DEDICATED TO SIX OF DEAN’S FORMER TEACHERS, THE BAD PLACE was published in January 1990, and became Dean’s next number one bestseller. This was the year of the Persian Gulf Crisis, when United Nations forces liberated Kuwait from Iran’s aggression. In the U.S., the shocking magnitude of the countrywide savings and loan debacle was realized, an economic recession pushed in, and President Bush violated his “read my lips” no-new-taxes campaign pledge by signing a five hundred billion tax package for the purpose of deficit reduction. As a backlash to the “greed is good” eighties mentality, celebrity entrepreneurs like Milken and Trump lost their clout, and the politically correct movement arose to support minority diversity. What seemed a positive step on behalf of oppressed people was to grow into a politicized weapon of power.
The Bad Place was one of Dean’s darkest and most imaginative stories, with a villain reminiscent of Bruno Frey from Whispers. Dean explored the “stain of Eden” and crafted a biblical allegory even as he was telling a story of incest, monstrosity, and horror. Each character has a fatal flaw, yet the story ends on a note of hope, with the imminent birth of a child created in love. The lead characters, while portrayed as a modern-day Nick and Nora Charles from Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel, The Thin Man, represent at a deeper level the archetypal Adam and Eve seeking Paradise.
Richard Forsythe, Dean’s former professor from Shippensburg and now a close friend, thought that The Bad Place was his best book. “His imagination is at its peak here,” he said. “Dean sets up some pretty difficult technical problems for himself in this book.” He was most impressed with how Dean managed to present the thinking processes of a boy with Down’s syndrome. He also noticed Dean’s method of gradually shortening the segments as he jumped from one character to another, to subtly increase tension and make the book feel as if everything were happening at once.
Dean also pulls in the broader social and cultural aspects of Orange County as more than just a backdrop for the action. He includes such elements as minority cultures, the Santa Ana winds, the fruit-dotted landscape, and even posters of Disney characters to keep the southern California flavor. That it is set in California, a land considered by some a paradise, is important to the overall dark effect of the allegory.
The protagonists are Bobby and Julie Dakota, a high-tech detective team that serves primarily universities, corporations, and other institutions rather than individuals. Married to each other, they have obvious links to Dean and Gerda. Like Dean, Bobby has a sense of humor and is an optimist willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. He hates bugs, fears chaos, and loves swing music. (Dean’s favorite music is from the era of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, and an early title for this novel was “One O’Clock Jump.”) Bobby craves order and stability and finds himself attracted to Asian culture for its discipline, neatness, sense of tradition, structure, and control. He desperately needs Julie, feeling that without her, his sense of purpose would die. Julie is pessimistic (or, as she sees it, realistic), cautious, strong, protective, and ever aware of many people’s potential for evil. She also loves swing music, and has dreams of a peaceful life. She differs from Gerda in that she is driven by a strong nihilistic streak, and has a brother, Thomas, who has Down’s syndrome, a genetic condition that results in mental retardation. Julie and Bobby devote much of their off-duty time to this boy.
“I did a lot of reading about Down’s syndrome,” says Dean, “and we’ve been involved with charities for the disabled for quite some time, so I’ve been around people with Down’s. They’re absolutely loving and sweet-tempered — and interesting. Thomas has a great sense of humor. His role in this book is to be able to say things about life and about people that are true, but that might seem mean coming from another character. When I was writing from his point of view, it had this magical quality. Everything Thomas looked at — how he looked at it — made it new and different to me, and it got to be great fun to write those scenes. It was a difficult voice to sustain, because it wasn’t just conveying his thoughts in misused grammar and syntax, but getting his tilted sensibility.”
Julie and Bobby are joined in a common dream: They want a house by the sea and early retirement so they can enjoy their lives and care for Thomas. Often they will reverse roles, with the optimist becoming a cautionary voice — a technique that shows a fluidity between dualities common to most polarized characters in this novel. These two share an awareness of the brevity of life and the need to focus on what is significant. Love and fear, to them, are indivisible, because real love involves risk and vulnerability.
