IT WAS THE AGE OF ABUNDANCE; IT WAS THE AGE OF INFECTION. Thirteen million homes were built across the country and personal income rose, but a polio epidemic, the fear of radioactive fallout, and a rash of films about space aliens all attested to a broad cultural anxiety. Despite national optimism, people feared invasion. The peace following World War II seemed fragile. Germany was finished, but a new enemy loomed: Soviet Russia. Their aggression in Eastern Europe raised suspicions about designs on America and the Cold War began.
A rising birthrate and an emphasis on family fostered blind patriotism. The images of what a true American family should be were channeled into every home that could afford a television. Kids saw other kids who behaved themselves (Timmy on Lassie) or got into a manageable amount of trouble (Beaver on Leave it to Beaver). From Dick and Jane reading primers, boys had a clear idea of how to be responsible young men, and girls understood their future domestic goals. In such families, no need went unmet, no problem unresolved, and togetherness was unrelenting. Minorities and others different from the norm were ignored.
Early in this decade, the ideal of a fulfilled mother guiding the nuclear family reached its zenith. The fifties “baby boom” seemed a guarantee against recession, and people were urged to keep it up. Even small towns like Bedford had to find ways to fund education for the increasing population.
There was no kindergarten in Bedford, so Dean started school in the first grade. He took a bus to North Bedford Elementary, a typical fifties style, single-level brick building situated on a main road that ran between the heart of town and turnpike operations two miles away. Dot Duncan, who works at the Bedford Gazette, was in his class and remembers that in grade school Dean wanted to be a monster on the playground: “Just any kind of monster. He was always into monsters.” Dean, who was shy at that age, does not remember having this preoccupation.
His first grade teacher, Vera (Houck) Blackburn, recalls that he was well behaved and a good student. “He was quiet and shy,” she states. “I think he had a rough life. I don’t remember him being creative, but he was young.” Ms. Blackburn apparently made a strong impression on Dean, for in 1989, he autographed a book for her with an inscription that said, “I was always in love with my first grade teacher.”
Eventually he learned to read. “There were no books around the house,” Dean remembers, “but some kids in the neighborhood had comic books. That’s the first thing I could really remember reading. It wasn’t until I was around nine or ten that I realized there was a library where I could take books out.”
Having already met characters like Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck, he eventually discovered comic renditions of the classics, such as Jack London’s Call of the Wild and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. He also read about super-heroes.
One of the earliest books Dean read was The Wind in the Willows. “That book had the most influence on me and I still read it every three or four years,” he says. All of the characters in the story are animals: Mole, Ratty, Toad, and Mr. Badger. Although each has his own habits and customs, they tolerate one another’s differences and celebrate a devoted friendship that transcends dissimilarities. The aura of the story is one of adventure, discovery, security, and guardianship. Much of it happens in the warmth of a cozy hearth. Dean had no friends his age, little sense of protection, and an imagination that resonated to a good story, so the community of friends presented in these pages held a charismatic allure.
“I loved the humor and the sense of camaraderie among all these animals,” he explains. “It was this fully realized separate world, I think, that so completely appealed to me, as well as the sense of community spirit.”
Years later in Dragonfly, Dean’s 1975 novel of international intrigue, this children’s story was the sourcebook for codes that were passed from “The Committee” to a triggerman whose task it was to wipe out millions of people in communist China.
Despite the apparent sense of calm, there was an undercurrent of fear among adults that affected children at a subtle level. At the close of World War II, the United States kept a monopoly on nuclear weapons for only four years. In 1949, Russia exploded their own A-bomb, which sent American scientists scurrying to perfect the more powerful hydrogen bomb. The government feared that the Soviets intended to take over the world, so as the Defense Department devised sophisticated military operations, the CIA began covert activities to control Third World countries. At the same time, Senator McCarthy and his sensation-hungry entourage led a national witch-hunt for suspected communists. These Cold War tactics would influence many writers in later years, Dean among them. Much of his suspicion of government officials would derive from covert activities that would explode into the open in decades to come.
Everyone feared a first nuclear strike, and talk of World War III, particularly in the wake of the Korean takeover by communist forces, made human annihilation seem imminent. Teachers drilled schoolchildren in what to do in the event of a nuclear attack, while radio and television stations played frequent warnings with a high-pitched tone, explaining, “This has been a test. In the event of a real emergency …”
Dean remembers the tension. As a child just going to school, he feared that the Russians would surely target his hometown for a nuclear blast. He thought he might escape by hiding in the coal bin in the basement of his ramshackle house.
