THE NEXT NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER, WHICH CAME OUT EARLY in 1992, was Hideaway. It was inspired by the evolving science of resuscitation medicine. A few years earlier, Dean had read about the reanimation of a child who had been dead for sixty-six minutes and was brought back to life without suffering brain damage. He soon forgot the article. Then one day in 1990, he went to search for story ideas to link together certain themes that intrigued him. He wanted to write about people confronted with genuine evil in an antireligious age that denied the existence of Evil with a capital E, that insisted on Freudian shades of gray. How would a modern couple cope and adapt to the sudden possibility of the uncanny and the spiritual? He went through everything in his file without finding a suitable story. “Suddenly the premise for Hideaway came to me fully developed,” he says.
This experience showed him the value of reading widely and allowing the subconscious to process the material, because it had certainly delivered. He went to the University of California at Irvine and discovered a wealth of material on the subject. He also talked with writer and physicist Greg Benford, who was able to answer a lot of his questions about surviving very cold temperatures.
Hideaway is a highly significant novel on the theme of deadly intimacy between father and son, juxtaposed with the bond of devils and angels potentially linked by the same forces in the unknown. Dean uses a quote from Shakespeare, “O, what may man within him hide, Though Angel on the Outward side.” Although he had once considered himself an atheist, Dean had come around to the belief that there is more to life than the perceived world; there is purpose and “mysteries perhaps unpierceable.” Having little patience with either codified religions or New Age enlightenment, he believed that spiritual power lay within each individual, in a “long-term application of intellect to the vital questions of existence.” His reading in modern physics and molecular biology — the proposal by some scientists in these disciplines that we might be living in a created universe — had recast his thinking.
Dean was writing Hideaway as he was struggling to free himself of his codependence with his father, who was by then eighty-one years old. He had managed to cut down his visits to Ray but not to the extent suggested by his doctor. There is no doubt that his childhood sense of his father plays out in this novel, with his father’s penchant for being a veritable devil. The only atonement possible is to redirect all energy that could potentially be evil — the result of being associated with his father — toward goodness. Dean also expresses his fear that that psychosis may skip a generation, as it does in the Nyebern family in the novel, and that not having children is better than trying to cope with and cover over the heinous acts of a possible genetic throwback.
Lindsay and Hatch Harrison have lost a four-year-old son to cancer, which took a terrible toll on their marriage. An accident on an icy road sends them into a river, drowning Hatch, but he is resuscitated after eighty minutes. He and Lindsay decide to repair their lives by adopting a child, and know they can expedite the process by adopting one with a handicap. They meet ten-year-old Regina, a feisty girl with a deformed hand and foot, who is nevertheless full of life. When Lindsay and Hatch adopt her, she gets caught up in a nightmare imposed on them by another resuscitation patient, Jeremy Nyebern.
Jeremy, who calls himself Vassago, after a prince of hell, is a sociopathic boy who had killed his mother and sister and had then committed suicide in an attempt to join his idol, a previously executed murderer who had written about satanic visions. Jeremy’s own father, Jonas Nyebern, who was also Hatch’s physician, had resuscitated the boy in the hope of discovering why he had murdered the rest of the family. He realizes that it was an inherited sociopathic illness from his own murderous father, which had skipped a generation.
Nyebern’s desire to redeem his bloodline is similar to Dean’s, although he goes about it in a different manner. He collects religious art that inspires in him some belief in atonement, and then donates each collection. He and Hatch have a conversation about evil that expresses Dean’s own feelings about it at that point in his authorship: that psychosis may have a genetic cause, but that evil itself might be a very real force in the world — an energy wholly apart. Nyebern states that no expert has ever proposed a satisfactory explanation for monstrous sociopathic violence. “The only cogent answer,” it seems to him (and Dean), “was that the human species was imperfect, stained, and carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction.”1The Church calls it Satan; science calls it the mystery of genetics, but neither offers satisfactory solutions or preventives. Evil endures, as always.