The Dakotas are called into an unusual case involving Frank Pollard, an amnesiac who arrives in their office with an exotic bug and a pocket full of gems. Subsequently we learn that he can teleport himself from place to place and is on the run from his demented giant of a brother, Candy, who wants to kill him for killing their psychotic mother. Candy and Frank also have sisters who are twins and who raise hordes of cats (which mimic them in their narcissism). As twins, they symbolize mirrors — this family’s relationship to evil. All of them are products of a mother whose madness and bizarre sexuality had resulted in genetically defective children. Her own parents had been brother and sister and she had been a hermaphrodite who had impregnated herself. Having had children without benefit of intercourse, she believes their births and their missions are holy. She even fed Candy on blood from the palm of her hand (the stigmata defiled) and he consequently drinks the blood of his victims in an unholy ceremony of transformation into evil (an evil he views as righteousness). He reflects the sociopath in a novel that, in one scene, a character named Hal is reading, The Last One Left, by John D. MacDonald. (Hal reads MacDonald for the same reasons that Dean did, and The Last One Left is the same novel that first alerted Dean to the true nature of his father’s aberrant traits.) The entire family is the essence of genetic and spiritual chaos; they are an evil mutation and their home is hell, The Bad Place.
Even the teleportation that Frank can achieve is an anarchic metaphor, because with each trip, his genetic structure becomes consistently disordered until he mutates into something unrecognizable. This mirrors the genetic chaos resulting from incest and the psychological madness of drugs, both of which influenced the births of the bizarre siblings.
Thomas, the boy of limited intelligence but purity of heart, is the exact opposite of the two-hundred-twenty-pound Candy, whose intelligence is equally limited through a genetic defect, but who embodies rampaging evil in the form of the unrelenting and unrelieved drive of male hormones. Candy embodies the motivations of the world’s worst murderers in his zeal and self-righteous justifications. Candy and Thomas are psychically connected, enacting Dean’s philosophy that the same kinds of traits can be manifested as either good or evil, depending on the character of the person who directs the energy. Thomas is aware of Candy, and to protect Julie, he telepathically explores this man whom he knows only as The Bad Thing. That draws Candy to him; Candy then kills him, making Thomas the Christ figure who sacrifices himself for Julie and Bobby. Dying, Thomas learns there is a light filled with love toward which he is going; he manages to communicate this revelation to Julie, to relieve her darkness. Dreams can be realized, she discovers, but it might be at a cost. The survivors’ duty is to preserve, through memory, a person (Thomas) they love: “… they tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death … an endorsement of order and of meaning.”1
Initially Dean had loved the character of Thomas so much that he had tried to keep him alive. Then the story began to fall apart. Dean agonized for two days and then went back to rewrite the problem scene. “The book is based on the Christian mythos. Thomas was Christ,” he says. “He was a holy innocent in a corrupt world. Christ didn’t live, and as soon as I started violating the inspiring mythology, The Bad Place stopped working.”
The other Christ figure is Frank, who also sacrifices himself to stop the rampaging Candy. His middle name is Ezekiel, a biblical prophet who had experienced apocalyptic visions. He is represented in art as the one who will provide a new heart and spirit, as well as being a motif in the Last Judgment. Frank uses his own mutation to destroy Candy, chaos devouring chaos. The sick family imbibes its own poison, as exemplified in the man-eating cats, which devour people as food with no concerns outside themselves.
Throughout this novel, Dean constructs patterns of dichotomies such as vulnerability/safety, chaos/stability, the twins/the Dakotas, and innocence/corruption. He explores how easily one end of a polarity can change to the other, or at least be superficially similar enough to be vulnerable to corruption. Candy and Thomas both have psychic ability as the result of genetic defects, but in one it manifests as evil, in the other as innocence. Candy is the exaggeration of the worst human potential, while Thomas is the best. It shows Dean’s two sides — the dream both realized and unrealized: There is some good in the bad (Frank among the Pollards) and there is some bad in the good (gaining paradise at Thomas’s expense).
