could write full-time and respond to all of that.”
Dean issued the first newsletter in October 1986. “My main concern,” said Dean in a published statement, “is that HWA becomes more than a social organization. I think there are various useful and necessary things that HWA can do for its members, such as forming a grievance committee to deal with problems with publishers and getting out a document to cover contracts.” He thought HWA could add dignity and publicity to the horror genre, and expected it to help horror to make the same strides that science fiction had made. Above all, he wanted to change much of the victimization and exploitation of writers by publishers that he had witnessed and experienced over the past two decades. Once the organization proved itself to be reliable and sober, he expected to be able to use it to sponsor yearly anthologies of short stories by members. Dean also urged members to consider setting up and contributing to a hardship fund for those writers hitting difficult times.
He lobbied against the institution of an awards program on the grounds that they inevitably become politicized, turn writers into competitors, and often are awarded to work that is trendy rather than substantive. Reluctantly he succumbed to membership pressure to establish annual awards. Those who had organized HWA wanted to prevent the awards from becoming a central feature, but the membership had other ideas. Harlan Ellison, whom Dean persuaded to become involved, found an artist willing to contribute his time to designing a high quality award. Stephen Kirk, a conceptual artist for Disney, came up with a haunted house so artistic that Dean realized writers would compete just to have one, let alone gaining the extra clout of recognition. Still, they were all proud to have an award that was more than just a chintzy plaque.
For the first year, Dean published statements in the HWA newsletters, urging members to focus on professional interests and avoid bickering over inconsequential issues. When people complained that the awards would be rigged, Dean urged the other officers to follow his lead in removing his own work from consideration. He also said that the awards should be for “superior achievement” rather than “best of the year.” The membership agreed.
Dean received many letters that crushed some of his illusions. In fact, only a few people seemed to share his concept of solidarity. There was much bickering, back-stabbing, jealousy, and attempts at undermining one another. When he used humor to deal with hot-button issues, some members wrote vehement letters of protest. “It took me the longest time to realize that so many members lacked a sense of humor,” he says. “They didn’t even realize that it was humor. Those of us who knew how to laugh at ourselves had fun … for a while. But the humorless crowd wore me down over time.”
The awards in particular, called the Bram Stoker Awards, for superior achievement in specific categories, made the organization susceptible to corruption and politicizing. Those who had put so much work into making HWA happen grew weary of the unrelenting suspicions and outright attacks. “I was naïve,” says McCammon. “I didn’t realize there would be all this bickering. Dean had a very difficult time keeping it going. He had the good sense to steer it correctly when it began, but some people wanted power to the detriment of the good of the whole. That disappointed me, and that’s when I started pulling back. The awards should never have been that important. The letters we got were very demanding and picky, and I didn’t have the diplomacy to deal with them. I got disillusioned with the whole thing.”
The following year, Dean relinquished the presidency to Charlie Grant, author of the Oxrun Station novels, and became president of the board of trustees. Maxine O’Callaghan, known for her Delilah West mystery series, became the new treasurer. She remembers that Dean remained watchful. “He monitored everything very closely that year,” she says. She had agreed to become an officer only because she had seen how much effort Dean had put into it, and she wanted to support what he believed in. “In the beginning he had great hopes,” she asserts, “but I think he hoped it would be a more supportive group. There were all kinds of infighting among the small presses when lines were drawn to protect professional standards. The whole thing kind of collapsed into all this wrangling. Dean became very disenchanted.”
Nevertheless he continued to edit the “Fiendish Endeavors” column wherein the membership announced their writing accomplishments. He also continued to write columns and to offer advice. In his last letter in any official capacity, dated October 1988, he warned members about the downside of the awards program. To his mind, things had taken a bad turn when a writer complained, after the votes had been counted and tossed away, that he had been cheated. Dean thought people were losing perspective.
“We wanted something that would benefit writers,” Lansdale explains, “but it veered away from that and became more like other existing organizations. Awards have their place, but the whole thing became something that we had not intended.”
One night the situation reached critical mass for Dean. He attended an awards banquet for Canine Companions for Independence, a program supplying dogs for physically challenged people. He saw people disabled for life whose attitudes were better and whose perspective was healthier than those he had seen among some of the HWA members. Their pettiness finally got to him. These complaining writers had no serious problems in comparison to those who bore the brunt of life’s worst disadvantages. Whining about awards, fighting about fine points of professional standards — to Dean this all seemed to be the essence of self-pity and small-mindedness. He wished he had never gotten involved.
“That was one of the biggest mistakes in my entire career,” he admits. “Even at that time, I rejected the label of horror, but when you become first president of a horror association, it haunts you for the rest of time. I could see it was a doomed effort almost from the beginning. I knew that awards would lead to the dissolution of the organization. That’s all people cared about. I’m sorry I launched it. I think it could have been a really valuable thing. I think all these writers organizations have the potential, but having gone through it, I think writers can be their own worst enemies. Instead of pulling together, they argue among themselves. To me, their values are always on the wrong things — awards or validation from peers. But awards always end up being corrupt. They’re trinkets. Baubles. Only the work matters, not what an awards committee or a handful of voters think. With awards, everything is political, and if you need that kind of validation, I’m not sure you have any meaningful confidence in your work. It becomes the end-all and be-all, and you lose track of what you should be doing. I’ve stayed out of all writers organizations since then. I used to belong to Mystery Writers when I was in HWA, but after leaving HWA, I dropped out of Mystery Writers, too.”
Yet it was not all negative. Through this organization, he met and became friends with other writers, such as Lansdale and McCammon, Matthew Costello, and F. Paul Wilson. He gave advice to younger writers such as Bentley Little and Douglas Clegg, both of whom went on to become published.