“I can remember the drills about what to do,” he says. “We’d all move out in the hall and sit with our backs against the wall and our heads cradled. I had lots of dreams about nuclear war. Of course, when you’re a kid, it’s this two-edged thing: It’s terrifying and it’s kind of interesting. The destruction of the world! So I had dreams where the Russians would attack and that we’d have to run away and live in caves in the mountains above the fairgrounds. Actually it was pretty ridiculous to be worried that we would sustain a direct nuclear hit, but I was much older before I realized that there were not a lot of wicked Soviet generals saying, ‘Yeah, we gotta take out that malt shop in Bedford.’”
Simultaneous with the fear of foreign attack was a growing public awareness of the possibility of extraterrestrials approaching Earth. In the summer of 1947, when Dean was two, Kenneth Arnold, a forest service employee, had reported nine flying objects traveling at a fantastic speed near Mount Rainier. During the same period, many Scandinavians claimed to witness cigar-shaped flying objects. More reports turned up, including the rumor of a UFO crash near the Roswell air force base in New Mexico. The air force adopted an official stand that “flying saucers” were not real, drawing charges of conspiracy and cover-up. By the early fifties, people reported being contacted and even abducted by short, human-like creatures that emerged from alien aircraft.
In 1952, reporters revealed that the air force had placed its pilots on alert to shoot down any “flying saucers” that refused to land. Only three months before, Life magazine had featured accounts of UFOs that defied explanation. By November, cult leader George Adamski claimed to have met a Nordic-looking “human being” from Venus who revealed that many Venusians lived on Earth in disguise. His books became bestsellers.
Novelists and screenwriters were clearly influenced. Science fiction movies reeled forth, one after another, on the dangers of postwar disasters, from giant monsters produced by nuclear fallout to aliens in disguise who meant us only harm. Such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Invaders from Mars captured the pervasive suspicion that even the people closest to you could harm you: The source of your demise was within arm’s length, and possibly already within you.
Dean knew this feeling intimately. As he watched these films, he sometimes wondered how real they might be. In Invaders from Mars, starring William Menzies and Helena Carter, a young boy Dean’s age witnesses a flying saucer landing in his backyard and disappearing into the sand. His father investigates, and returns staring vacantly and acting strangely. The boy knows that something has happened to his father, but since the man looks the same as he always did on the outside, no one believes the boy’s story. That makes them all vulnerable to invasion. It turns out that the aliens are taking people on board their ship and surgically altering them, with no one the wiser.
“That one was scary,” Dean says. “You think, oh my God, my parents could be aliens.” The movie resonated with him because of the alien-like behavior of his father.
Some characters in Dean’s future novels would experience this same unsettling fear. Fourteen-year-old Colin Jacobs, in The Voice of the Night, spots the monstrous potential in the mother of his demented friend, Roy. It was Mrs. Borden’s abominable treatment of her son, Colin believes, that turned Roy into a killer. “[Colin] thought she was far more terrifying than any of the monsters he’d feared through his childhood … doubly dangerous because she was so well disguised.”1
Dean was an avid fan of these films. Whenever he heard that a new one was coming to the town’s only theater, he would dig into his meager savings to see it. “I always had an affinity for science fiction and horror movies. Radiation accident movies like Them were big then. Almost anything in that genre, I had to see.”
Dean was one of many young people to cut his teeth on the images of the Japanese monsters Gorgo and Godzilla, huge irradiated ants in desert caves near bomb testing sites, and malformed alien invaders. The impression for kids everywhere was that adults felt impotent to protect them, and that their world was largely vulnerable. Numerous images converged to become part of their shared cultural heritage.
Dean also loved horror. Monster films from the thirties such as Dracula and Frankenstein were still going strong, scaring kids of all ages. Dean was particularly affected by Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, and he had recurring nightmares about being pursued by this ungainly, manmade image of uncontrolled chaos:
“Until after the first couple of years I was married, I had a dream about being pursued by that Karloffian figure. In the dream, I would be in bed sleeping and I’d wake up just as someone was trying to open the door. Then the Frankenstein monster would burst into the room. There were no exits, and I’d try to keep furniture between him and me. By the time I was an adult, I realized that this dream was about my father.”2
Most of the time, however, Dean’s room was a sanctuary, “the eye of the hurricane, where the storm could not touch him, where it could even be forgotten for a while.”3 While his parents argued downstairs, his room healed him and “made him feel that in some mystical way, he was part of something far, far more important and better than everyday life.”4 It was a refuge and a stage — a laboratory where he could act out his fantasies. He did not have the monster models that he later describes some of his boy characters having, but he had comic books and the science fiction and horror novels that characters like Colin Jacobs and Joey Harper read. Since his parents disapproved, he often read with a flashlight under the covers. Whenever the world seemed harsh, Dean retreated here to escape to other worlds, where boys could be heroes, and all heroes were cunning, strong, and confident. Perversely, even monsters were survivors, and sometimes even transcendent.