The Bad Place was a Literary Guild main selection — a deal that was settled before the manuscript was even finished. Putnam also published a limited edition of 250 copies, finely illustrated by Phil Parks. The novel stayed on the bestsellers list for fifteen weeks and ended up as the number twelve best-selling book for the year, with some 387,578 copies sold. It also went to number one in paperback, selling over two million copies during its initial stint on the list.
This novel was the first one that was made into a full-length audio version. Dean had allowed an audio abridgment of Lightning, and had found the cuts imposed on the material so intolerable that thereafter he licensed the Reader’s Chair to do his next few books on tape.
“We met Dean at the ABA in 1990,” says Delia White of the Reader’s Chair. “We had published only one title at the time. He liked that we published unabridged and was instrumental to our obtaining the rights. I’m sure we wouldn’t be where we are today if it weren’t for his influence.”
“Because I’ve virtually surrendered a piece of my life to each book,” Dean said, “I can’t bear to license an abridged audiotape.” A full reading of The Bad Place required ten cassettes. The Reader’s Chair did the same for Cold Fire and Hideaway.
Though The Bad Place received many strongly positive reviews, some critics found Frank’s demise and the explanation for Candy’s evil repulsive, although most recognized the high degree of imagination that had gone into such a story. Almost no one commented on the biblical allegory. For the most part, the critics concentrated on the complex characters, pace, or the plot.
“This is white-knuckle, hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck-curling reading,” said The Los Angeles Book Review, “as close to actual physical terror as the printed word can deliver.” Rave Reviews noted “the cascading torrent of emotion” and “explosive climax.” Publishers Weekly said, “Koontz soars beyond the limits of Midnight.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune compared Dean’s strange world to that of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. In Kirkus, the reviewer called the novel “wildly eclectic … but not derivative: Koontz shrewdly refashions the borrowings and welds them to his own inventions.” The New York Times recognized the painstaking work put into the powerful and credible characterization of Thomas, and Michael Collings in Mystery Scene said this novel is about us: “Its monsters are our monsters, writ large.”
Dean delivered The Bad Place as the second book on a three-book contract, but Phyllis Grann wanted commitment from him for the future, so she offered to fold the third book into the next contract, which would be for four books, at $2.5 million per book. This meant that his advance for the next novel would be much higher than she had originally offered. She also paid $1.5 million for a collection of short stories, projected to be published by 1993.
Dean signed the contract, but it turned out to be his last with Putnam.
Just six days after he had typed “The End” on The Bad Place, Dean sold the rights to Warner Brothers for a theatrical film. He was also to write the screenplay, and he delivered two drafts. The second draft created so much buzz that Don Johnson — who had been trying to find a way to work with Dean — hoped that it might be a vehicle for him and Melanie Griffith — to whom he was married at the time. Dean had long felt that Johnson was underestimated as an actor and was enthusiastic about working with him. For a brief period, the script was hot at Warner — until the CEO read it. “What genre is this in?” he asked. “It doesn’t seem marketable. It’s science fiction and suspense and romance and drama. I’m confused.” Suddenly, in deference to the top guy, all the other executives became confused as well! They dumped Dean’s script and set about developing the book into a straight, cheesy horror movie with a new writer. The product failed to reach film: Dean tried to buy back his script, even offering more money than he had been paid, but Warner would not sell.
In May, Paramount studio green-lighted the screenplay of Midnight that Dean had written for Mace Neufeld and Bob Rhemie. Several good directors were interested in it, but the producers chose one that Dean felt would make it into a slasher-type picture. “After a long phone call and a meeting with him,” Dean says, “I was very distressed. I thought he didn’t understand the story at all. The only things that interested him were gore and eroticism, and he wanted to replace original aspects of the story with material that was painfully derivative. So I withdrew from the project.” Midnight was subsequently shelved.
The one movie that did get done was The Face of Fear. It was one of the four movies that Warner had sold to CBS television. Dean had written one script for this earlier for another company, which had been shelved, and now he had to work with someone else’s adaptation. He was the co-executive producer with Grant Rosenberg, for the producer Lee Rich. “I’ve found everyone at Warner and CBS to be bright, flexible, and fun to work with,” Dean said at the time. “They’re not classic genre producers; they are much broader and more mainstream.”
