ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1988, DEAN HAD AN EXPERIENCE THAT HE would not write about for nearly a decade, but he claimed it in his essay for Beautiful Death as his one possible encounter with evidence for life after death. He was at work that day in his office when the phone rang. He picked it up and heard a female voice that sounded far away. She spoke with a sense of great urgency. “Please, be careful!” she said.
A bit startled, Dean asked, “Who is this?”
He received no response. The woman repeated the warning three more times, and each time she said it, her voice became more distant. When the line fell silent, Dean sat there listening for a while, uncertain what to make of it. The voice had sounded eerily like his mother’s, and she had been dead for nearly two decades. “But a voice is much harder to remember than a face, so I thought I was being melodramatic.” His number was unlisted, so it could not have been a prank call aimed at him. Perhaps it had been a number simply misdialed. He mentioned the incident to Gerda, but told no one else.
“It was such a strange call,” says Dean. “I don’t claim that it was a ghost. I don’t know what I believe. It certainly was odd. People report these kinds of events all the time, and it’s always struck me as interesting that everyone seems to have had an experience or two of the uncanny. Sometimes I believe that call was from my mother and sometimes that it was a very strange, serendipitous wrong number. I think you always have to keep some skepticism about things like this, but it’s comforting to think that there may be a realm where the personality survives.”
Two days after this call, Dean went to visit his father at Casa Orange. The staff were dealing with Ray’s behavioral problems, and they had asked Dean to come and talk with him. Ray had punched another resident, a man on a walker, and the nurses were worried. Dean was unaware that Ray had used some of his small allowance to go out and buy the same type of yellow-handled fishing knife that he had owned the year before, and that he had worked on this one, honing it to razor sharpness and oiling the hinge to make it open like a switchblade. When Dean came into the room, Ray grabbed the knife from a drawer, and Dean had to try to wrestle it away from him. There were many witnesses to this altercation, and one of them called the police. Finally Dean got the knife without incident and carried it out into the hall — just as the police arrived.
They drew their guns and ordered him to drop the knife.
Dean was startled. “It’s not me you want,” he insisted. “It’s him in there.” He pointed into his father’s room.
“Drop the knife,” they repeated, still training their weapons on him.
Dean froze. “All of a sudden,” he recalls, “I realized that they were going to shoot me if I didn’t drop the knife. They thought I was the perpetrator. So I dropped it and obeyed them. That was one of the worst moments of my life. My own stupidity almost got me killed.” He later included this scene in his 1993 novel, Mr. Murder, when Marty Stillwater, the protagonist, has a similar encounter (though under different circumstances) with the police.
Eventually the police realized that Ray was the dangerous party. They took him to a psychiatric ward where he would be kept for a short observation period. It was only temporary relief. Casa Orange would not take him back, and Dean knew that something would have to be done immediately to get his father placed in a more secure establishment. Despite the pressure of deadlines, this took priority. His father was now too mentally ill to be without supervision. Yet the ordeal was only to intensify.
A week later, Dean and the hospital administration were summoned to court. A public advocate making the rounds in the psychiatric wards had asked Ray if he wanted to be released. In spite of his aphasia, Ray had managed to persuade the man that he was fine and wanted out. The man had then filed the paperwork to demand immediate release.
“I went to the courthouse,” says Dean, “and the attorney representing the hospital told me what would most likely happen. She didn’t expect the public defender to call me because he’d have nothing to gain by it, and much to lose. Instead he’d go before the judge and say that my father was perfectly capable of living outside the psychiatric ward. That alarmed me because my father was a dangerous man. He had threatened neighbors with a knife, too, and he’d been on antipsychotic medication to which he had developed a high tolerance.”
The hospital psychiatrist, a Korean-American man whom Dean liked, was there to testify, along with a physician. The judge, a Mexican-American, was reputed to be conservative about turning people with psychiatric problems loose on the streets. Even so, there was no certainty about the outcome.
Dean realized that if Ray were released, he might wind up living on the streets, and if he did not want anyone to manage him, there was nothing Dean could do about it. If he wanted to, Ray could live in the gutter. It was not that Dean wanted Ray to be kept in the psychiatric hospital ward, but he needed more time to look for a decent facility, to ensure that Ray had better care.