When Dean was around eight, he began to write his own stories. Bored with the simplistic books that taught him to “look and see,” he filled tablets of paper with exotic tales influenced by watching television and reading comics. He remembers that they had robots and monsters in them, like the stories that young Joey writes in The Funhouse. He also illustrated them with cartoonish drawings. Then he put the pages together with staples and black electrician’s tape, and peddled them to relatives for a nickel or dime. His mother bought a few, as did his aunts and his Uncle Ray.
At first they thought his entrepreneurial spirit was cute. Then he produced more books and became persistent. People who once had donated to the cause were now annoyed, so Dean’s mother put a stop to it.
“One day I was told in no uncertain terms,” says Dean, “that I wasn’t to try to sell these to relatives and neighbors anymore.”
When he was around eleven, he entered a contest sponsored by one of the Sunday supplements in the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. He wrote an essay on “What it Means to Be an American,” and won a twenty-five dollar gift certificate and a wristwatch. “In no time at all, the watch just exploded off my wrist,” Dean recalls. “It blew to pieces.” The gift certificate, however, was welcome to a boy with only a sporadic income from birthday money or the occasional allowance.
One person who recalls his creative talent is Helen (Morgart) Carberry, his fourth grade teacher. There were about forty-five students in Dean’s class, but she claims to remember them all. “Dean sat in the first row, the last seat,” she said. “He was a very intelligent child. He studied and worked hard for the grades he got and he was one of the top five in my class. We stressed English and writing, and he loved to write.” Since she required that her students present something in front of the class, Dean learned early what it was like to have an audience. Although he does not remember being this bold, his teacher insists that while other students sang songs or showed their classmates some interesting item, Dean preferred to read something he had written. “His stories were quite good and the other children liked to listen to him,” said Ms. Carberry. “I remember one of the stories was about a black cat with green eyes. It was quite long and had an intricate plot and a surprise ending.”
It was around age ten that Dean discovered the library. He was soon reading as much science fiction as he could find, just as Colin Jacobs in The Voice of the Night could hardly wait for the next book by one of his favorite authors. “I found all this great stuff as a teenager,” says Dean, “and I read it all the way through college. I don’t think I read much else.” He also collected Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines, the first issue of which hit the stands in February 1958, when Dean was twelve.
He started with the various juvenile series. Aimed at teenage boys, there were dozens of series that featured interplanetary exploration, time travel, and far-future scenarios. Heroes were always male, and sometimes were brainy boys who could use their wits to expedite the action. Often they were alienated from their peers or had dormant powers that set them apart. There was great emphasis on stories that involved psionic powers such as ESP, an emphasis which remained constant through the sixties.
Robert Heinlein’s juveniles were quite successful. He was one of the authors who helped to shape the “Golden Age” of science fiction with his folksy and inventive yarns about solipsism, time paradoxes, and alien life forms. His heroes were competent men of intellect and action. Like many science fiction books at the time, the greatest value was placed on problem-solving aptitude, a facet of this genre that became part of Dean’s evolving world view. No matter what type of story he would write in the future, he honored rational ways to solve dilemmas and triumph over evil.
“Heinlein may be the writer that I can remember most clearly as a kid,” says Dean. “I was in high school before I discovered that he had written adult books. That was a function of living in a town with no bookstore. The only books were on a paperback rack in Turner News.”
Throughout his adolescence, he also read Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon, both of whom had a strong influence on his imagination. Bradbury’s work was inspired by the films of traveling-show veteran Tod Browning, and he made dark carnival images central to his work, with references to freaks, shapeless things in bottles, and black Ferris wheels. One of Bradbury’s most famous books, Something Wicked This Way Comes, features a strange carnival called Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show that rolls into a small town. Two boys, Jim and Will, become aware of its hidden evils, so Mr. Dark entices the more vulnerable Jim into participating. Only Will’s commitment to him saves him. “I identified with Bradbury’s book,” says Dean. “Those two boys would go out on their porch roofs and talk. They were always getting out of the house in ways their parents didn’t know, and I identified with that. There’s a certain magical feeling about getting in and out without your parents knowing.”
Sturgeon was the pen name of Edward Hamilton Waldo. He, too, was a central figure in the Golden Age of science fiction and he was sympathetic toward tortured adolescents. He often wrote about children with paranormal powers who struggled against repressive orders, met others like themselves, and formed the foundation of a new world.
One of his novels, The Dreaming Jewels, became a favorite for Dean. It is about a boy who escapes his adoptive family and joins the carnival to feel safe among the freaks. One of the carnies is the Maneater, who controls jewels that can be used for either harm or good. The boy, who discovers he was made by the jewels, defeats the evil.