“In this novel,” says Dean, “evil can be traced to three sources: human behavior; the transmittal of sociopathic behavior through damaged genes, which is the most terrifying because it is the most arbitrary and relentless; and possibly to evil as a supernatural force. … Nothing in the book prevents the reader from embracing either the totally supernatural or the more logical interpretation of events. … The way you interpret it at first pass may tell you something about your own subconscious attitudes.”2
Nyebern fails to understand how his impulses have transformed a tool that could be used for good into one that wreaks destruction. His reanimations bring back a devil (Jeremy) and an angel (Hatch).
Jeremy lives in Fantasy World, a defunct amusement park that had gone bankrupt the night he killed his best friend on a ride and then set fire to the Haunted House. His own secret hideaway is in service tunnels under the park, and his “church” is in the Funhouse, where he brings victims to kill in the process of creating a sculpture out of their bodies to present to Satan. He is fascinated solely with the dead, and where he lives bears similarities to Dante’s ninth circle of hell, with Satan in the center. Resentful of being brought back to life, he wants to earn his way back to hell by committing monstrous acts. Since he and Hatch were resuscitated under similar circumstances, they can see through each other’s eyes. Vassago sees Regina and Lindsay, and decides to add this mother and daughter to his creation — an echo of his own mother and sister. He grabs Regina, forcing Lindsay and Hatch to pursue him to the Funhouse. When Vassago captures Lindsay, Hatch attacks, surprised to hear himself saying he is Uriel, the Archangel. He uses a crucifix to kill Vassago and restore moral balance in the world. Whether he is actually transformed via supernatural forces or whether this is merely the way Vassago perceived him is left to the reader to decide.
One of the settings in this novel is Zov’s Bistro, a contemporary Mediterranean restaurant in Tustin where Dean and Gerda often have dinner. Dean claims he has never had a bad meal there, and has become friends with Zov and her husband, Gary. He dedicated Dark Rivers of the Heart to them.
In Hideaway’s subplots, Dean took a shot at art critics by linking them to predatory insects and to the unfeeling sociopath. Some seem to have no concern for people’s feelings, and one, Hornell, gets his due when he becomes Vassago’s target. Dean also comments on the deleterious effects of the erosion of values in modern society. The killer, Vassago, is linked with nihilistic subcultures that have no love of life and lose themselves in drugs, dirt, music, and chaos.
Although he had based Vassago on real-life sociopaths, Dean worried that this character’s behavior was too extreme to ring true to the reader. But in July, while he was still working on the book, a story broke in the papers about a man named Jeffrey Dahmer. Thirty-one-year-old Dahmer was arrested in Wisconsin for killing fifteen young men (with other counts pending), and then cooking and eating their flesh. He had dismembered some while they were still alive and had taken photos and videotapes of his “art.” Body parts of all kinds lay around his apartment, including severed heads in the refrigerator.
Dean realized that nothing he could create in fiction could be half as extreme as human behavior in the real world, and he stopped worrying about his Vassago.
The continuing theme of toxic intimacy is explored in several relationships in this novel. The central association is that between Vassago and his father and grandfather, but there is also one between Hatch and his father. If anyone in this novel is Dean, it is Hatch. He likes to sing along with oldies and lives in a Mediterranean-style house. His father, like Dean’s, had been quick-tempered, angry, verbally abusive, and controlling: “Secretly he cherished irritation and actively sought new sources of it.”3 The father had believed he was not destined to be happy, and anything — or nothing — could set him off. Hatch fears the potential for having the same temper, and he is even more terrified of losing control, so he strives to make himself mellow and tolerant. “Having been raised under the hateful and oppressive hand of his father, he had surrendered innocence at an early age in return for an intuitive grasp of aberrant psychology that had permitted him to survive.”4 Even so, his anger lies within, ready to erupt, and it gets resolved only when it emerges as righteous anger that attacks evil — as Dean does in his novels. Righteous anger taps what he inherited from his father and purifies it for better purposes. In that way, he is nothing like his father. He uses the same energy and obsessiveness, but channels it into a more creative process. Hatch shares with Vassago, as Dean shares with his father, a feeling of relentless pressure, but he makes it work for himself and for humanity, rather than in an abusive, self-defeating way. In the end, each person perceives the world in his or her own way and takes from it different lessons. The potential is present for good or ill, and the person’s own character make all the difference.
