THE YEAR AFTER JIM BARKER’S SCANDAL, RELIGIOUS LEADER Jimmy Swaggart resigned for sexual misconduct, tearfully begging his flock’s forgiveness. It seemed that no one could be trusted. The first black presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson, won five state primaries and made history for black Americans. By 1988, male life expectancy was seventy-six years, female was seventy-eight, and a loaf of bread cost about seventy-six cents — unless it was designer bread.
The following year brought a major world shift that influenced suspense writers everywhere, particularly those, like Dean, who had occasionally used the Cold War as a plot device. East Germany opened the Berlin Wall and many of its citizens fled toward democracy. It was not long before the two sides of this divided city were reunited and the breakdown of Soviet domination over smaller countries was at hand. When Dean revised some of his novels, he had to make changes in accord with the new world that was taking shape in response to the diminished threat from this totalitarian regime.
It was also the year that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini offered five million dollars for the murder of writer Salman Rushdie, who went into hiding. Many American writers spoke out in Rushdie’s defense. Khomeini died, but the issue of free speech remained alive. San Francisco suffered a major earthquake, New York endured brutal gang “wildings,” and Russia prepared for its first presidential elections.
Dean wanted to name his next novel for Putnam Lightning Road, but the publisher thought it sounded too much like a book about stock cars. Reluctantly he shortened it to Lightning, in the tradition of the one-word titles of his two previous bestsellers, although he did not think it was apt or evocative. He had been inspired by the idea while writing Strangers, and he wanted to develop the plot with a form of characterization that looked to Dickens for its motivation. The story follows the main character, Laura Shane, from childhood into her thirties, when she becomes a successful author. The challenge was to maintain a gripping level of suspense in spite of the story’s long time frame.
Laura is a forceful woman, with a strength born of adversity and common sense. Much of her character derives from Dean himself: her writing and research methods, her determination, and her life philosophies. She was one in a succession of strong female characters in his books. “I tend to like and respond to women,” he says. “I get a lot of mail from female readers who say they don’t know another male writer who gets into a woman’s head so well.”
Laura’s best friend is Thelma, one of a set of twins who has a self-mocking sense of humor and an ability to bring light into darkness. For her, as for Dean and Gerda, humor is a defense against life itself. Thelma becomes a famous stand-up comic, and throughout the book her relationship with Laura creates an atmosphere of warmth.
A third character who embodies some of the author’s qualities is twelve-year-old Christopher, Laura’s son, who loves science fiction, is devoted to his mother, and who understands thoroughly the various paradoxes of time travel.
Driving the plot is the ambiguity over whether the force of destiny will have positive or negative consequences. Laura Shane has a secret admirer from another era who travels through time to become her guardian. Whenever he arrives to save her from trouble, such as a physician’s mishandling of her birth, he is accompanied by the sound of thunder and the crack of lightning. He warns her of imminent danger from assassins arriving from his own time. Although one of his interventions had failed to save her husband’s life, Laura must trust him not only for her own sake, but to save her son.
Laura’s mysterious guardian is Stefan Krieger from the past — Nazi Germany — a twist on time travel of which science fiction writer Gregory Benford said, “I thought I had thought of every angle in my novel, Timescape, but that one was innovative.”
Stefan is an unlikely hero in that he is a Nazi with a stained soul. However, his inherent goodness, deep remorse, and love for Laura motivate him to try to set things right for her and for the world at large — in hopes of redemption. Yet the paradoxes of time travel prevent him from protecting Laura as well as he would like. She dies, and Stefan must figure out a way to work through the twists of paradox to defy destiny, reverse the damage, change the course of his future, and therefore “undo” Laura’s death. The twists and turns of Stefan’s struggle give Lightning one of Dean’s most clever plots. Simultaneously, Stefan’s knowledge of the future gives the Allies what they need to defeat Hitler, but they also destroy the time travel gate in Berlin, stranding Stefan in Laura’s era. Eventually she accepts him as her lover, which allows destiny to assert itself in a more life-enhancing way. No matter which way destiny has turned, ultimately it becomes a literary tool for reinforcing a sense of purpose and optimism.