“I was already desperately looking and I just didn’t like the places I was seeing,” he says. “Some were nice, but those places wouldn’t touch him if he’d had psychiatric problems. Especially associated with violence. And I didn’t like the lockup facilities. I was still looking, and there were twenty or thirty places left to see. I’d been to about a dozen but I had not liked any of those.”
Dean told the hospital’s attorney that his father would die on the street. It would not benefit him to be released, as he was a danger to himself and others. She was sympathetic and reassuring. “We have hope and believe there’s a seventy-five percent chance that they’ll keep your dad in psychiatric care.”
Also attending a hearing with the same attorney was a fiftyish couple who were also trying to ensure that a psychotic relative be held in a psychiatric ward long enough to find another facility where he could get longer-term treatment. Initially Dean thought they were dealing with a parent, as was he, but as he listened to the attorney discuss the case with them, he realized they were plagued by a twenty-year-old son suffering from drug-related psychosis. He had been driving with wild aggressiveness, but each time his parents had attempted to get his driver’s license taken from him, the state gave him another chance, in spite of a long list of accidents. The boy’s dream was to run down schoolchildren at a crossing. He had been committed several times, but each time some public advocate got him released. He had once smashed in the windows of his family’s home to get back into the house. Because of his youth, they faced a lifetime of similar incidents. Dean realized that their problems were much worse than his, but that was little comfort.
In the courtroom, when Ray was brought in a wheelchair, he made several histrionic gestures to the effect that Dean was breaking his heart.
The court called the physician and the psychiatrist to the stand, both of whom testified that Ray was psychotic, suffering from degenerative alcohol syndrome, and should not be released. Then, to the hospital attorney’s surprise, the advocate called Dean. From what followed, it became apparent that somehow Ray had managed to convince his advocate that he was a successful businessman whose son wanted to put him away to get his money — and the advocate evidently had taken this at face value. On the stand, Dean suggested that he would rather discuss his father’s history more privately, perhaps in the judge’s chambers.
The advocate insisted he say whatever he had to say right there in court, in front of Ray and all onlookers.
Reluctantly, while Ray stared at him from his wheelchair, Dean recounted his childhood experiences and added the facts as they stood: Ray was destitute; Dean had supported him for the past eleven years; he had gone through some forty jobs in thirty-four years; he was an alcoholic; and had been diagnosed a borderline schizophrenic and pathological liar.
In the brief cross-examination, the advocate quickly saw where the truth lay — and knew it was not with his client. Initially aggressive, he quickly wilted.
The judged asked Dean what his plans were for his father.
Dean explained that he was looking for a satisfactory care facility, but thus far had been unsuccessful, and hoped to be granted more time to find the right place.
The judge was ready to make his decision. He looked at Ray and said, “You’ve had to sit here and listen to your son say some terrible things about you today. That could not have been easy.”
Ray nodded emphatically. Dean had the sinking feeling that the judge was going to be sympathetic to his father. After all he had just said, that seemed impossible, yet he feared that Ray was about to be released.
Then the judge continued, still looking at Ray. “I must remind you that your own advocate made your son do this. It wasn’t what he wanted to do. And I believe I speak for most of the people in this room when I say that if I ever need help in my old age, I’d be relieved to have a son or daughter who will take care of me as well as your son has been taking care of you.”
With that, he directed that Ray be held in a psychiatric ward for the additional legally allowable period, giving Dean the time he needed to look for a decent nursing home.
Dean was vastly relieved. In spite of pending deadlines, he went back to the search for a good care facility.
Dean describes some of this process in his 1991 novel, Cold Fire. Jim Ironheart remembers having had to go to court and then find a decent rest home for his grandfather. What Dean describes of this place, Fair Haven, is similar to the home he finally found for his father, Buena Vista. The institution was clean, the staff were friendly, the food was good, and the rooms were attractive. Buena Vista was also the only nursing home of quality that would take a man who had Ray’s history of psychiatric problems; otherwise, he would have had to have been placed in a far grimmer locked facility.
Ray entered Buena Vista Care Home on October 7. Dean was glad to finally find a place where he could be sure that Ray would be under a watchful eye, yet living in as pleasant an atmosphere as possible under the circumstances.
Dean continued to visit him regularly, partly out of fear that, without guidance, Ray might yet hurt someone. He thought again about having blood tests done to determine their true relationship, but again procrastinated.