Hideaway was the only novel in four months to knock Scarlett, a sequel to Gone With the Wind, from the top spot on the bestsellers list. It was a Literary Guild main selection and remained on the list for three months. It was also number one in paperback.
Phyllis Grann was the first to understand that Hideaway only appeared to be supernatural, but was not necessarily so. Few reviewers echoed her sentiments, and some viewed the supernatural twist as a miscalculation. The Washington Post’s critic said, “Though rife with familiar theological arguments, his novels have always conveyed the belief that innate goodness ultimately must triumph over evil because good and evil originate in the human heart. Indeed, long before most of his colleagues, Koontz realized that this bedrock concern of horror fiction could be addressed through non-supernatural scenarios.” In The San Francisco Chronicle, Alix Madrigal pointed out that “Koontz asks us to believe in a vision of hell that he himself has discredited,” and he disliked being pulled into Vassago’s perspective. Yet most reviewers were more enthusiastic. David Forsmark in the Flint Journal said that the questions Koontz raises about life, death, good, and evil, are “worthy of C. S. Lewis,” while Kirkus called the book a “grandly melodramatic morality play.” That reviewer went on to say that “Koontz’s novels crest bestseller lists not only for their heart-pounding horrors, but also for their celebrations of righteousness and redemption.” The Associated Press called it “a chiller capable of leaving emotional bruises on the reader,” while Michigan State News cited the author’s “incredible gift for the art of language.”
Pat Karlan sold the film rights for $600,000 to Tri-Star Pictures and Summers-Quaid Productions, who said they wanted to make it into a “classy suspense movie.” They developed a script, changing writers twice. (Dean had no time to work on a script just then.) They signed Jeff Goldblum and Christine Lahti to star in it, and Brett Leonard to direct. Dean liked the final draft of the screenplay and had high hopes. The producer of the picture seemed to understand the book, including the complicated subtext. Then the good screenplay was replaced by one that Dean considered “inept and cheesy.” To make matters worse, they changed the character of Regina from a handicapped adoptee to a promiscuous teenage girl who willingly goes with Vassago.
After sitting through forty minutes of the November 1994 screening at a Long Beach preview, Dean walked out in disgust. He found the whole thing offensive, so he threatened legal action with Tri-Star to get his name off the credits. The nature of the story was completely changed, and he did not want his own vision associated with that presented on the screen. What to him had been a story about a disabled girl using wit and courage in the face of adversity had been turned into an outright horror story. In a letter to the studio, he called it “astonishingly incoherent, filled with contradictions and moronic logic. … This script has a viewpoint that is the antithesis of everything my work stands for and is offensive when it is not simply boring.” The only draft of the script he had read and approved had been thrown out. He offered to repay all the money he had been given for the rights in exchange for removing any trace of his association with the project. But he could only persuade the studio to minimize the use of his name. Tri-Star did not use his name in trailers or put it above the title in their ads.
Agreeing with Dean, the critics found it dull, imitative, and clichéd. Daily Variety said it “fell short of satisfying visceral entertainment.”
Dean decided not to sell film rights again unless he wrote the screenplay, was named co-executive producer, and/or profoundly respected the talents of the producer and director.