Farhad Mann was the director, and Dean liked what he saw of Farhad’s work: “I liked the visuals in Nick Knight. It was a vampire movie and he did a lot of scenes from the vampire’s point of view in flight. I don’t know how he did these things on such a small budget. I also liked his work on Max Headroom. He created the whole unique look of it. Of the directors they were proposing for The Face of Fear, I thought he had a much better visual sense than anyone else. And he’s honest.”
“That was the first time I had met Dean,” says Farhad. “I was hired through Warner Brothers. I’d always loved his writing, so that’s the reason I chose that project. They liked my point of view and I was hired.”
The film went into production in June, based on Dean’s script, with a tight schedule of twenty-one days for completion. Dean was working on Cold Fire, but changes to the script were needed so quickly that he did not have time to meet his deadline for Putnam. He estimated that each week he devoted to the film, he was working one hundred hours per week. What he was able to send Phyllis Grann — a partial manuscript of four hundred pages — was received with great delight. From what she could tell, she said, it was the best novel he had written yet. That surprised him, considering how much attention he was giving to the filming.
“Dean was terrific to work with,” says Farhad. “He’s very at ease and cooperative. I was amazed. He was open to changes, fast in getting things done, and cinematic. He really understands filmmaking in terms of storytelling in a visual sense. The screenplay had been written by someone else and had a lot of problems, but within a couple of weeks, Dean just turned it around. It moved.”
Farhad’s vision was to create a very suspenseful and realistic film, but since they were shooting in Los Angeles and the story took place in Manhattan, he had to recreate the scenery with special optical shots. “I used eleven different locations to create that building. We painted and used lighting to make the colors and textures consistent.”
The principal actors, Lee Horsley and Pam Dawber, had already been cast — and now Kevin Conroy, Bob Balaban, and William Sadler were added. Farhad managed to shoot the entire movie on schedule, which is a relatively short period for a television movie, and on a tight budget. “I had a terrific script and someone I could talk to every day, when things had to change quickly. And when you have a writer with imagination and passion, it takes you pretty far.”
The most difficult aspects for him were having the actors rappel down the building. “We were in Los Angeles, so you couldn’t aim the camera and show palm trees or buildings that people recognize. I needed three mat shots to make the scenes feel as if they were in New York, and Dean was enormously helpful. He fought for those shots. When the executives didn’t want to release more money he was ready to pay for them himself. He’d fight with the studio regarding certain things, and he really supported me as a director. That’s unusual. If he likes you, he works with you. He doesn’t let you be hanged. And he wants quality.”
Pam Dawber, the actress playing Connie, agreed that working with Dean was a positive experience. “He seemed to have no ego at all with this movie,” she said. “He didn’t think his words were etched in stone. He just wanted this movie to work.”
CBS aired The Face of Fear on September 30, 1990, against the second-year premiere of the popular television show Twin Peaks. The Wall Street Journal saw an advance showing and gave it a positive review, saying the killers were especially terrifying. The movie won the ratings battle for that night.
Shortly thereafter, one of the major television networks approached Grant Rosenberg — who was then at Paramount — about doing a summer anthology show with Dean. “I came up with a show to be called Strange Highways,” says Dean. “The main character’s name was Bobby Strange, and he traveled around with his dog in a pickup truck. He supported himself by playing music on a guitar, washing dishes, and doing odd jobs. Music was the only thing that sustained him. Every show opened with this voice-over that said that someone had killed his family. It was to be this very disturbing, mysterious background, with the impression that he was on the run. He says, ‘Maybe because of my own experience with the darkness, wherever I go people come up to me with stories they’ve never been able to tell others, things they’ve seen, things that have happened to them.’ They were all eerie stories and some would have sprung out of stories of mine.”
Rosenberg and the executives at Paramount Television were happy with the concept and sure they would nail it down with no problem. Interest at the network waned, however, and Dean eventually used the show’s title for his collection of short stories.