When Dean turned in the manuscript, he felt that he had stretched himself and had written a unique and powerful novel. To his surprise, Phyllis Grann was unhappy with it. She was concerned that the three-decade time line of the novel vitiated the suspense, and that the first quarter of the novel, dealing with the lead character’s childhood, made it feel too much like a young adult novel. And it was demonstrably not horror, which was how she thought Dean should be marketed. Believing it would be harmful to his career momentum, she wanted to shelve Lightning for seven years and have him write a different book.
Dean knew that Phyllis Grann had good instincts and had built many writers into bestsellers. She had a solid reputation for that. Yet he was not about to let go of this novel. “I couldn’t understand what was so radical about it,” says Dean. “Short time frames in suspense work well — but there’s no reason tension can’t be maintained in a hundred-year time frame. Perhaps I didn’t share her prejudice because I’d read so many science fiction novels with very long time frames that were nonetheless gripping. As far as the character being a child for the whole opening segment, what about Oliver Twist?”
In short, the objections were that Lightning had no ticking clock, which most suspense stories require; a lot of space was devoted to developing the lead character’s childhood; the convoluted plot demanded too much from readers; and the male lead had a dark past. Dean resisted conforming to these “rules of fiction” and, ultimately, Putman agreed to publish the novel as a follow-up to his success with Watchers.
“If you don’t hang on to your vision, no one will hang on to it for you. If you didn’t have a vision, you’d be pulled in eighteen directions. If I’d slavishly done all that I’ve been asked to do by editors, I’d have never had a bestselling career. So with this book, I insisted that it had to be published, not in seven years, but on the original schedule. Lightning was a bear of a book to write because I was developing an idea that had never been used before — time travel from the past instead of from the future — plus a very unusual mix of genres. To pull that off was monumentally difficult. There were days when I thought my head was going to burst, keeping all the paradoxes straight. I had put so much work into it, so I was determined that it would be published on a timely basis.”
Nevertheless, Dean worried about his publisher’s reaction and mentioned it to fellow writer, Ed Gorman. Ed was the editor of Mystery Scene magazine, a writer of mystery and suspense, and a longtime fan of Dean’s. They had started talking on the phone regularly a few years earlier, and Dean had trusted Ed’s judgment enough to send him a copy of the manuscript to read.
“It’s a fantastic book,” Gorman assured him. “It’s going to be your most popular novel to date.” Gorman felt that the book was structurally sophisticated and took risks that no writer had taken before. “It’s about fate,” he said, “and American writers just don’t write about fate. It’s accepted in European literature, but not in American. No one since Thornton Wilder has seriously used fate as a theme.”
They went on to discuss at length the concept of fate in literature, and Dean felt better because Gorman had grasped the essence of the novel so clearly.
Later, in a letter to a reader, Dean mentioned this issue of fate: “I believe there is a certain pattern to the universe and that life has meaning, and I think that our species’ intellect is the link with God by which we will approach a state of grace here on Earth … If God exists, He provided us with high intelligence so we could question, reflect, and struggle to find and understand Him; the application of that intelligence in probing the world around us is perhaps a more sincere expression of faith than endless hours of prayer.”
Dean’s editor for Lightning was Stacy Creamer. He thought she was ebullient, amusing, and smart. “Good editors listen,” he says. “They don’t suggest changes merely because they feel they have to. They can let good writing alone. They can speak frankly. The worst thing an editor can do is cut or rewrite something without the author’s express permission. I don’t think I spent more than a day or two responding to Stacy’s notes. She never had many notes — but what notes she had were good and to the point.”