A friend suggested that perhaps Dean did not wish to know that his mother might have been unfaithful to Ray. Dean dismissed this concern. If that indeed had happened, he would understand it, considering the marriage she had endured. It was something else that kept him from following through.
As difficult as all of this was for him, Dean had another novel coming out in January that he knew had every chance of doing well, thanks to the popularity of Lightning and Watchers. Only a month later, the review of an advance copy of Midnight in Publishers Weekly predicted just that: “Koontz’s sense of pace and drama are sure, and there are a number of memorable moments. This one should hit the bestseller list at a run.”
When Lightning had come out, Putnam had pressured Dean to do an author tour, but he resisted. He did not enjoy the spotlight and preferred to get on with writing his next book. He also felt that anonymity suited a writer better because he was free to observe those around him in a way he could not after allowing himself to become a celebrity. As Putnam prepared Midnight for publication, they asked again that he do an extensive promotional tour, but again Dean pleaded the primacy of writing. Phyllis Grann relented once more but insisted on making a deal, sealed with her and Dean’s words of honor. For the next book and every book thereafter, Dean would do a long tour until and if he ever hit number one on The New York Times list. Thereafter, no tours.
Dean had tried out several titles for this book, among them Midnight Music and Shadow Run, but Grann had not liked them. Stacy Creamer remembers that Grann was heavily involved with editing this novel and that they had suggested changes to the ending to clarify it. They were rapidly preparing it for print when Stacy noticed an error on the dust jacket flap that had somehow gotten past everyone’s scrutiny: The last time Moonlight Cove was mentioned in the summary, someone had inadvertently spelled it Midnight Cove. It was the printer himself who had brought this to her attention, but only after he had already printed 100,000 copies of the jacket, at a total cost of $35,000. “Phyllis was in Florida,” Stacy recalls, “and I had to call her. She was really angry, but she had those jackets destroyed.”
Midnight, published in January 1989, hit the top of all the major lists its second week out. But Dean would not have to tour, after all. This was his first number one bestseller in hardcover.
“We were astonished,” Dean said at the time about his and Gerda’s reactions. “I’ve been jumping up and down so much that my ankle joints are beginning to give out.”
Phyllis Grann also responded to the flurry of press. “He became the number one bestseller the way people used to get to be number one,” she said. “He built a loyal following and those fans stayed with him, while he attracted new ones with each book.”1
Claire Smith noted that Dean’s decision to concentrate on fewer but more ambitious novels was also instrumental.
First printing was set at 200,000 copies, with an ad budget of $150,000. The Literary Guild took it as a main selection, the third of Dean’s books to be used by them so prominently. The following November, Midnight went to number one in paperback.
Dean and Gerda decided to celebrate by buying something and then going out for a large slice of rich chocolate cake. They went to a nearby shopping mall and Dean purchased a sport coat. Then they ate dinner at a casual restaurant and ultimately decided to pass on the cake. “We need practice at this,” Dean commented to a friend, Ned Frear.
He dedicated Midnight to Ed and Pat Thomas, friends and owners of the bookstore in Tustin, California, where he has done signings for every book since Strangers. They were the first people ever to ask him to sign.
The story concerns four people, previously strangers, who come together and, in the course of one night, join forces to resist a megalomaniac computer genius intent on using nanotechnology to physically and psychologically transform all the residents of a small, isolated town. Dean uses geography and weather to enhance the feeling of isolation common to towns along a certain stretch of California coast. This novel’s themes are drawn from several science fiction scenarios, most notably the H. G. Wells 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. That story is an allegorical tale of human conceit in which a scientist populates a remote island with beasts that have been surgically transformed into men, and whose veneer of civilized behavior proves tenuous.
In Midnight, Sam Booker is an FBI agent, Tessa Lockland the sister of a murder victim, Chrissie Foster a young girl terrorized by her technologically transformed parents, and Harry Talbot a paraplegic with a companion dog named Moose. All of these people must cope with some degree of isolation or loneliness. Ultimately they join in a healing bond of friendship that becomes like family. Harry and Chrissie are residents of Moonlight Cove, an oceanside town, while Sam and Tessa come into town in response to the string of violent deaths that have occurred there. Most of the residents work for New Wave Microtechnology, owned and operated by a reclusive and demented genius, Thomas Shaddack.