Another novel, Some of Your Blood, gave Dean a firsthand look at a sociopathic mind. It was an epistolary novel about a blood-drinking borderline psychotic who, Dean felt, bore startling similarities to his father. His mother had never said that his father was different or dangerous, yet here was an author that he loved telling him otherwise. He began to think about his father in a new light. “It was the first time I had realized there was something wrong with him. It was a great revelation to me.”
The town of Bedford was based on Midwestern values, infused with a rising drive toward material status. People tried to live as well as they could, and they desired an orderly, well-kept community. “Teachers and doctors were respected,” says Tom Doyle, who taught high school history in Bedford. “Churches were filled and children behaved respectfully. The town was always clean.”
Dean was painfully aware that he was not part of any “in group.” He lived on the edge of town rather than up on Juliana Heights, where pristine homes with well-kept lawns defined an elite merchant community. Sometimes he walked up this hill to look out at the town, but knew he was not part of the Bedford gentility. “Bedford was the kind of town that made someone like me feel like an outsider,” he says. “I didn’t have what most of the people who lived there had.”
As a smallish kid who did not quite fit in, he became a prime target for practical jokes, and one of these resulted in Dean’s first taste of fame. “I was out playing at night in the big field behind the house,” he recalls, “and I was grabbed and terrorized by someone making monster noises. I turned around and got pushed down this hill, and right at the bottom, this thing was on fire in a hole in the ground.” According to a published report in the Bedford Gazette, Dean “narrowly missed getting hit by a small meteorite near his home.” A picture features him showing the rock, “three times the size of an egg,” to a friend. Dean claimed that he carried it around in his pocket so he would not lose it, although “he has been asked to part with it long enough for scientists at Penn State to subject it to spectroscopic analysis.” Dean then went around telling everyone about this amazing event, and some townspeople recall that he showed them the hole where it purportedly had landed.
Dean does not remember these scientists or what, if anything, they discovered. By the time all the interest died down, he was convinced that perhaps it had not been a meteorite after all. “I think my cousin Jim played a joke on me,” he admits. “He liked to tease me, but I took it all very seriously as a kid.”
He also became a target for bullies. “There were certain kids who mocked you if you were not among their group. When I was in seventh and eighth grades, I was terrorized by a couple of bullies on the school bus. At first I resolved the problem by walking home every evening. I handled it by avoidance until I was old enough to realize that even if they were bigger than I was, being willing to strike back could put an end to it pretty quickly. I think most kids arrive at that moment of revelation, where they say, ‘To hell with this. I may get beaten up but I’m going to hurt somebody back in the process.’ Bullies hate that and they’ll beat you twice as hard, but they’ll be more reluctant to come at you the next time.”
His change in perspective carried through years later into his work. Characters in his novels learn this same lesson, most notably Colin Jacobs in The Voice of the Night. When his friend Roy, who is physically stronger, turns on him, he initially runs, but then fights back. He convinces Roy to come to an abandoned house and tricks him into confessing his deadly intentions. Then, with all the courage he can muster, Colin pulls a gun and stands up to Roy, who cowers in fear.
In Shadowfires, Dean offers the same wisdom. A man faced with following orders, or standing up against a sadistic superior, realizes the bully is the real coward. “He might shoot you in the back or sneak up on you and slit your throat … but in a face-to-face confrontation, he would chicken out if the stakes got high enough.”5
For much of Dean’s childhood, his father changed from one job to another, never staying with anything more than a few months. As Dean looks back, he estimates that Ray held some forty jobs in the space of thirty-four years, and that for part of that time, he was unemployed. When Dean was about eight or nine, Ray started to sell premiums for Washington National Insurance and managed to keep this job for a couple of years. “It was the longest job he ever held,” says Dean. Even so, Ray still had troubles. He continued to get into fights, and nearly had a run-in with the law.
“There was scuttlebutt,” reports Dean’s cousin Jane, “that Ray spent the insurance premiums on himself.”
“I’d never heard that,” says Dean, “but there was a situation where he punched someone at the company. The nature of that was always very mysterious, but thinking back, I remember that there was some fear he might go to jail. It could well have been over the premiums. Washington National didn’t push the issue, so he didn’t go to jail, and there was great relief at home.”
Despite Ray’s temper, he could be quite engaging. “I always thought he was easygoing,” says Jane. “If he and Aunt Dodie got into an argument, he’d smile and say, ‘Now Molly.’ I never saw him the way Dean describes him, but in those days you didn’t show your problems to kids. He could have put on one face for the public and another at home.”
“Sometimes I can’t begin to understand how people couldn’t see through him,” Dean now remarks. “My father, like a lot of sociopathic people, could be enormously charming, but I could see through every lie and nonsense story. He seemed almost childishly transparent. I could see his motivation and how he was trying to manipulate me, but it was clear that a lot of people couldn’t. There are people who take someone at face value and seem unable to see the kind of deception that my father could project.”