Dean was becoming increasingly unhappy with both his publisher and his agent. He felt that Hideaway had not been given the promised support. The publisher had talked about doing forced distribution on this book to really push copies into the bookstores, but that had not occurred. When Dean complained to Claire Smith about what he felt was a glass ceiling being imposed on him, he remembers that she tried to mollify him rather than taking action. As often in the past, he felt that she sided with the publisher even when he was complaining about an egregious breach of promise. He believed that he could get much more money and support from another publisher, but his agent argued for the wisdom of staying put. He began to feel that he might need a new agent.
After Putnam backed off the promised promotion and ad plans for Hideaway, Dean had to look forward to Dragon Tears with the hope that there would be a more aggressive publication. But then he learned that the print run would be only slightly higher than the previous novel, with no more ad money, and he realized that nothing was going to change. Phyllis Grann would stick to her conservative formula, even though Dean felt it was a good time in his career to be bold. Sell-through was very high, largely on word of mouth, and it was the ideal moment to capitalize on that. Perhaps the cautious approach had worked for other writers, but Dean was impatient with this methodical pace.
He felt subsumed under a general policy rather than treated as an individual. He asked Grann to raise his advance and she did, but she still offered much less than he felt he would receive elsewhere. The money was not important in itself — but he knew from bitter experience that publishers would often push hard only those books on which they were genuinely at risk of losing money. If they made fortunes without a hard push, they would never take the risk — and Putnam had made out exceptionally well on all of Dean’s titles, with limited advertising and promotion. Writing is about communicating, and Dean — as do all authors — wanted to reach as many people as possible with his ideas.
Claire Smith tried to persuade Dean to accept what was offered, so he left her and called Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency. He had met Gottlieb at the American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim one year, and Gottlieb had expressed enthusiasm for Dean’s work. They had chatted for a moment and then had gone their separate ways. Gottlieb was now prepared to fly to California to meet with him and Gerda to see if they were all in agreement.
Robert Gottlieb had gotten his start as an agent in the mail-room of the William Morris Agency, then had become an assistant in the Literary Department. He became an agent in 1982, and seven years later became one of the youngest agents to head that department. By 1992, he had become an executive vice president and was elected to the board of directors. On his client list are such high-profile authors as Tom Clancy and Evan Hunter/Ed McBain.
Gottlieb had read and admired Dean’s novels for years. “Dean is a compelling author,” he says. “He writes what I would call serious commercial fiction. He’s a true novelist and craftsman, and he has honed that craft with an eye toward perfection throughout his professional career.
“My philosophy as an agent is to be a gateway of opportunity for my authors, which means that I need to be knowledgeable about all the different possible formats in which intellectual property rights can be exploited. Dean is in a unique position in that there is a universe of formats for his work. It’s a question of organizing it, focusing it, and concentrating it in such a way that it will leverage all the other values of his business. It’s my job to see to it that his business is always growing.”
Gottlieb felt that much was wrong with the Putnam contracts Dean had signed, and he wanted them revised (with no commission to him) as part of any deal for new books. He also wanted Dean’s advances to be nearly tripled. Ultimately Putnam agreed to ninety-five percent of the requested terms, but in light of what both Gottlieb and Dean believed were woefully inadequate past contracts, they decided that all matters had to be settled favorably in order to proceed.
Gottlieb let Sonny Mehta at the Knopf Publishing Group know that he could make a bid as well for a three-book package, so he did. Dean accepted it. Although there was a gentlemen’s agreement that the terms would not be made public, the very next day’s Wall Street Journal reported that Knopf had paid $18.9 million for three new novels and another $10 million for six backlist books to be published in paperback by Ballantine.
Phyllis Grann was disappointed. “We are sad to see Dean leave,” she said at the time, “but happy to know he will be published by one of my best friends and a publisher I totally admire.”5 In The Wall Street Journal, she said that Putnam simply could not afford the deal.
Dean says, “I have always admired Phyllis enormously, even when I’ve disagreed with her. As she herself would be quick to say, ‘It’s business, nothing personal.’ But the fact is that she had offered the same terms as Knopf — and our deal broke down over other issues, mainly terms of the contracts already in force there on twenty-five backlist titles.”