As revealed in a flashback setpiece that is virtually a novella in itself, Shaddack had killed his parents when he was only twelve and had gotten away with it. Even as he had excelled in computer technology, he had remained a mentally arrested adolescent. Self-centered and greedy, he views Moonlight Cove as his kingdom and its residents as his subjects. To his mind, if they become mechanized through a process he has invented that joins flesh to machines, they will never die and can then be controlled and made to serve him forever. The idea is to improve the species according to his design. In the first application of nanotechnology to biological purpose, he has injected into their blood silicon microchips that connect to a computer that will override their brain functions and make them into his New People — beings of great intellectual power untrammeled by emotion. Yet he has failed to predict the regressive effects: People need emotions, and being so fiercely deprived, will revert to the most primal states of their animal selves. Some of the townspeople are becoming marauding werewolf-like savages, called “regressives.” They enjoy killing.
On the surface, Midnight is a novel about the dark side of technology — that which can be used for good can also be used for evil. In the wrong hands, it can be a formidable weapon. In this case, it forces people into a sterile part of themselves and draws forth the primitive emotions that civilization has managed to repress. It also allows these people to shift shapes and indulge in their worst desires. This computer-age myth of the consequences of playing God forces us to take a look at ourselves — our own dark sides. It is the Faustian urge to have it all crashing in on itself.
The central theme of Midnight is the way power negatively works on the human soul. Dean uses the quote from Will and Ariel Durant, “Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.”2 Technology can be a liberating force, contributing to human freedom, or an instrument of power, enslaving us — depending on those using it. Shaddack is a power freak. Sam, too, is a power freak in his personal relationships, and only learns not to be when, by the end, he can stop trying to control his teenage son and can embrace him instead. Power — people’s use of it, rejection of its use, resistance to it, or subjugation by it — is the issue with every character in the novel.
Juxtaposed against that is the force of love and responsibility to others. It can turn pessimism to optimism, and protect, encourage, and heal. As it does with the four characters, it can restore faith in life. It is meaning and purpose against nihilism, structure against chaos; it is what people live for. As such, the novel itself is a metaphor of how Dean views the writing process: As writers seek to structure their material with moral purpose and optimism, they contribute to resisting the forces that break down society and individuals.
Dean’s conception of what it means to be human involves the capacity for good or evil, and maintaining goodness requires a strong will and the support of others of like mind. Yet neither force may appear in the way we might expect. Shaddack is the monster who looks normal, while Harry Talbot is a crippled man who does not. Talbot is isolated by society, but he is more human than is Shaddack or those turning into “New People.” Even the dog, Moose, shows more human responses to need than most people in the story.
In a note at the end of the novel, Dean mentions Canine Companions for Independence, an organization to which he and Gerda have contributed money and time. CCI breeds, trains, and provides exceptional guide dogs to physically challenged people. As he and Gerda love dogs and admire the courage of all the disabled people they have met, CCI has a special meaning for them. In honor of the Koontz’s substantial support, a campus in the Oceanside, California, facility was dedicated to them.
Corey Hudson, executive director of Canine Companions for Independence, was delighted with Dean’s participation. “The dedication in Midnight generated a tremendous amount of awareness and support for our nonprofit organization. Generous readers have contributed close to $100,000 over the years in response. Dean and Gerda Koontz have played a major role in the growth of our program service. Because of their support, many people are directly enjoying the love and assistance of canine companions.”
Reviews of Midnight were largely positive, although some critics complained that Dean had used a well-worn “mad scientist” premise and that his delivery lacked subtlety: Rather than allowing readers to make their own connections with science fiction classics, Dean had spelled it out for them with explicit and repeated references.
Sarah Sue Goldsmith in the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate found it interesting that the novel was based on nanotechnology, which had been fully explained in Scientific American, but only after the novel had been written. She was impressed that Dean kept up on the latest technology via professional journals as it was happening.
Several critics discussed the general decline in horror fiction, but cited Koontz as an author still striving for quality in this genre. “What has always impressed me about Koontz,” said Gregory Frost in Science Fiction and Fantasy, “is his ability to craft a story so that it barely lets the reader come up for air between terrors.” In The New York Times Book Review, David Murray noted the complex characters, and described the novel as “good, page-turning fiction designed to keep a reader up well beyond midnight.” Kirkus said that “Koontz recaps and puts a high-velocity spin on the whole history of horror fiction here, enriching a bounty of scary set-pieces with winsome characters and piquant reflection on what exactly makes us human … Koontz cooks at high heat here … a sure-fire bestseller.”