“I took him on with some trepidation,” Stacy Creamer recalls, “because it’s always hard for a writer to get a new editor. It’s such a personal involvement. Dean is a dream to edit. I called him Dean the Dream. Sometimes with bestselling authors, the more successful they are, the less they like to get edited, but Dean was always game for a thoughtful reading. Most of his work becomes like a word search — just try to find something that needs editing or trimming. I try to be an honest reader. I’d send line notes and he’d take about half of them. I always felt comfortable that I would get a fair hearing. The real writers are the ones who become more engaged with the process.”
The first printing was set at 110,000, but to Dean’s disappointment, when bookstores sold out, it was not immediately restocked. He would go into a store and see the space for his book standing empty. Booksellers he knew complained to him that they could not get copies from the publisher. Puzzled, Dean decided to do some detective work. A friend looked up the computer records of bookstore chains across the country and reported back that there were no copies at the major supplier warehouses. Dean grew more alarmed.
“I was nuts,” he said. “Here we were with breakthrough potential and no one was doing anything about it. So I wrote a detailed memo for my agent. She passed it along to Putnam, but they denied it. They were reprinting in increments of ten thousand and getting them out, but the general attitude was, if stock is thin, that makes the bookseller realize the book is selling, and they’ll order more.”
Dean was not happy with this philosophy — but even more unhappy that Claire Smith seemed disinclined to take his complaints seriously or check out the facts. He felt that she was too much of a partisan for the publisher, and that the lack of supply was causing the book to lose momentum. “She actually admitted to me that she didn’t take me seriously until her husband, in talking to a bookseller, discovered the store couldn’t get copies from Putnam.
“There are certain times when everything is clicking,” he says, “and if you don’t seize the moment, it may never come again.”
Lightning jumped onto The New York Times bestsellers list on January 24, at number fifteen. The next week it hit number nine. It stayed on the list for ten weeks, getting as high as six. On the Publishers Weekly list, it got to number four. This was a major achievement for Dean. Now he had three hardcover bestsellers in a row, one of them getting close to the coveted number one position. With the tremendous success of Watchers in paperback, there was some hope that the next novel might just do it. Despite the problem with short supplies in the stores, Lightning had done relatively well. With 251,000 copies shipped, it just missed being one of the top fifteen books of the year in sales.
Among reviewers, many comparisons were made between Dean and Stephen King, particularly King’s novel, Tommyknockers. Some had the impression from the dust jacket that Putnam was intentionally marketing Dean as the next Stephen King. Dean resisted the comparison because he felt their writing styles and philosophies were quite different, and he had no intention of being viewed as an imitator. King was primarily supernatural horror with a pessimistic tone, while Dean wrote his way through more realistic scenarios with an optimistic approach. Often critics took as horror what was closer to science fiction.
The West Coast Review of Books thought Lightning was a well-plotted, suspenseful tale, while The New York Times said Koontz had energized an otherwise cliché of stock horror opening scenes. The Associated Press called it “brilliant … both challenging and entertaining.” A “Koontz formula” was beginning to appear to the reviewer for The San Francisco Chronicle, of likable characters getting through threat and hardship. He called the novel well choreographed with outstanding plot twists. Many reviewers noted the innovative plot and liked the characters — especially that Dean had developed a strong and credible female lead character who was able to carry the book. When Dean heard from readers, males told him they had found it highly romantic.
In paperback the following April, Lightning went to number two on the Times mass market list, and number one on Publishers Weekly’s list.
Putnam made an offer for Dean’s next book, but he rejected it. Then Warner began to court Dean with better figures, but Putnam outbid them and signed Dean for three more books. Though he had no title, plot, or single line of print, Grann offered him $1 million per book. It seemed to Dean and Gerda a fantastic sum of money.
They were in the kitchen when Dean received the offer. Gerda was in the process of whittling down the handle of a six-dollar sponge mop to make it fit the head. She looked at what she was doing — they could just go buy a new mop! — and they laughed together at this incredible news. They could stop being so frugal. Indeed, they could have stopped years earlier, but “once poor, never rich.”