Despite the times of fear and uncertainty, Dean experienced the atmosphere of an enthusiastically creative mind. His father fancied himself an inventor and an entrepreneur. It mattered little if one invention failed to pay off. There would always be another idea. He managed to persuade people time and again to back him. Unfortunately for Dean and his mother, Ray’s repeated failures were often at their expense. For example, when Dean was ten, Ray invented a camping stove—an idea before its time. He worked on it sporadically for almost a decade.
“He created it from sheets of aluminum that collapsed and went into a little plastic pack,” Dean recalls. “It was about a foot square. It was a clever device but impractical. You could stick it in your backpack and take a pack of charcoal to toast frankfurters, but to use it more than once, you had to carry a lot of charcoal. The beauty was that it was small and easy to carry, but that also meant you couldn’t do much with it.”
There seemed no end to Ray’s inventions. “The ideas came,” Dean explains, “he proceeded with them, and then they receded. He would get financial backers and the thing would collapse, so he’d forget about it for a few years, but then he’d return to it. He’d never let go. There was this novelty thing he invented that he would drag out periodically when I was a kid. It was a plastic dog with a little dog dish, and you pressed its snout into a waxy substance in the dish. The dog had coiled springs in its legs, and by forcing the head down, you created this kinetic energy. As soon as the snout broke loose from the stuff in the dish, the dog would do a total three hundred sixty degree flip and land on its feet.” Ray believed he could persuade companies or tourist places like Atlantic City to buy this invention and imprint it with their logos. He was sure he could sell millions. He had a plastic model made and managed to produce a few to sell, but no one had the vision to take it further.
Another scheme that Ray devised required Dean’s assistance. “He got this steam-cleaning thing,” says Dean. “He could use it to clean anything made of metal, but he used it mostly for car and truck engines. It was like a rolling boiler. I worked on this one summer with him and this boiler would always be over-pressurizing and the pressure-release valve wouldn’t always kick off quite right. It would start screaming and I’d have to run and turn it off. I was always sure the thing was going to blow up before I could get to it and that I would be killed by all the flying shrapnel. It did blow up at the end of the summer and that was the end of that. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone.”
Since the fairgrounds were across the street from Dean’s house, he could look out to that expanse of land and watch the weedy lot each August blossom into an extravaganza of amusement rides, stock car races, games, and food joints. At night, fireworks lit up the entire sky in a spectacle of color.
As the carnival trucks rolled in, Dean eagerly watched the preparations and dreamed about becoming part of the crew. The carnies unloaded tents, booths, and colorful metal frames for rides like the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel. As they started up their motors to test the rides, the smell of grease wafted through the summer air. Dean longed to go down and mingle with them, to listen to their slang, and merge into a community that seemed exotic and romantic. These people were footloose and free; they could go wherever they wanted.
Once the show was up and rolling, Dean found ways to get in. “I couldn’t afford to pay,” he says, “but the fairgrounds were surrounded by forest and it was easy to sneak through the fence. If you got caught, all they did was take you to the entrance and throw you out.”
The carnival was set up like a street fair, with games, “grab joints,” and arcades toward the front, while the “Back End” consisted mostly of rides and shows. Sometimes concessions would be placed down the middle, with rides to the sides.
Each day that the carnival was in town, Dean walked the Midway. He might look at farm animals and crafts, but his favorite place was among all the lights. As he listened to the calliope and smelled cotton candy, popcorn, and corn dogs, he wandered from one game of chance to another to watch the barkers hawk their wares. This one had darts and that one invited him to spin a wheel. Over there was a Haunted House and here were games of manly skill, such as the High Striker. The surging press of people filled the air with excitement, and Dean heard the unrestrained yelling and shrieking from rides like the Tilt-A-Whirl. He always saved money to go on these rides, but for him, that was only part of the spectacle: “A carnival isn’t just about the rides,” he insists. “You could walk around for hours and spend only fifty cents. Just walking the Midway, looking at all this amazing exotic stuff — that was the carnival!”
While he was young, these carnivals were relatively small. The Dell and Travers Shows ran, according to their slogan, “The finest Midway for family entertainment.” Then came the James E. Strates Traveling Show, one of the largest in the country. They owned their own train and brought exotic sideshows to give people a glimpse of things rarely seen.
Dean’s favorite sideshow was the Ten-in-One, the collection of human oddities, such as the Fat Man or Fat Lady, the Alligator Man, and the Bearded Lady. One of his more memorable characters, Joel Tuck in Twilight Eyes, is a man with a third eye whose personality was inspired by a real three-eyed man that Dean actually saw. He felt a strange kinship with these people who did not belong to “normal America.” For years afterward, he would think of this association whenever he felt like an outsider. Dean was not so much repulsed as drawn to them and he tried to imagine what they must be feeling. He later wrote about people considered by the average gawker as not quite human, and many of his science fiction stories feature “muties” — deformed, shunned beings. The settings for both The Funhouse and Twilight Eyes came directly from these childhood experiences.