Midnight remained on the bestsellers list for three months in hardcover, selling 310,000 copies. In paperback, it stayed fourteen weeks and sold over two million copies.
Two months later, Dean sold six of his previously published novels to Berkley for $3 million. They were willing to pay for the rights based on how well The Mask, originally published under the name Owen West, had done as a reissue under Dean’s name. The Mask spent several weeks at number five on the Times list and number four on Publishers Weekly’s, list. Advance orders from booksellers totaled 1.2 million. The books that Berkley planned to reissue were Demon Seed, The House of Thunder, The Servants of Twilight, The Eyes of Darkness, The Key to Midnight, and The Voice of the Night. It had been only a year since Dean had made a deal with them to sell five old novels — including two from the list above — for $50,000 apiece. But he had never signed the contract. He had first wanted Berkley to rectify the trouble they were having supporting his backlist. By the time they managed to do so, the price for the rights had shot up, based on his increasing success in hardcover.
Berkley published the last of this list, Demon Seed, in the summer of 1997. All five books far outearned even the greater advances that his success had required the company to pay.
Dean had been through several Hollywood agents. Through Henry Morrison he had acquired one, Gordon Molson, whom he liked personally and whom he kept for a while. Then with Claire Smith at Harold Ober Associates, he had been represented by Creative Artists Agency, though he was not pleased with their work. Through Warner Books on the Oddkins project, he met Pat Karlan.
“We were compatible,” says Karlan. “Dean liked the way I work, which is low-key and up-front. We share some of the same philosophies, and he was wonderful to work with. Dean always understood what was going on in the crazy film business.”
Warner and Lorimar together optioned sixteen of Dean’s books for a period of a year. Their hope was to get two movies made per year under a series tentatively to be called “The Dean Koontz Theater.” During the first six months, they began to develop four of these for CBS television: Night Chills, The Eyes of Darkness, Darkfall, and The Face of Fear. Rose Schacht and Ann Powell wrote a script for The Eyes of Darkness, Robert Crais wrote a screenplay for Night Chills, and Alan Glueckman wrote the teleplay for The Face of Fear. Dean wrote the script for Darkfall.
Dean was named executive producer, and was able to work closely with the assigned writers. He also had some input regarding casting and direction.
Ultimately the network approved Darkfall, the only script by Dean. But because a new regime of executives was to take over in a couple of months, the current executives wanted Darkfall delivered prior to the change. Warner Brothers Television and Dean agreed that delivering a quality TV movie in the time allotted would be impossible. Though they knew that the new regime might choose to proceed with none of the four scripts, they risked waiting. Realizing that of the remaining three, only Robert Crais’s script had a chance of being approved, and not wanting to bet everything on that and Darkfall, Dean wrote his own script for The Face of Fear. Sure enough, the new network executives decided against Darkfall because they didn’t like “stories with nasty little creatures in them.” They passed on Night Chills and The Eyes of Darkness as well — giving the green light only to Dean’s script for The Face of Fear. Though Dean felt he had used nothing of the Glueckman script, the Writers Guild arbitration committee gave them shared credit — though Dean received top billing — unusual in a case where the original writer did retain some credit, and a de facto acknowledgment that the film script was largely Dean’s.
Dean was due in England on April 12 to promote Midnight and Lightning for Headline. The tour was to begin in Manchester, then go on to Birmingham and London.
Dean had some trepidation, because one plane ride early in his career had been extremely rough. Another time, a friend had urged him to come along on a private plane, insisting that riding with someone he trusted at the controls would cure him of his fear of flying. He had nearly accepted, but prior commitments prevented him from accepting the invitation. The following day, that plane crashed into a mountain, killing everyone. Now he faced the prospect of a very long trip, putting his life in the hands of strangers.
“We had elaborate arrangements,” Dean says. “We were going on British Airways and coming back on the Concorde. We had a suite at Claridge’s and money on deposit there, and then I came down with a serious stomach ailment.”
About a month before they were scheduled to leave, he awoke one morning suffering from pain in his right side and a seriously swollen abdomen. Overnight, he had gone from a thirty to a thirty-nine inch waist. He immediately went to his doctor, who eventually recommended a gastroenterologist, Dr. Steven Ducker, who insisted he go into the hospital for tests.