Dean let friends know, and he was surprised at some of the reactions he heard from other writers. “A number of writers I knew said to me very seriously and very excitedly, ‘When you finish this contract, you’ll never have to write again.’ That was such an astounding thing to say. I’d never written for money. Through a lot of lean years, I’d kept going, expecting nothing, writing for the love of it. Why would I ever stop, money or not? But I began to realize there were a lot of people who would look at it that way. They think money will make them happy. I’m happy to have the money, but I never thought the money was going to make me happy. With money, I still have the same problems, the same worries and fears. I just now know I can pay for things. That doesn’t make a very big difference, but it’s hard to make anyone understand. The money is fun, but in the end, it doesn’t change your life. If you’re unhappy poor, you’re going to be unhappy when you’re rich.”
Only one short story appeared in 1988, “Graveyard Highway” in Tropical Chills. A commuter on the Costa Mesa Freeway in California suddenly spots a vast graveyard along the west side — where he knows no such cemetery exists. Then he begins to see death everywhere he looks. What happens to him changes his focus from angry political activism to a desire to put all his effort into affirming life through art.
In an Introduction to Dark Harvest’s Dark Visions 6, later published by Berkley as The Bone Yard, Dean wrote a controversial account of the state of contemporary horror. He insisted that the effect of good horror should be as profound as that of any type of fiction, and used the example of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist to make his point. It does more than tell a scary story, he said. In spite of what he saw as its stylistic shortcomings, he felt that The Exorcist had enormous emotional impact, thematic integrity, and soul. In contrast, he dismissed much horror writing seventeen years after the publication of that novel as trash; these books, he felt, have nothing to say to the mind and heart. “Too many writers have turned away from their responsibilities as storytellers and craftsmen and artists, and instead of honing their talent and skills through hard work and polish, have tried to hold the reader by repeatedly shocking him, laying on the gore and violence with the misguided notion that vividly portrayed evisceration can substitute for storytelling, that splatter can compensate for lousy writing.”1 It seemed to him that the predominant theme was nihilism, which was nothing more than an adolescent conceit.
He lay the blame for much of the problem with fan conventions, which familiarized writers with the style and criticism of amateurs. “Subtexts cannot exist in a creative vacuum,” he claimed.2 Writers who see bad writing praised in fan magazines tend to copy that style in order to win similar accolades for themselves. The genre cannot survive, he believed, by feeding on lies about writing. Writers must be honest about the quality of the work and strive toward greater depth and skill in their presentation of all aspects of the human condition.
These were some of the reasons that he continued to resist being classified as a horror writer, and he insisted to his publisher that they leave the horror label off his book covers. To be thus identified meant to be associated with everything that a genre represents — even its worst elements — and to be limited to that genre. He had no intention of being thus corralled.
“He felt that we were trying to pigeonhole him,” admits Stacy Creamer. “In some respects, that’s right. Phyllis Grann wants to turn out a good product year after year. The readership comes to expect something, and she wants to succeed a little better every year with every author. She does it the way she knows how, and I think Dean felt restricted by that. But ultimately we did what he wanted to do.”
When Twilight Eyes was published in 1985, Chris Zavisa came up with an idea for another book for Land of Enchantment and decided to approach Dean about possibilities. He had seen how well faddish children’s toys like Strawberry Shortcakes and he-man action figures had sold. He wanted to enjoy that kind of success. “I wanted to create the next big thing,” he says, “so I came up with this concept of Stuffins and ran it by Phil Parks, and he came up with some drawings.”
Chris mentioned to Dean that he had another idea, and Dean warned him that his schedule was full, but he was willing to listen. He was interested in doing another project with Phil Parks.
“Chris’s idea,” Dean recalls, “was about a toymaker who makes magic toys that can talk. And some evil business is buying out his company or crushing him in some way. The story was to be about how he uses his magic toys to win out over the big company.”
Dean thought about it and began to offer his own suggestions. “One of the things that keeps you fresh as a writer,” says Dean, “is trying to do something new and different. So when this idea came up, I hesitated, but only briefly. It sounded like fun.”