As Dean read stories of the fantastic, he came across allegedly true tales of strange phenomena. Around the age of twelve, he became engrossed with legends of bizarre disappearances around the world.
“I’ve always been interested in that kind of stuff,” he admits. “There were books on it that purported to be real. Probably some stories were real and some were made up, but to me as a kid, they were all real and they were terrific. So I got fascinated with people just suddenly disappearing.”
His favorite books of this type, such as Stranger than Science, were written by Frank Edwards. What Dean learned would later influence his 1983 novel, Phantoms. He was amazed to read about the missing colony of early settlers at Roanoke, Virginia, and the 1939 disappearance of thousands of Chinese soldiers. He thrilled to the stories of airplanes that vanished from radar, with no evidence of a crash and no word ever heard again from passengers or crew. On the Great Lakes, not far away, numerous ships had disappeared—sometimes allegedly before the eyes of startled witnesses—and then reappeared years later, or were never heard from again. He was especially enthralled with the accounts of the Mary Celeste and her mysteriously missing crew. Even better, whole civilizations, like the Maya and the Anasazi, seemed to have been whisked off the face of the earth. The possibility of the existence of other dimensions was exciting to a boy who dreamed of somehow escaping his own situation.
“I’m sure that was probably why I liked those stories,” he admits. “I might have thought, ‘Gee, maybe aliens will come and take me up. I’ll be on another world where everything is nice.’”
As he read, he created scenarios that offered him a sense of control over the chaos in which he lived. The fantasies and “true” stories of other dimensions provided more than mere entertainment. They fueled his imagination with possibility. He did not have to be limited to what his five senses told him. He did not have to live only in Bedford. He could travel to any world that he devised and populate it in any manner he chose. These stories helped him transcend loneliness and feel happy, safe, and inventive.
Throughout his youth and into high school, Dean had little to do with his father. Often Ray was just not around or not sober, but when he was, Dean tried to avoid him. For a while, he had his Uncle Ray nearby. Since Ray was a hunter, Dean was often cajoled into helping to dress deer carcasses — an activity he would gladly have skipped. “As a bonding experience, skiing weekends and camping trips … pale compared to standing in a drafty basement in your skivvies with your uncle and your cousin, everyone spattered with blood and bits of deer fat …”6
One Thanksgiving when Dean was around eleven, Ray decided to show him how to kill a turkey. “That was the first time I discovered that when a turkey’s head is chopped off, the turkey still runs around,” Dean states. “It’s gross and horrifying beyond belief. Uncle Ray held it down and chopped its head off, and the thing just suddenly kicked and leaped up and went dashing around in circles before it flopped over. This is pretty horrifying stuff when you’re eleven, but at the same time, it struck me as hilarious. He’d push the bird into a drum of boiling water to saturate the feathers, and it was my job to pluck them. Given how squeamish I was about things, it amazed me that I would do this, but Uncle Ray was so funny. It was like a Laurel and Hardy movie. He’d lose control of the bird and he’d chase it all over the place and fall over things. Whether he just did that to make me laugh, I don’t know.”
Although Dean did not like the idea of hunting any better than fishing, he once went with Uncle Ray and his cousin Jim during small game season. “I had an air gun,” Dean recalls, “and you could possibly get a squirrel or a rabbit with it, but I was not a real hunter. I didn’t hit anything and they started joking that I was purposely missing animals.”
Dean liked to fantasize that Uncle Ray Mock was really his father. He thought he looked a lot like his cousin, Jim, and he was certain Uncle Ray’s attention to him was special. He imagined Uncle Ray and his mother together rather than married to their respective spouses. One day, he overheard a conversation that made him wonder.
Uncle Ray had come in to talk about some distressing thing that Kate had done. Florence sent Dean on an errand, but he lingered. Uncle Ray was in such an agitated state, it had to be something important. Then he heard Uncle Ray ask his mother, “How did it happen, Molly? How did we both marry the wrong person?”
Florence hushed him. “Don’t talk about that,” she insisted. “It’s too late now. It’s been too late for a long time.”
“But it should have been me and you.”
Florence laughed a little bitterly. “Don’t talk that way,” she urged him. “Someone might hear. Anyway, it just makes everything worse.”
Dean withdrew, feeling stunned. What did it mean? He was never to know, but many years later, it made him speculate about the possibilities.