“We’re supposed to be in London soon,” Dean told him.
“I don’t think you’re going,” was all Ducker would say.
Dean went into the hospital. Although the doctor had assured him this was not cancer, he still worried. He had never experienced anything like this before, and nothing his family doctor had tried prior to Ducker had proved effective.
Dean returned to the doctor for the results of his tests a few days after he left the hospital. Dr. Ducker told him, “Well, we have good news. There’s no trace of cancer anywhere in your body. When you came in here, I thought you were probably terminal.”
Taken aback, Dean responded, “But you said there was no reason to worry that it was cancer.”
The doctor smiled and shrugged. “What would you have had me say? I realized it would have been a bad four days of waiting if I’d said, ‘I think there might be a malignancy.’”
As it turned out, Dean had a valve inflammation caused by the buildup of long-term stress. He had to get some relief from the stress before the swelling would subside.
“So what’s going on that’s so stressful?” the doctor asked.
Dean shrugged. “Nothing.”
Ducker, who possesses both a direct manner and an exceptionally charming bedside manner, said, “Nope, sorry, but that can’t be true. What about your work?”
“I love my work,” Dean said. “It’s a great pleasure, even on hard days. There’s always the pressure of deadlines. That’s kind of stressful, but I’m used to that now.”
The doctor pressed. “There’s nothing else?”
“No, not really.” Then Dean thought for a moment and added, “My father is a lifelong alcoholic and a diagnosed schizophrenic, and we’ve had to bring him out here and support him. He’s kind of violent and a hypochondriac. He was calling us around three mornings a week at two and three A.M. to say he had to go to the hospital, so we’d rush over to his apartment and take him to the ER, but there was never anything wrong with him. It’s exhausting. That’s been kind of stressful, but I’ve put up with him all my life.”
“Has he been violent lately?”
Dean shrugged. “Well, he tried to kill me. I had to take a knife away from him.”
Ducker stared at him, speechless.
“I guess I am under stress,” Dean said.
The doctor concurred. As they talked, he mentioned that he had started the first Adult Children of Alcoholics organization in Orange County. He thought Dean might benefit from coming to the meetings, although he recognized that Dean possessed a high level of self-control and could probably work on the problem himself. Ducker taught him a few relaxation techniques. He urged Dean to learn to recognize when he was stressed and then change activities to break the reaction patterns.
“How often do you see your father?” he asked.
“Twice a week for about an hour and a half,” Dean told him.
“Okay, now listen. This guy is a user. He’s never going to be anything else. You go because some part of you thinks that if you just play the dutiful son that someday he will explain to you why he’s done all these terrible things. But he won’t. It’ll never happen. In fact, he’ll just try to use you and hurt you more and get more out of you. I want you to go once every six weeks for fifteen minutes and that’s it.”
“I can’t do that,” Dean insisted. “No matter what he’s done, he’s still my father.”
“If you don’t do this,” the doctor pressed, “you’ll never get well. You’re going to have to wean yourself out of this code-pendency. Go see him twice a week and stay for half an hour. Then cut back to once a week, and then once every other week. And then drop it to fifteen minutes, until you’re seeing him briefly, once every six weeks. Otherwise he will destroy the rest of your life as long as he’s alive.”
Dean was in such bad shape with his stomach condition that he knew he would accept this advice. He followed the doctor’s instructions and ultimately reduced his visits to his father to once a month for half an hour. About six months after this discussion with Dr. Ducker, Dean’s physical problems cleared up. “It was very interesting because it showed me how much the mind does affect the health of the body,” Dean says.
Dr. Ducker became Dean’s personal physician, not just his gastroenterologist, and Dean credits him with more than a mere healing touch. “Because of Dr. Ducker’s desire to treat the whole patient, not just the current malady, because of his willingness to take time with patients, because of his insight, I was not only cured of my gastroenterological problems, but began to get a handle on how to separate myself from my father and prevent the damage he delighted in causing.”
He never did get to England.
In 1989, Shippensburg University made the decision to confer an honorary Doctor of Letters degree on Dean as one of their most distinguished alumni. Not all of the faculty were in agreement on this. Some of the English professors felt that Dean’s writing was not serious enough to be awarded such an honor; he was merely a popular writer, they said, and expressed their disagreement by deciding to boycott a talk that Dean was planning to give to the English students. Nevertheless, other people felt that Dean’s accomplishments merited recognition.