When Dean and Gerda sold their second home in Orange, they found a place in Newport Beach, which is one of Orange County’s most spectacular coastal towns, south of Los Angeles and southwest of Anaheim. It surrounds the largest yacht harbor in the United States, in which are seven residential islands. Dotted with celebrity homes, Newport Beach is part business center and part resort. From their house, located not far from Fashion Island, Dean and Gerda could see out to Balboa Peninsula and the ocean beyond.
The Victorian-style house, sitting on a quiet cul de sac in a gated community, was in move-in condition, but they were used to making each and every home they lived in their own, so they spent nine months on a remodel. When it was finished, the previously darkish home was filled with light. White carpets lined the floors and the circular stair that dominated a large, skylighted hallway, and the walls were all painted a pale peach with glossy white trim. Sunlight streamed in through large windows in nearly every room of the three-story house. They filled it with antiques, Chinese porcelains, original art, and their collection of fifty thousand books. Dean and Gerda each had an office, and once again, Dean lined his with a copy of each of his books in all editions. He also hung original artwork of his covers on the walls and installed a massive, custom-made walnut desk with drawers designed to fit his specific needs. Although he had a view, he kept the blinds drawn to concentrate on his work. He describes this office in Mr. Murder.
Dean finally finished the manuscript for Cold Fire, based initially on an idea he had been pondering for some time. “For a period I was fascinated with Jung and the concept of synchronicity,” he says. “I wanted to do a novel that explained synchronicity. But of course it is a mystery of existence that can’t be explained! So I had to settle for using it as a major device in a way that shows that coincidence can be more than mere coincidence.”
Dean had read a book, Incredible Coincidence, in which he had found a particularly fascinating case that involved a businessman and a patrolman in El Paso, Texas. The patrolman, Allen Falby, had crashed his motorcycle into the tailgate of a truck, rupturing an artery and nearly severing one of his legs. A businessman named Alfred Smith witnessed the accident and used his tie to bind Falby’s leg and save his life.
Five years later, Falby was on highway night patrol when he received a call about a bad accident. He reached the wreck before the ambulance and found that the victim was bleeding badly from a severed artery in his leg. Falby applied a tourniquet and pulled him from the car. Then he recognized this man as the same person who had saved his own life.
“That story so impressed me,” Dean remembers. “You wonder what’s at work here. For years, I had thought about a story based on an ordinary person who finds himself caught in amazing incidents that have no explanation. I wanted to write a novel about somebody who was always, uncannily, in the right place at the right time, whose life just dripped synchronicity — and then try to make meaning of it. That ended up being Cold Fire, but it never was the novel I wanted to write. It actually turned into something else, but the idea came from the concept of synchronicity.
“If you were to build up a series of breathtaking incidents like this, I think you could write a riveting story, but you’d better have a payoff. You have to explain it with some power greater than man. You’ll either have aliens, which I’ve done. Or God. But it’s hard to write about God in modern fiction. You’re dealing with the ineffable, and I could never quite figure out a story that would be satisfying in the end. It would have to be enormously spiritual, working at another level.
“I think, on an unconscious level, we’re more in tune with the realities of existence than we are on a conscious level. Colin Wilson touches upon the thought — which I agree with — that our culture narrows our vision. It allows us to see things in a certain way, but prevents us from seeing in other ways. We may have the capability to see three hundred sixty degrees, but we basically see life in a narrow wedge. If only we could look at the world with no prejudices, with our senses wide open to reception, we might see everything in a totally different way, but we are led to view the world within certain cultural constrictions.
“Our fear of death starts at an early age — that awful moment, somewhere between the ages of five and eight — and a tremendous amount of human potential is extinguished. We become fearful, but also intensely focused because we become aware of the ticking clock, aware of our mortality. We can’t think about death constantly, of course, or we couldn’t go forward. Everything would seem meaningless. These forces of the human condition narrow what we’re capable of seeing. But I think on an unconscious level, we are obsessed with our mortality. We’re always aware that there are other dimensions to life. If we could get in touch with the repressed part of our consciousness that is fundamentally attuned to the nature of creation and our place in it, we’d find greater potential within ourselves. I think on that deeper level we have an innate sense of right and wrong, and we have a connection to the infinite. As a writer, I enjoy the possibility of other dimensions.”