Dean realized that he now had an agent who would fight for him and get him the best possible terms. “He has vision,” Dean says. “He reads the novels and understands them. I can talk to him about them — and he has a business strategy for the next ten years! He knows that in modern publishing, you must succeed financially in order to have a chance to say what you want to say, as a writer, to the largest possible audience. Maybe it’s sad that art cannot flourish without commerce — but that’s the hard truth.”
“I view myself as Dean’s partner, as his agent, his manager, his friend,” Gottlieb states, “and as someone who is his most ardent advocate in all situations.”
In July 1992, New Jersey resident Linda Kuzminczuk was reading a novel by sisters Dawn Pauline Dunn and Susan Hartzell, called The Crawling Dark when she felt a sense of familiarity. She was certain she had read something like it before. It was about a town whose residents are all discovered dead and a sheriff and his deputy who assist two siblings who have returned there. That sounded to her like Dean Koontz’s novel Phantoms, which she had read five years earlier. When she checked, she noticed that not only were the plots similar, but virtually whole passages were plagiarized. She typed up a letter to Putnam, who forwarded it to Dean. He took immediate legal action. The two women, who wrote together as Pauline Dunn, and their publisher, Zebra Books, had to withdraw not only that novel from the market, but their previous one as well. Called Demonic Color and also published by Zebra, it, too, exhibited similarities to Phantoms. The women forwarded their $2,500 advance to Dean’s attorney to offset his substantial legal fees, and were required to place an ad in Publishers Weekly announcing their action.
“It seems to me if you were going to do this,” Dean said at the time, “it would make a lot of sense to choose an obscure book by a dead author.”6 With over three million copies of Phantoms in print at that time in the United States alone, their chances of getting caught were fairly high.
Dean was grateful to Linda Kuzminczuk for looking out for his interests, and every year he sends her a signed copy of each of his new novels.
The next novel was Dean’s fifth number one bestseller in a row. For the byline of this one, he dropped his middle initial, which he had used since he began to be published, for two reasons. First, authors had once used initials as a matter of course, but now it seemed old-fashioned to do so. Second, with his growing success, publishers used his name on two lines on the jacket, the better to make it large, and the “R.” dangling on the end of the first line was simply ugly design. Besides, the “R.” stood for “Ray,” which was his father’s name. It seemed appropriate to put that behind him. Subsequently, during Berkley’s in-house Halloween party that year, Susan Allison and her coworkers dressed in costumes as usual, but also made a tombstone for the “R” — rest in peace.
Dedicated to Ed and Carol Gorman, friends in Iowa, Dragon Tears is an anti-Freudian novel about personal transformation through the power of the will. Dean had wanted to call it Ticktock, and had briefly thought of calling it Split Second, but finally settled for Dragon Tears, a symbol of bitterness which Dean explained in the poem he wrote for The Book of Counted Sorrows to open Part Three.
A major theme is that moral responsibility and commitment fend off entropy, while excuses for victimhood merely contribute to society’s decline. Dean opened the novel with several poems from The Book of Counted Sorrows and one from country singer Garth Brooks. The central theme that radiates throughout the novel is an etching by Francisco de Goya, which represents the dissolution of self by greedy ego, and which is portrayed by a voracious character whose development is arrested in a narcissistic twelve-year-old mentality. “The work was menacing, abrasive to the nerves, conveying a sense of horror and despair, not least of all because it included the figure of a giant, demonic ghoul in the act of devouring a bloody and headless human body.”7
Dean’s endless experimenting with point of view is this time best studied in the part of the story told through the perspective of Woofer, a dog. Dean believed that this allowed for an interesting way to comment on the world, since a dog would have a very different angle. It was a challenge to create a narrative voice for the dog that would seem genuine and not anthropomorphic.