“When you have a graduate who has excelled in an area,” says President Anthony Ceddia, “who represents a standard of performance that is above the average in something that satisfies people’s interests and needs, that person deserves to be recognized. We invited him to receive an honorary degree, and he did a terrific job at the graduation ceremony. His profound ability to understate things is magnificent. He just mesmerized the students. We’re very proud that he’s an alumnus and pleased with his success. We’ve given about fifteen honorary doctorates to such people as Bishop Tutu and Dick Thornburg. Dean is the only alumnus to date to get one.”
For Dean, it was an irony — but a delightful one — to receive an award like this from an institution that had nearly expelled him after his first year.
On his way to Shippensburg, Dean returned to Bedford to see friends and relatives. By phone, he had met Ned Frear, publisher of the Bedford Gazette. Years earlier, Ned had read something by Alan Dean Foster and surmised in print that Foster might be one of Dean’s pseudonyms. Dean had called to correct him. Alan Dean Foster was a real person. From that time forward, they had kept in touch, and Ned had written regular columns to let the people of Dean’s hometown know about his latest achievements. Ned was also a partner in the local bookstore, so he set up a book signing there that was attended by many people that Dean had known, including grade school teachers.
Dean reunited with Larry Johnson, and he and Gerda joined Larry and his wife at the famous Ed’s Steak House — the restaurant that Dean had so yearned to enter as a kid. It made him laugh to see that although the food was quite good, the decor that he had imagined to be the ultimate in elegance back then was actually ordinary steakhouse decor. How much his life had changed!
He had another strange occurrence in Bedford. Dean’s Aunt Virginia had arranged with the current owners of Dean’s childhood home to allow him to go inside and see it. They drove Dean and Gerda over to that side of town. Dean thought it might be interesting to see the place, but he was surprised to find that he was having a stronger and more negative reaction the closer they got to the house.
“We pulled up in front,” Dean remembers, “and I could not get out of the car. I got very shaky and I said, ‘We’ve got to go.’ I couldn’t even look at the place. I was stunned at my reaction. I could not physically get out of the car. I asked Aunt Ginny to call the people and apologize. I just had to leave. I couldn’t even speak. So we left.”
He does not know whether something may have happened in the house that he still has not remembered, or whether he was merely reacting to all those desperate days of his youth and to his mother’s suffering there. Later, when he wrote Dark Rivers of the Heart, featuring a man with repressed memories of an atrocity that he had witnessed at his home, Dean wondered if there was some connection.
In Shippensburg, commencement was scheduled in Seth Grove Stadium for Saturday, May 6, at eleven o’clock. Eight hundred and six seniors were receiving bachelor’s degrees, along with one hundred graduate students receiving master’s degrees. The afternoon before, Dean gave a talk on “The Trials and Tribulations of Young Writers Entering the Publishing Process,” and that evening he was honored at a reception at the president’s house.
Richard Forsythe was happy to see his former student again. They spent time in his Chambersburg home, catching up on their separate lives, but Richard worried that Dean was not putting any time into preparing. “I said, ‘Dean when are you going to work on your speech?’ He said he wasn’t going to worry about it. And the morning when we were going to Shippensburg, I picked him up and saw that he had no papers with him, so I said, ‘You must have left your notes in the hotel room.’ He said, ‘No, I didn’t.’” Although Dean explained that he always spoke extemporaneously, Richard continued to worry that he was going into the ceremony without knowing what he would say.
After the graduates came in and were seated, Dean was introduced by President Ceddia. Quoting Dr. Harold Gleason, English department chair during Dean’s undergraduate days, he described the honoree as “a consistently polite and moderate young man,” commenting that this former student, equipped with a degree in English from the university, had gone on to have a career “of almost unparalleled productivity and success.” By that time, Dean had already written fifty books, had been translated into seventeen languages, and had forty-five million copies of his novels in print throughout the world.
“It is his integrity of purpose,” Gleason wrote in the official citation, “that distinguishes his novels from the avant-garde on the one hand and the sensational on the other … In tribute to his pre-eminence as a figure in contemporary American literature, his unflinching advocacy of freedom and openness in human relations, and his embodiment of the ideals of a liberal education, we confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, upon Dean Ray Koontz.”