Cold Fire was dedicated to Nick and Vicky Page, and Dick and Pat Karlan. It opens with poems from The Book of Counted Sorrows that prepare readers for the idea that nothing in life is what it seems. Sociological observations are a stronger part of the narrative in this story than in any previous novel, particularly the self-indulgence and selfishness of the early nineties culture. Dean comments on the state of irresponsible journalism and the emphasis on violence over stories of hope and courage. Such stories are shown to side with chaos, not with the human spirit that strives for purpose and coherence. He sees a world around him that breeds rather than fights monsters, in terms of false values and victim mentalities.
The scene set in the church in the desert is an allegory suggesting that people who seek meaning in social or political movements are doomed to frustration; only spiritual values and one-on-one commitments (love, friendship) will provide satisfaction, but society seems to be moving away from this solution to its problems. Life without meaning is unbearable — we are creatures who must have some sort of spiritual purpose. The other theme is that we often spend our lives struggling with the consequences of unresolved sorrow. A sense of purpose can aid us.
In an interview, Dean mentioned that the inspiration for this novel came from his love of books. “It’s about what books mean to me,” he said in Fear magazine. “I was talking to someone else who had a difficult childhood who also found that reading books was a way to escape. I wanted to write about the value of books.”
The heroine, Holly Thorne, is a disillusioned journalist in Portland, Oregon, searching for meaning in her life. She hates being alone and wants to improve upon the world that God has made. She is distressed by the deteriorating sense of values in society at large, but hope is born when she encounters Jim Ironheart heroically saving a child. He rebuffs her even as he invites her closer, which intrigues her. She traces him to California through a series of extraordinary stories about him saving people, and insists that he tell her about himself. She is the most feisty of Koontz’s female characters to date, determined and competent. Through her, Jim learns more about himself, and eventually realizes the truth about his inner conflicts. She is a Lois Lane to Jim’s Superman, but with a decidedly more psychological twist.
Jim’s parents had been victims of random violence and, as a young boy, he had been unable to help them — even though he had been experiencing some nascent psychic powers. Subsequently he had developed a savior complex. He views himself as channeling God’s will when his powers allow him to predict imminent catastrophe. This was affirmed for him when, after a daring rescue in a Nevada desert, he collapses outside a church and the priest who finds him says that Jim exhibited the stigmata, which had returned the priest to his faith.
Holly follows Jim onto a plane which he is driven to board because he knows someone on it will need him. He doesn’t know who he is about to save — or from what — but after takeoff, he realizes that the plane is fated to crash and that most of the passengers will die. There is a certain child that he must save. He also shows Holly where to sit to have a chance at survival. Now she knows she is on to an extraordinary story, but she begins to be plagued by dreams of a pursuing monster. Jim knows this thing from his own dreams and calls it The Entity. He takes Holly to his childhood home north of Santa Barbara, where suddenly he recalls encountering The Friend — a being on an alien spaceship in the bottom of a mill pond. The alien shows itself now to Holly and Jim, and claims to be the one sending Jim on his miraculous missions, saving the lives of people destined to make great contributions to humanity.
Holly remains skeptical, despite The Friend’s warnings to beware The Enemy — a second alien presence that is the embodiment of every movie monster ever to threaten a ten-year-old boy. Eventually she realizes that the entire scenario is based on a novel that Jim had read as a child, The Black Windmill, and that both The Friend and The Enemy are not aliens but aspects of his own consciousness. He is as dangerous as he is benevolent — both a dark and light miracle. The fantasy had given him a sense of purpose and the feeling of redemption when he had failed to save his parents. However, his rage and despair had added a dark edge, a way to punish himself. Subconsciously he had drawn Holly to himself because of her talent for forcing an issue. She had brought him to the truth — that psychologically he had projected outside himself nonhuman entities rather than fragmenting into multiple personalities. He had saved himself this way before his shadow side became powerful enough to annihilate him. Yet, despite dissolving this fantasy, Jim finds he can still save lives, so he and Holly set forth together with this destiny and their love as their shared sense of purpose.