“Dean introduced the evil characters,” says Chris. “He said we needed suspense and an antagonist. So Phil did some drawings of bad characters.”
“The best children’s books in my estimation have a very dark side to them,” Dean explains. “Kids not only roll with that — they love it. I wanted it to be a story about damaged kids having magical protectors. The idea was that if this all had worked on a bigger level, the sequels would have followed the toys on their journeys with children in troubled homes. We would have adventure stories about how they bring the child through turmoil. I think it could have been a wonderful series.”
They all wanted this to be as big as possible, so Dean turned it over to Claire Smith to sell, and Warner Books made a good offer. Dean had the name “Stuffins” checked out, and it turned out to have been trademarked already by Hallmark as a name for toys. So they changed the name of their toy characters to “Oddkins.”
“I started painting the characters before Dean started writing,” Phil Parks recalls. “I sent him characters in various poses. Dean had a definite idea for the main bad guy. He wanted a marionette reminiscent of Fred Astaire but with evil overtones. I named a few of the characters, and Dean named a few. I threw in a dozen different types, and we narrowed it down to the ones he liked. Sometimes the pictures I sent him would influence his writing, and that was the most stimulating thing to me about the project. It was a true collaboration.”
As they worked closely together, Phil began to see a mathematical tempo in Dean’s writing. “There were key events or scenes that happened in a rhythmic sequence. I don’t think it’s intentional. I think it comes from inside him, part of his natural rhythm, like a musician with an internal sense of timing. And he draws things out so well that there’s nothing for me to embellish. It’s like I’m restricted to a room where he’s defined the parameters and I have to pick out the image that best represents what’s going on. The challenge for me is to bring a new perspective to a scene or do something compositionally to make it visually dynamic.”
Dean ended up writing a children’s fable about the value of friendship — which had equal value for adults. His dedication was for Gerda. His idea was to make each of the heroic toys in some way archetypal, to be juxtaposed against the evil as images of nobility, goodness, and courage. “I thought they should have subconscious resonances.” In particular, he hoped to capture the feeling he recalled from childhood upon reading The Wind in the Willows. He wanted characters who had that kind of community. He felt it would give this story substance. It was important to Dean to convey the idea that civilization rests on friendship, compassion, and sacrifice.
The story follows a group of stuffed animals called Oddkins — because they are odd and they are “kin” to Bodkins, the toymaker — who lose their maker when he dies, and therefore must find a new toymaker to take their maker’s magic mantle. Among them are Amos the bear (also a poet), Butterscotch the dog, Patch the cat, and Burl the elephant. They have been made for children who have been bruised by life and who need special toys to help them to cope. The toys set out on their journey to the store of Bodkin’s successor, Colleen Shannon, but following them is a gang of evil toys led by a marionette — and an ex-con, Jagg. The devil wants Jagg to buy the toy factory so he can produce harmful toys. These mean toys represent a threat to good magic and life-affirming powers. The need for inner resources against such enemies becomes paramount, and it is the bonds created among those of like mind that can enhance the ability of any one of them to resist the forces that try to destroy.
The deceased toymaker’s brother is tempted to sell the store to the devil’s agent. Before that can happen, the evil toys are destroyed. But during the battle, Amos the bear is killed. The toys take him to the new toymaker, but even her skills cannot restore his life. The other toys each donates part of his or her magical stuffing — and then their loving sacrifice works its magic.
Warner had planned to include this book as part of their children’s line, but the sales force thought it could be marketed to adults as well. The book had a first printing of 80,000 copies, and was widely reviewed as a children’s tale about good and evil that had charm and a positive ending.
Peter Guber and John Peters, producers of Rain Man and The Color Purple, bought the rights to Oddkins in association with Warner Brothers. Then they moved on to head Columbia Pictures — and the project was left behind. Tim Burton was interested in making this story into an animated film, which excited Dean, but those plans fell through. Eventually Dean bought back the theatrical rights in a deal that gave Warner Books — a sister company of Warner Brothers — a collection of his short stories, Strange Highways, published in 1995.