The Christmas that Dean was twelve, Uncle Ray gave him a special gift. Since Dean’s father had a habit of sleeping in on Christmas morning, the family had shifted its gift-opening ritual to Christmas Eve so everyone could share in it together. “I remember that my Uncle Ray was so excited this Christmas Eve,” Dean says, “and when I opened his gift to me, I was floored. It was a new bike, my very first bike. When he saw my delight, he cried. It was the nicest gift I got that year — that decade. I was aware then that there was some tension that night because my father was insanely jealous. It was obviously an extravagant gift.”
Dean kept the maroon bike all through high school, and it allowed him a greater sense of freedom and escape. “That bike was my best friend.”
It also allowed him to see his Uncle Ray when Ray and Kate eventually moved across town. “They lived close until I was about thirteen, and then they built this house that was far enough away that I couldn’t go over there easily.”
Much as he missed his uncle, he was glad to have some respite from Aunt Kate. “On my mother’s side, there was endless bickering among brothers and sisters,” he explains. “Often it was about my grandmother, who engineered these kinds of things. She thrived on setting people against each other, and when I was a kid, there was a lot of that in the family. My Aunt Kate had her good side, but she did not feel content if everybody else was content, so she would cause bickering.”
For a long time, Dean’s Aunt Virginia was Kate’s target, and she pulled Dean into it: “When my Grandmother Logue needed to live with someone, she first moved in with my Aunt Betty, but after a few years, this caused tremendous strain on Betty’s marriage. Then Aunt Ginny and Uncle Henry took her in, but they were young and liked to go out. Aunt Kate would get furious that they weren’t staying home, so she would sit in her car and watch their house. Once in a while, she picked me up to keep her company. We’d sit outside their house, up the street, and watch to see where they went, and then follow them. Aunt Kate would keep this little record so she could prove they weren’t treating Grandmother Logue properly. It was pretty bizarre.”
What Dean did not realize was how closely his Aunt Kate watched him. “Kate cared a lot about Dean,” says Nancy Eckard, who married Dean’s cousin Jim and who was privy to Kate’s confidences. “She watched her sister [Florence] lose so many babies. Kate was funny about showing her feelings and she came across as being pushy. She was a hard person to deal with, but when Flo was worried about Dean, Kate was worried right along with her.”
Dean’s family rarely went on vacations, but when Ray won his settlement from the accident with the truck, he decided to use money left over from installing their first bathroom to go on a fishing trip to Florida. That had always been his dream. They already knew someone there, Florence’s stepsister Thelma, so they made plans. Aunt Kate protested that it was too far and would cost too much, but Ray had made up his mind.
He drove all the way without stopping overnight, since a motel would diminish the funds. “We left at four in the morning and drove for however long it took to drive over fifteen hundred miles,” says Dean. “The idea was that if you had to pay for a hotel coming and going, you couldn’t spend much time there.” They arrived at the Matecumbe Key, south of Key Largo, checking in to an isolated motel. Each day, Ray went behind the motel to fish on the beach, while Dean and his mother swam in the ocean. On the third day there, Dean saw a stingray swim past him and up the beach, where it stung a man standing in the water. He had to be taken to the hospital. “Seeing that,” says Dean, “I didn’t go back in the water.”
During the week, a dog at the motel bit Dean. Florence applied first aid and took him to the nearest doctor, who dressed the wound. Florence watched her son carefully over the last few days there and during the long trip back, but by the time they reached home, he was running a high fever and was delirious. Afraid he had rabies, Florence took him immediately to the hospital for a series of shots. The dog, however, tested negative and Dean recovered.
The following year, they went to Hollywood, Florida, situated between Fort Lauderdale and North Miami Beach. Florence insisted on a motel with a swimming pool this time, so that Dean could learn to swim. They took a room at Playland Motel and Dean was in heaven. Each day for most of the week, his father crossed the highway to go to the fishing beach, while Dean and his mother swam in the pool. “My mother would throw a handful of pennies into the pool, so I’d put on my goggles and dive for them. It didn’t take much to entertain me, but it was great fun.”
The only time Dean felt anxious was when his father would forgo fishing to join him in the water. Even looking at photographs nearly four decades later of the two of them in the pool evokes a negative visceral reaction. Dean remembers the dark undercurrent of their “horseplay.” “My father would get into the pool only to come after me. He’d pretend that he was playing, but he did some mean things. His only reason to get in was to frighten me. He’d horse around, and then he’d grab me and force me under the water. He’d do it at unexpected times. He’d say, ‘I’m going out to fish,’ and instead of fishing, he’d come to the pool. I had to play along, but it was pretty terrifying when he held me under. It was mean play, like the way someone will tickle you until you’re sick. It got to the point that when I’d see him come from fishing, I’d leave the pool.”