To frame the tale, Dean uses several autobiographical elements. The town where Jim takes Holly has the flavor of Bedford, where Dean grew up. He buys his scary novels at the local drug store, as Dean did, and knows where the town bully lives. He also keeps his grandfather in a nursing home that is like the one that Dean had found for his father’s remaining years. Ray was still living there even as Dean wrote the novel.
Cold Fire was a main selection of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club. It hit number one on The New York Times bestsellers list in the same year that Robert Bly’s men’s movement was gaining ground and Deborah Tannen was teaching men and women that they just did not understand each other. Cold Fire remained a bestseller for over three months, and Putnam issued a limited edition of 800 copies, illustrated by Phil Parks. In paperback, it remained on the list for ten weeks.
Newsweek did an article on Dean and many more reviewers took notice, although some continued their repetitive comparisons to Stephen King. This book had the best reviews of any to date. The UPI said, “An extraordinary piece of fiction with unforgettable characters. It will be a classic.” Clarence Peters, for The Chicago Tribune, said, “Koontz’s characterizations are hardly surpassed by his ability to sustain the suspense and keep the most bizarre story plausible,” although The West Coast Review of Books felt the ending came too quickly, that the reader needs a little more breathing space after so much fast-paced action. Dean’s hope to be noticed for provoking a range of emotions was fulfilled in the Arkansas Democrat, with Susan Pierce’s comment: “But it’s in the description of emotional states — from love to despair — that Koontz consistently hits the bull’s eye, evoking reactions of, ‘Yes! I know exactly how that feels!’” She also noted that the novel emphasizes the conviction that life without purpose is the greatest horror of all.
After finishing The Face of Fear for CBS, Dean set to work developing a screenplay for Cold Fire. He showed it to Farhad Mann, with whom he wanted to work again. Farhad was delighted, both with the script and with Dean’s appreciation. He suggested some changes and Dean incorporated them.
“I had written a draft,” says Dean, “and he picked it apart. He’s the only director I’ve ever seen who can pick a screenplay apart and give good input about linear storytelling and genuinely deep characterization. We worked together and got a screenplay that we both loved. Farhad wanted Holly to have a solid relationship before meeting Jim, such as being the mother of a child. Then when she encounters Jim, she has to leave her daughter in the hands of her mother — with the ultimate rescue being a highly dramatic sequence in which the daughter is at risk. It really did make the script more dynamic.”
Thus, in the screenplay, some of the plot twists change. In addition to the new character — the daughter — there is a professor who explains the nature of poltergeist activity and sets Holly on the track of psychological possibilities. Jim also gets the opportunity to live out the scene of random violence from his childhood in a way different from in the book, and he discovers (as in the novel) that his power can be a tool of either death or life; it is up to him to decide.
Farhad and Dean pitched this screenplay to key producers and studios. Several studios were enthusastic. Then, when the executives read the script and realized that the enemy was Jim himself, they balked. “We had two different studios say, ‘We would buy the project if there really were aliens in the pond,’” says Dean. “‘And it must turn out that the aliens really are guiding him and there really is a good alien and a bad alien.’ In both cases, the studios were willing to put up big money. It would have been a fifty million dollar picture, at least, but Farhad and I didn’t pursue those avenues because we knew that we’d be destroying the integrity of the piece. I’m committed to keeping it off the market until I can get it done right.”
In July, Dean signed a contract with Dean Mullaney, publisher of Eclipse Books, to publish graphic adaptations of one of his works. Scripted by Ed Gorman and painted by Anthony Bilau, his novella, “Trapped,” appeared as an eighty-page, full-color graphic novel in 1993. No more have followed because Dean has mixed feelings about the medium. “Few graphic novels are flat-out wonderful, and I don’t want to do them unless I control the process and we can hit a homer every time.”