“It amazes people that we all know each other,” says F. Paul Wilson, author of The Keep. “It’s a web. We feel like we’re part of a family and, except for a few congenital malcontents, we’re not envious of one another. We have a language, a vocabulary. You can mention an old story and the others know what you’re referring to. We all come from sitting alone, reading the same books, and thinking they were wonderful.”
“He’s given me the best advice of anyone in publishing,” says Clegg about Dean. “He made me realize the importance of getting a strong commitment from the publisher. Of all the writers I’ve spoken with, he has the sharpest sense of the reality of the business.”
“Dean urged me to think big,” says Bentley Little, who met Dean at a book signing for Twilight Eyes. “Always try to surpass yourself, he told me. Always try to write a bigger book than you did last time. Always assume you’re writing a bestseller and tailor your work to a mainstream audience. Don’t write to just impress your peers.” From that initial meeting, Dean even helped him to get an agent.
In a limited way, Dean managed to gain some sense of community, but it was among those writers who worked at it as a profession, who had a sense of humor, and who wanted to do the hard work it would take to enhance their careers.
For the first time in a decade, Dean published short stories again, four in 1986 and four in 1987. He responded generously to editors of genre magazines who hoped his presence would improve circulation.
The summer issue of a magazine called The Horror Show focused on Dean, with two short stories and an interview. David B. Silva, the editor, had been surprised to find Dean receptive to contributing. He had started The Horror Show in 1982, and when he felt confident enough, had sent some issues to Dean. Dean called to express support. “Six months later and a number of phone calls back and forth,” Silva recalls, “we did a special Dean R. Koontz issue. He gave us the essay and the stories gratis, and hooked me up with the Land of Enchantment publisher to design the front cover. He also invested an enormous amount of time and effort. It was definitely a turning point for the magazine. It gave us legitimacy.”
The first story, “Down in the Darkness,” was about the suppressed potential for evil in the human soul. A man named Jess buys a home from a Vietnamese entrepreneur who turns out to be the torture master from a prisoner of war camp where Jess had been held. A mysterious door opens up to a dark cellar — unusual for a southern California home — and Jess discovers below a realm that is clearly supernatural — perhaps an antechamber to hell itself. Entities in this place wait to drag down and devour anyone sent down to them. Jess uses the cellar for revenge against the former torturer, which seems to restore moral balance in the universe. However, as he realizes that “darkness dwells within even the best of us,” he finds himself tempted to use it to dispose of other people whose offenses against him are minor, and he hopes he will not succumb to such a moral eclipse.
The second piece, “Weird World,” is more whimsical. It describes a magazine called Weird World, full of of strange and confusing news, and the “editor” says that Dean Koontz has pulled some strange episodes from their files. Presented are two absurd features entitled, “The Day it Rained Frogs” and “The Unluckiest Man in the World.”
Another story by Dean, “Snatcher,” was published in a horror magazine, Night Cry, and later revised for Strange Highways. A purse snatcher, Billy Neeks, finds out what it means to snatch the purse of a woman with unusual powers.
A similar theme of moral balance occurs in “The Black Pumpkin,” a Halloween story that appeared in The Twilight Zone magazine. A creepy pumpkin carver sends a message — “You get what you give” — to an aggressive kid who buys a pumpkin from him after wheedling a price much lower than the true value of his work. The horrific consequences reflect Dean’s take on life: People reap what they sow, and if their souls are in disorder, they will somehow pay the price. In some ways, this story crystallized what Dean wanted to do with his entire oeuvre: A good person starts at a disadvantage to a bad person, but life itself — along with the good person’s ability to engage its momentum — restores the balance and rewards the good person for his efforts to maintain integrity.
That year, in October of 1986, Dean and Gerda celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary. Gerda wanted to take a cruise to Acapulco and she insisted that they were going to dance, so Dean agreed to go with her to the Holiday School in Anaheim to take ballroom dance lessons. To his surprise, he found it to be a lot of fun — especially swing dancing to Big Band music.
The cruise went down the western coast of Mexico, and while they were on board, a storm began to form. Most passengers remained unaware that the seas were actually so bad as to qualify as a hurricane. While eighty percent of the passengers took to their rooms for four days, too ill to get out of bed, Dean and Gerda discovered that they did not get seasick even under the worst of circumstances — and managed to dance every evening, even with the deck pitching and yawing.
In Acapulco, they disembarked to explore the city. When it got late and their driver was nowhere to be found, they hired a cab. Across the dashboard, they noticed a line of small skulls — each intricately hand-painted. There were perhaps twenty of them — and they almost seemed to be symbols of successful kills — like skulls painted on the fuselages of World War II fighter planes.
Worse, the driver said to them, “I can take you places. Does anyone know where you are?”
Dean and Gerda look at each other. A stranger with a collection of skulls in a city they did not know was asking if anyone knew of their whereabouts.
“Oh, sure,” said Dean with forced confidence. He went on to claim that they were lifelong friends with the captain of the cruise ship and that it would not leave dock until they arrived. He wanted to make it clear that, were there to be any foul play, there would be immediate consequences.
By the time the driver dropped them at their destination, Dean realized that the skulls were merely part of the upcoming Day of the Dead festivals, and that the question had been innocent (and probably misphrased due to the driver’s poor English). Instead of narrowly escaping being murdered, they had most likely missed an opportunity to see some unusual sights. A novelist’s imagination is easily engaged!
1The Horror Show (Summer 1987), p. 23.
2Dean R. Koontz, Strangers (New York: Putnam, 1986), p. 680.
3Ibid., p. 415.
4Interview in the Los Angeles Daily News (February 8, 1987).
5The Horror Show (Summer 1987), p. 23.