In the story, partners Harry Lyon and Connie Gulliver are cops. Harry loves order, while Connie never fails to note the signs of entropy all around. She was abused as a child and has no family, so she heads into risk with abandon. Her attitude reflects that of other social elements that Dean describes in which entropy is a factor.
According to this concept in physics, all living systems transform energy, and some of that energy gets lost in the process. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that any system tends to run down over time and needs a new influx of energy to keep going. Entropy is a measure of how far from equilibrium a given system is, a calibration of the degree of disorder. The law states that the disorder of a system can never decrease, and when it reaches the state of maximum entropy, it cannot support growth. It falls apart. Not only were the principles of thermodynamics of fundamental importance to all branches of science, but Dean felt they served as accurate metaphors for human psychology. Without the energy influx of meaning and hope, entropy in the form of depression and other types of breakdowns could set in.
In the attic above a restaurant, Harry shoots a mass murderer after a frantic chase. Subsequently he encounters a kid, Bryan, who is fascinated with all the violence and blood. When Harry, in anger at the boy’s insensitivity, shoves him, he makes himself a target for retaliation. The boy, Bryan, has special powers. Among other things, he can stop the flow of time at will — a phenomenon that he calls The Pause — and he uses this ability to torment people, particularly the homeless. He views himself as a god who must weed out society’s worst elements, and he goes even further by constructing and energizing a golem to warn his victims of their imminent demise.
Harry and Connie experience The Pause — but unlike others, they are allowed to move because Bryan wants to have a game of chase. There ensues an almost magical pursuit through a stop-time world where every ordinary object is wondrous.
The dog Woofer leads them to the nursing home where Bryan’s mother lives, and she tells them about his controlling grandmother and his subsequent violence. She also tells them where to find him — and there follows a fearful confrontation in the dragon’s lair, Bryan’s strange home.
The enemy of humanity is our psychological attraction to entropy, the book tells us. Commitments based on immaturity and greed are doomed to failure. By the end of the story, the will to do good and maintain one’s integrity triumphs over spiritual disintegration.
Dragon Tears debuted at number one on January 24, 1993, and spent ten weeks on the list of The New York Timed. It was number one in paperback in September.
Kirkus called this novel “an electrifying terrorfest” and a “vise-tight tale.” Publishers Weekly said, “Koontz romps playfully and skillfully through this grownup enchantment … as irresistible as a sack of brownies.” Paul Sutter, in an Ontario paper, said, “Like fine wine, he keeps improving with age. … Horror doesn’t get more precise and potent.” In People magazine’s “Picks and Pans,” Dragon Tears was called solid, credible, and “incredible.”
Early in 1992, Dean and Gerda decided to go into partnership with Jose J. Perez on a company they called Perfection Custom Cabinetry (later Perfection Custom Wood Designs), with a showroom at 1570 Lewis Street in Anaheim. It opened that year on October 5, displaying full rooms and vignettes, including a unique modern kitchen, an Art Deco bedroom, and a Biedermeier office. Zov’s Bistro catered the open house with exotic appetizers and desserts.
“We bring the architect’s style of the home into the cabinetry, and into free-standing furniture to ornament and enhance that style,” Dean told Design Journal during the press preview. “We look at an entire room and create cabinetry to reflect and reinforce the ambiance.” Because of his and Gerda’s great admiration for the talent of Jose Perez, they hoped to see the company become legendary among designers and architects.
Gerda assumed the role of president, although she had resisted the idea of doing this at all. Dean was secretary, while Jose was vice president, designer, and master craftsman. They had known one another for over ten years, dating from the first job Jose had done in the Koontz’s Orange County home. He had built a fireplace and a series of bookcases. Subsequently he put custom libraries in each of their successive homes, installing beautifully detailed crown molding, wood paneling, cabinetry, and window seats. When Dean and Gerda had prepared to move to Newport Beach, they had gone through a number of otherwise fine homes in which they had noticed substandard woodworking. That had given them the idea that there was a market in high-end woodworking and design. They knew that Jose could manage that. They based the company on a philosophy expressed by Winston Churchill: “By striving for perfection in any task, you give purpose to your existence … and make the world that much less of a mean and sorry place.”