In the last few months of his father’s life, Dean again thought about having DNA tests done. Gerda urged him to do it, but when he watched his father’s increasingly angry behavior, he finally realized why he had put it off so long: He did not wish to discover definitively that Ray Koontz was his father. At least, if he never knew the truth, he could imagine other, more comforting, possibilities. “The truth does not always set us free,” he later wrote about this decision. “Sometimes fantasy can enhance our lives more than science, self-deception more than truth. In the exercise of imagination, we can achieve liberation that can never be attained when we are encumbered by the leaden weight of cold facts.”3
Ray died on September 16, 1991. Dean had him cremated the same evening, and although there was a plot beside Florence reserved for Ray in Bedford, Dean elected not to disturb her rest. He put Ray’s ashes in an urn and sealed it into a marble niche in a mausoleum in Fullerton, California.
Dean organized a memorial service, but no one came. “This is the most terrifying thing I can imagine,” he says. “To have lived a whole life and no one cares that you were here. My father’s life is a perfect reflection of the idea that when you always operate to personal advantage, you alienate yourself from everyone — from meaning, from hope. His situation in the end was pretty bleak. When we made a list of who we needed to tell that he had died, it was very short. Of those we did tell, there wasn’t a one who would have come to the funeral. Not even if it had been in Bedford, I suspect.”
Dean’s subsequent books show his progression of working through some of the issues that still felt incomplete. He had already written Hideaway, with its underlying struggle between father and son. His next novel, Dragon Tears, would confront the sense of chaos that his father had always represented to him. He was not sure that he had even remembered everything about his life with his father — a thought provoked by his inability to go into his childhood home two years before — and some of the more deeply buried fears were now to surface as he created characters based on Ray who presented his heroes and heroines with difficult moral struggles.
“Honestly, it was a time of great relief for me because my father had died,” Dean recalls. “This burden that he’d always been was finally removed from us. Gerda and I went out for drinks that evening, and I said, ‘Isn’t this terrible? It’s almost like we’re celebrating.’ We stayed there from five until midnight just talking about our experiences with him. I could not think of a single moment in my entire life — not one two-minute stretch — where my father and I had any conversation or any shared experience that wasn’t stressful, that was actually father to son, that was pleasant and worth remembering. I can’t imagine anything sadder.”
Dean was then plagued by a recurring dream.
“After my father died, I had this dream seven or eight times within the space of a few weeks, and then I never had it again. In the dream, I’m in the basement of the house as it was when I grew up. My grandfather had dug out the cellar and had plastered a couple of inches of concrete over the dirt, so the walls had this smooth, hand-formed feeling to them. There was a coal room, and the coal was delivered through a chute from outside. Nevertheless, you accessed the coal room from inside the cellar, itself. It was a fairly dark place, spidery. The dream was always in or around this space, and it was always related to the furnace. In some of the dreams, I’d be in the basement, and in some, I’d be coming down the basement steps. In one dream I was behind the furnace. I’d fallen asleep in the space back there. I woke and heard a noise and saw that the basement was full of the light from the open furnace. My father was at the furnace door, and when I came out from where I’d been sleeping, he was shocked to see me. He demanded to know what I was doing, whether I was spying on him. He pushed me back into the corner and threatened that he was going to kill me right there. It was frightening, and I woke up just gasping, unable to get my breath.
“Sometimes in the dream I would come down the cellar steps and see him at the furnace. He would turn around and see me at the base of the steps and come running across the basement to grab me and push me up against the wall. He would say, ‘You’re not even supposed to be home,’ and then threaten to kill me. And it always centered around that furnace. I’m sure my father never burned a body in the furnace, but that is definitely the feeling of the dream, that something terrible happened in that basement and was being covered up, and somehow I found it. The feeling in the dream is that I’ve seen something I’m not supposed to have seen. That’s what’s really frightening.
“It’s weird to me that, after he died, I should have this dream repeatedly, and then just have it go away. I don’t really believe in repressed memories, but sometimes I think this dream was almost a memory, because it was excruciatingly vivid.”
1 Dean R. Koontz, The Bad Place (New York: Putnam, 1992), p. 379.
2Fear, September 1988.
3 Dean Koontz, “Beautiful Death” in Beautiful Death (New York: Penguin Studio, 1996).