Dean and his mother also spent time with her stepsister while Ray was fishing. Dean especially loved Pete, Thelma’s cocker spaniel. He ran around the yard with the dog, delighting in Pete’s rambunctious play. Just in the sheer joy of romping around, he realized how much a dog like this could make life better.
Then in 1959, the same month Dean turned fourteen, his parents decided to return to Florida, to the Playland Motel. The vacation week proved uneventful, but the return trip was a nightmare. Florence was driving their station wagon at night through the Carolinas when she hit a car that was stopped dead in the road, its lights off. “She saw it at the last minute,” Dean recalls. “We were traveling at a high speed and she hit the back end and our car rolled. I remember waking up as I hit the floor with all the suitcases flying from the back of the station wagon onto the seats. My father was sleeping and he hit the dashboard and got a cut over his eye.”
Dean’s parents ended up in the hospital for several days, while some local people took care of Dean. He was unhurt, but he understood the repercussions. The car was totaled. “It was this catastrophic thing because we couldn’t afford a loss like this. My mother had four or five teeth knocked out, and always after, my father had a dent in his skull.” Dean called his Uncle Ray, who drove down to help them.
It turned out that the people in the car—two men and a woman — had been drunk, naked, and engaging in sex, but they had no idea that they had stopped in the middle of the road. “After we hit them, they started their car and drove a couple of miles up the road and stopped again. That’s where the police found them. My parents were hoping to get some sort of settlement, but they were from out of state and got nothing. That was the last time we went to Florida.”
Even into Dean’s teenage years, Ray’s behavior filled the house with tension. “It wasn’t just that you knew he was in the house,” says Dean. “You could feel him. Even if he was downstairs and you were upstairs and he was in a stable mood, everything felt different. I could wake up in bed and tell if he was in the house, without any clue other than the way the house felt.”
When he was fourteen, Dean accidentally discovered part of the source of his mother’s unhappiness. It shed a new light on his father’s frequent absences.
“I was involved in a play at school and there was practice afterward. It was winter, on a Friday, and my mother didn’t want me walking home in the dark, so my dad had to pick me up and bring me home. First he stopped someplace and went in to get something, while I stayed in the car. I knew he always had Dentyne because it covered the liquor smell on his breath, so I opened the glove compartment and rooted through stuff. Then I saw this letter. It was in a flowery envelope that smelled of perfume, and — I hate to say this—I snooped. I guess the thing was so exotic looking and to some extent I suspect I knew what it was. So I took out the envelope and read the letter and discovered it was a love letter to my father from a woman. She was asking for money and saying he knew how tough her life was and it would help if he could just give her a little more than he’s given her before. I wasn’t shocked, but I put it back in the glove compartment.
“My dad came back and got in the car and I never said anything to him. He went somewhere else, stopped and went in, and I sat there thinking that my mother might find this letter. I took it from the glove compartment and put it in my pocket. When I got home, I cut it into little pieces and threw it in the waste can. I think this was the first time I realized that this was part of my dad’s life. He never said anything to me, but at some point he must have gone to get that letter and found it wasn’t there. I often wonder what he thought and whether he wondered if my mother had found it.
“After that, I started looking at things in a different way, especially the times he was away. I had always assumed he was just out drinking. Then I discovered this and I was able to see why certain odd things had happened in my parents’ relationships with other people. Several relationships fell apart and I began to think the reason was that my father had made a pass at the wife of the other couple. I remember my mother being embarrassed in one case and I had never understood why she was so angry at my father. I had assumed that he’d been drunk and had made a fool of himself, but then I began to wonder if it wasn’t this other thing.”
Years later, Dean’s Aunt Virginia confirmed that his father had been a philanderer —naming names. “And I knew some of these women,” Dean recalls. “I had seen my father with them at functions we’d go to, like when he worked for an insurance agency. I think one of these women either worked there or came with someone who worked there and they would spend a lot of time with us. And these women weren’t ten percent as attractive as my mother. I think to some extent, my father was a victim to his illness, but I also think he could have made choices — he wasn’t utterly compelled to do these things.”
Dean began to realize the full extent of his mother’s misery and he resolved to do what he could to be a comfort to her. Yet he had his own problems. He was about to enter high school and he still did not have real friends, nor did he take much pleasure in school work. Within the next few years, however, he was to meet several people who would make a big difference in his life.
1Dean Koontz writing as Brian Coffey, The Voice of the Night (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 307.
2Patrick Mott, “Scared Silly,” Los Angeles Times (October 28, 1989), N1.
3The Voice of the Night, p. 274.
4Ibid., p. 274.
5Dean Koontz writing as Leigh Nichols, Shadowfires (New York: Berkley, 1990), p. 227.
6Martin Greenberg, Ed Gorman, and Bill Munster, The Dean Koontz Companion (New York: Berkley, 1994), p. 4.