Gerda ran the front office, set up all of the business systems, and contributed to the designs. She and Dean shared a preference for contemporary styling, and for Art Deco and Art Nouveau, but the company offered a wide variety of traditions, from rustic Southwest to Rococo. They had a professional brochure, designed and written by Dean, in which he stated, “We all seek a perfect world. However, reality defeats us because most things lay beyond our control. Perfection is glimpsed only in the petals of a flower, moonlight silvered surf, or a crimson sunset. … At Perfection Custom Cabinetry we believe that the pinnacle can be achieved.”
Promising to meet every deadline, never make excuses, and to respect homeowners’ property, he assured prospective buyers that whatever could be conceived could be made. For each full-color photo of a piece already made, he provided an evocative description and suggested further fantasies involving the “visual symphony” of the woodwork.
“It got to be a major operation,” says Dean. “We identified a niche of high-end cabinetry and developed our own approach. Gerda and I bought a warehouse separate from the company, but the company used it. We started out with eight master cabinetmakers. Within a year and a half we had fifty-three employees, and it had grown into this absolute nightmare — because we still had been able to find only eight true masters. We had no problem getting the work, but we were having enormous problems getting it properly built. The problem was that the California economy had been in recession so long that most of the master cabinetmakers had moved to states where there was still a building boom — Nevada, Arizona, Texas. We would bring in guys who were apprentices and tram them. Six months, eight months, down the road they would be far better cabinetmakers — and then they would quit and go to Nevada, where they could get even better money, and pay no income tax! We were already paying twenty percent above what anyone else here was paying for master cabinetmakers, so there was no way we could compete.
“We reached the point where we saw that we’d created this business, we’d identified a market, we were sitting on a million dollars in contracts and more were coming through the door every day, but the labor pool wasn’t here. We were really running a cabinetmaking school! Every dollar of work we put out the door was costing us a dollar and thirty cents. The losses were getting ridiculous. If we could have had enough men as good as our core group, the thing would have been enormously profitable, but we finally had to shut the doors. We delivered the work we owed, wound the thing down, and closed it up.”
Not only had this venture been financially unfeasible, but the time that Dean and Gerda ended up investing was enormous. “At its peak, it was taking thirty hours a week of my time and sixty of hers. It was unbelievable. And I came to have an absolute disgust for the insanity of the government regulations imposed on businesses. I was horrified to see how much of our average worker’s wages went into state and federal taxes. Not as high a percentage as I paid — but too damn much!”
It had been an interesting experience, and Dean’s own home showed the high degree of skill these craftsmen could achieve, but he was happy that he could return his attention to writing. So was Gerda. At least, both agreed, this hard-won knowledge of business and manufacturing would provide new material for fiction one day. Everything was material.
Joe Stefko, drummer for the rock group The Turtles, ran a small press, Charnel House, with Tracy Cocoman. They approached Dean to produce a limited edition of 750 copies of Beastchild, which Dean revised by removing grammatical errors from editing done on earlier versions. “We do everything by hand,” says Joe. On the lettered version, he used a cover made from lizard skin because “we like to put some element or the story into the binding.” Three years later, Dean would allow him do a limited edition of Dark Rivers of the Heart.
Dean had one more book for Putnam before he moved on to his new publisher. The next few years would see some interesting changes in his fiction.
1 Dean R. Koontz, Hideaway (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992), p. 295.
2 Tyson Blue, “A Conversation with Dean Koontz,” Cemetery Dance (Spring 1992), p. 23.
3 Hideaway, p. 179.
4 Ibid., p. 201.
5 Publishers Weekly (August 10, 1992), p. 15.
6 Asbury Park Press, July 2, 1992.
7 Dean Koontz, Dragon Tears (New York: Putnam, 1993), p. 212.