Late in 1988, the Concorde and Centaur film version of Watchers opened to mixed reviews, mostly negative. Those who had loved the novel were dismayed to see the story so drastically altered. The only recognizable character was the dog — and he became almost secondary to a mindless teenage heartthrob main plot. Travis had been reinvented as a teenager and The Outsider was an OXCOM (Outside Experimental Combat Mammal) — but it looked ridiculously like someone wearing a rug.
“I knew I was in deep trouble,” Dean said in an interview with Robert Morrish, “when I read an article in which the director said, ‘We looked at this lead character, this thirty-five-year-old ex — Delta Force man, and his dog and said, gee, isn’t that a little tired? Let’s do something fresh. What really excited us was the fresh concept of a boy and his dog.’ And I said, ‘God, if they think that’s a fresh concept…’”3
Produced by Damien Lee, David Mitchell, and Roger Corman, and directed by John Hess, it starred Corey Haim as Travis and Barbara Williams as Nora. Corman had bought the rights, but had sold them to Carolco, which went on to produce the film in Vancouver, Canada, where it could be done more cheaply than in the States.
For the most part, the film was panned for lack of suspense, confusion in the story line, and lack of credibility. Daily Variety noted that it was difficult to tell who the “watchers” were in this film, but “it’s quickly certain that no one will be watching ‘Watchers’ for long.”
The box office gross was $940,173, but it did well enough in the home video market for Corman to think about exercising his rights to the sequel.
Dean was completely disheartened by the stupidity of the script and the shoddiness of the film. It made no sense to even call it Watchers, since all references to that theme were missing. When fans asked Dean about this film, he wrote a six-page response as a standard reply. In it, he praised the dog, but went into detail about what he thought “this stupid and tacky pile of noxious, steaming celluloid” lacked. He felt that only five percent of the book survived in translation to the screen, and that the story line was cobbled together and filled with holes. “This moronic screenplay,” he wrote, “wouldn’t win a prize in a creative writing contest in which all the submissions were written by monkeys.” He felt it stripped out all the magic and wonder of the novel, and tried to pass off bad science as thoughtful plotting. Even worse, it had radically altered the characters. “Aside from the dog, I don’t believe there’s any character in the movie who’s like he is in the book.”
Even so, Corman went on to produce two sequels. The announcement of the first sequel surprised Dean, but when he heard that Corman had supposedly been embarrassed by the original film, he thought that a remake might be a good idea. Corman had purchased Watchers with the proviso that he wanted to make a major film of high quality. However, Dean’s optimism was short-lived when he heard that Corman’s reasons for remaking the film were strictly capitalistic: The film had done well in video.
In the spring of 1990, Watchers II came to the screen, with a new director, Thierry Notz, and new cast including Marc Singer, Tracy Scoggins, and Jonathan Farwell. It was filmed outside Los Angeles, and Henry Dominic wrote the script. Again there is a dog and a creature (back to being called The Outsider) made by a genetics lab. This creature gets loose and eventually chases down the dog. There is a confrontation scene in which The Outsider is killed and the dog gives it a teddy bear as it dies. Again there are few parallels to the novel and little character development, although Variety thought it an improvement over the first version.
Dean, too, thought the film had more energy than the first one and fewer problems with the plot, but it seemed derivative of other movies, poorly paced, and still nothing like his novel. He was disappointed: “Still garbage of the stinkiest kind.” When Corman marketed yet another Watchers movie in 1994, he had a major fight on his hands. Dean was not about to sit back and quietly let him continue to exploit his name.
Dean sold hardcover rights for the five Leigh Nichols novels to a fine-edition, small press imprint, Dark Harvest. Paul Mikol and Scott Stadalsky had brought out their first volume in 1983, a collection of stories by horror writer George R. R. Martin, called Songs the Dead Men Sing. They went on to publish limited editions of novels and collections of stories by the top writers in the genre. Their Night Visions series consisted of three novellas by different name writers. Dan Simmons, Stephen King, Robert R. McCammon, and Clive Barker had all agreed to be published by Dark Harvest.