Even at that moment, Dean still had not composed his speech.
“I conceived it as I walked up to the podium,” he admits. “I decided to tell a few anecdotes about my days at Shippensburg and drop in a few observations. Between the sharper truths about life in the working world, I kept them laughing.”
As Dean looked out over the crowd of more than three thousand, all waiting patiently for what he might say, he told them he was supposed to boil down all the wisdom he had learned into ten minutes and it suddenly dawned on him that he might have some trouble filling up that much time. That got a laugh. He talked about his stint in Saxton, his year at Mechanicsburg, and a campus “sit-in” in which he had once participated as a student to protest the food in the cafeteria. One item of advice in a tongue-in-cheek list of hard-won truths that he wished to impart was this caution: “Never pick a fight with a man who has the words ‘Born to Die’ tattooed on his forehead.” Then he got more serious.
“I told them the truth,” says Dean. “I made it funny, but I structured it around advice for life.”
He looked the crowd over and said, “Most speakers would come here to tell you what’s happening in the world and how to meet it, but I’m here to tell you that most of what they say is a load of lies. You applaud them because they make you feel good. But I’m going to tell you what it’s really like out there — advice that will do you some good. They may tell you the world needs and wants you young people with your fresh faces and your fresh ideas — that industry and the arts and education all want you to come as fast as you can to take over the reins of society. They want you to succeed. I’m here to tell you, this is not true. They don’t want your fresh ideas. Everyone out there has his own ideas of how things should be and how everything should work, and the last thing he wants to do is listen to you. Your ideas will be reviled. You won’t be welcomed. This is human nature. Everyone is afraid of people with new ideas because they’ve spent their lives selling their specialty — and if their own ideas become passé, they don’t want to hear about it. If I’ve learned one lesson in life, it is that you can have all the ability in the world and it means absolutely nothing without perseverance.”
He let this sink in and then concluded, “So when you leave here today, be a little despondent, but be a little courageous, because they may not want you, but they need you.”
Some people were surprised by how blunt Dean had been, but he felt he owed the students the truth. Afterward, Richard Forsythe gave a party at his house and invited many people who had known Dean during his college days, including Fay Bitting.
On the drive back to California, Dean and Gerda stopped in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to meet Ed and Carol Gorman. Dean wrote about this in a humorous Afterword to Ed’s collection of stories, Moonchasers, reprinted later in The Dean Koontz Companion. Ed remembers being in a bookstore with Dean and looking over all the Ed McBain/Evan Hunter books still in print. “Dean remarked on how astonishing it was to see an author who was seventy years old and still had every single book in print. He really admired this accomplishment.”
Berkley published The Servants of Twilight, originally a Leigh Nichols novel, in paperback under Dean’s name. On the Publishers Weekly’s bestsellers list it went to number five, and then to number one, where it stayed for four weeks. It debuted at number one on The New York Times list, where it stayed for five weeks. Berkley planned to reissue all of the Nichols books under Dean’s name. They also put new covers on Dean’s older paperback novels, using the artist Don Brautigam, who worked closely with Dean to produce a look more representative of the work between the covers.
Dean also published a short story, “Trapped,” in an anthology called Stalkers. Originally he had written it for Redbook, but they had put him through such agony over the editing of it that he ultimately pulled the piece and allowed his friends Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg to use it in an anthology. In the wake of Watchers, Redbook had requested a two-part novella dealing with genetic engineering. Dean had written and submitted it. They had then decided to put it all in a single issue, but in that case, it needed to be cut. Dean had complied as far as he could, but he would not cut it as much as they wanted. They offered to do the cutting, and Dean declined.
The story is about a young widow who must protect her ten-year-old son from the rat-like creatures unleashed by a recombinant DNA research facility near their home. In light of Dean’s use of rats as representative of dark and demented inner forces, this is clearly a story about his own mother’s protection of him against his father’s genetic legacy. They both feel trapped, but she fights to ensure that he will survive and move on.
That year, Dean and Gerda bought a house in Tustin and remodeled it, but before moving in, they put it on the market for resale when they decided that they needed a larger library and more office space for assistants.
1The New York Times, February 8, 1989.
2Dean R. Koontz, Midnight (New York: Putnam, 1989), p. 235.