Dean had written an Introduction for Joe Lansdale’s The Nightrunners, which Dark Harvest published in a limited edition in 1987. He then wrote stories for Night Visions 4 and agreed to have limited, hardcover editions designed for his pseudonymous Nichols novels, bringing them out for the first time under his own name.
The first one, The Servants of Twilight, appeared in 1988, lavishly illustrated by Phil Parks, who would illustrate the other four as well. The House of Thunder also appeared that year, and Dean wrote an Introduction for Night Visions 6. By 1990, the other three Leigh Nichols novels were published in this limited-edition format.
The first book to analyze Dean’s work came out in 1988. Edited by Bill Munster of Round Top, New York, it was a collection of essays on themes and styles in Dean’s novels. Bill was the editor of Footsteps, a small-press magazine in the dark fantasy genre. He had printed a long interview with Dean in this magazine, which subsequently sold out.
“I was editing Footsteps, issue five,” Bill recalls. “I had interviews with Stephen King and Doug Winters, and the magazine did so well that I recognized you have to have a name. I wrote to Berkley asking them to forward a letter to Dean for issue six, and about a month before Christmas, on a Friday night, the phone rang and it was Dean. We talked for an hour and a half. He told me what he was working on and sent me his books. I published the interview and then wrote a proposal to Starmont House. Ted Dikty called me and said he was interested in a collection of essays about Dean. Dean told me to narrow it to the dark suspense books. The contributors were people I’d met through Footsteps. I invited them in and told everyone what to write about. Dean was happy with it. He was very cooperative.”
The book was to be called Sudden Fear. Dean’s friend Tim Powers wrote the Introduction, in which he delineated the history of practical jokes shared among Dean’s close acquaintances. Joe Lansdale supplied the Afterword, which he called “A Brief and Informal Appreciation.” Bill Munster also reprinted the entire interview he had conducted with Dean.
Other contributions included a study of Dean’s suspense techniques by Dave B. Silva, and a comparison between Dean and Stephen King by English professor Michael R. Collings, who also looked at the poetic style of Twilight Eyes. Author Elizabeth Massie wrote about the female protagonists in Dean’s novels, while Stan Brooks talked about Dean’s evolution away from science fiction, and discussed the similarities between Watchers and Shadowfires. Michael Morrison, a critic, author, and physics professor, examined the various monsters in three of Dean’s novels. A comparison of Whispers and Phantoms was done by English professor David Taylor, who described the skill of thematic braiding in these books, and Richard Laymon wrote about the power of language in Dean’s constant juxtaposition of death and life in his fiction.
Bill Munster then set to work on Cold Terror, a more ambitious companion-style book about Dean and his work. It was to be published by Underwood-Miller and was to include several interviews with people closely associated with Dean. Underwood-Miller scheduled it to be issued in hardcover in 1990. Production was delayed, however, and in the meantime, Marty Greenburg and Ed Gorman discussed with Dean the possibility of putting together a book called The Dean Koontz Companion. They included Bill Munster and his projects, folding it into theirs, so Cold Terror was never completed. Nor was a novella that Dean had hoped to write for Munster’s chapbook series, which was to be called “The Shadow Sea.”
Sudden Fear has been scheduled for reissue from Borgo Press, a publisher of scholarly materials, with the inclusion of a chapter written by Jim Seels on collecting first editions of Dean’s books.
Professor Michael Collings, one of the contributors, has also proposed to publish a complete bibliography of Dean’s work for Borgo Press.
1Dean R. Koontz, Introduction, Night Visions 6 (Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest Press, 1988), p. 5.
2Ibid., p. 9.
3Robert Morrish, “Weird Tales, Talks with Dean Koontz,” Weird Takes (Winter 1990/1), p. 112.