THE LAST OF DEAN’S NOVELS FOR PUTNAM, MR. MURDER, WAS published in October 1993. The book had numerous autobiographical parallels, with a male protagonist as a suspense writer who was trying to shed a reputation with which the media had saddled him. “I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in Mr. Murder was pretty much out of my own life,” says Dean.
He dedicated the book to artists Phil Parks and Don Brautigam. He included several poems from The Book of Counted Sorrows and, because the novel is in part about the interaction of fiction and reality and the difficulty of separating truth from fantasy in the modern world, there is a line from a book by Laura Shane, the protagonist of Lightning. Indeed, lines from the lead character’s books are also used as epigraphs, as if “Marty Stillwater” exists outside the novel as well as in it. The poem that Dean wrote as part of the story subsequently became the basis for a children’s book, Santa’s Twin, published three years later.
Once again, the psychopath that gives the suspense its momentum is driven by need — a craving that must be satisfied at all costs. He is an emotional vampire, a man/machine without a soul but with an appetite for other people’s lives. He is society itself at its most superficial, media-driven level — he shows us how we might recreate ourselves as soulless beings through such things as media, politics, and junk food, and thereby have a hand in the destruction of our own humanity. We forge our own insatiable appetites and feed our addictions.
Dean presents the psychopathic perspective in the present tense as a way to capture the episodic, moment-by-moment nature of his experience. This character, Alfie, has no memory and no sense of purpose. He does not even know his name. Despising his outsider status, he wants to kill those from whom he is different. For him, “Need fosters frustration, frustration grows into anger, anger leads to hatred, hatred generates violence — and violence sometimes soothes.”1 Oddly, he is a counterexample to the theory that Dean likes to cite, that madmen are always convinced of their sanity. Alfie does question his, but he is quite mad.
Marty Stillwater lives with his wife, Paige, and two daughters, Emily and Charlotte (named after the Bronte sisters), in Mission Viejo, a town not far from Newport Beach. Marty is a writer, and his wife is a child psychologist who has survived the girlhood trauma of discovering her parents’ bodies after a murder-suicide. Like Gerda, she is resilient, resourceful, and independent.
Marty tries to use his writing to transform the worst scenarios into images of optimism and hope. “It was always his nature to find reasons to be upbeat even when common sense suggested pessimism was a more realistic reaction. He was never able to stew in the gloom for long.”2 He possesses an acute sense of mortality and spends his life trying to cope with it, understanding that the curse of the writer’s imagination is to get himself sucked into dark possibilities — although when later alerted to imminent danger, he realizes that this “curse” can also be a blessing. He likes to put his characters into difficulties and challenge them to find a way out, as if reassuring himself through them that he can always emerge triumphant. Marty is his own toughest critic and revises each page of his books as many as twenty or thirty times. He dislikes publicity and self-promotion. “To him, the books were what mattered, not the person who wrote them.”3 Like Dean, Marty prefers staying home. His in-home office overflows with books of his in every foreign edition, original paintings from dust jackets, a couch meant for “plotting sessions” that he never uses, and a computer with an oversized monitor. He likes the novels of James M. Cam and Elmore Leonard, but tends to prefer reason, logic, and the triumph of the social order over vigilante solutions. Dean also takes the opportunity through Marty to take a poke at some of his critics.
Marty’s dilemma begins when he finds himself slipping into an eerie state of altered consciousness. On the first occasion, as he is dictating notes for a novel, he experiences a fugue, later discovering that a long section of the tape recording features nothing but him repeating the two words “I need …” Marry doesn’t realize that he is actually experiencing a mental linkage with a killer named Alfie. Alfie is a clone created by a clandestine fascist political organization called The Network, and he is used as an assassin who can never be traced back to his masters because he doesn’t know who they are or even who he himself is. He is to be the first in the “Alpha” series of genetically engineered and mind-controlled killers to be used to both disrupt and control society. The Network intended to clone Alfie from the bone marrow of its founder’s dead son. Accidentally, that tissue sample was switched with Marty’s — and the killer is not merely his identical twin but is fundamentally Marty in all ways but one: the killer has no soul.
Tormented by the meaninglessness of his existence, Alfie breaks his conditioning and sets out to kill Marty and take his place, thus acquiring an instant family, a life, and purpose. There is nowhere Marty can go to escape this doppelganger, which symbolizes one’s own internal toxins. Dean’s concern over his genetic legacy is reaching its peak in this novel, as if his father’s death allowed him to now face the real issues. He is definitely writing about himself and his determination to be rid of this potential for sociopathic madness. “Somehow, the wrongness was within him.”4
“Mr. Murder was a key book about yearning for family and holding them together against destructive influences from an outside force,” says Dean, “except that this is really an inside force. It’s Marty’s evil potential. So in a sense, I was working out the issues of my father.”
In fact, Dean mentions that writing Mr. Murder was similar to writing Watchers: He felt confident that both books were working. Since they are parallel in their use of genetic and psychic links between good and evil, it is clear that Dean sees himself as a person infected with negative potential that he cannot escape, but which he can struggle against to preserve those things that make him human. “Not to be melodramatic and imply that I am different from anyone else in this regard. We all have dark potential, and we all resist it — or not.”
Alfie invades Marty’s home (another metaphor of not being safe within one’s own self) and Marty flees with his family to his parents’ cabin. He tries to enlist the aid of the police, but in light of the People profile, they believe that this is a publicity stunt. The Network uses their pawns in the media to hype the story. Realizing the medical mix-up, they plan to kill Marry. They also discover that Alfie, who was designed to be impotent, has been raping women across the country, and they realize that they may have created something that could endanger the human race — if he is also fertile. Alfie has miraculous self-healing abilities and is therefore nearly unstoppable. For his superhuman metabolism to work, however, he must consume fearful amounts of food. When Alfie has finally cornered Marty and his family, Network agents intervene and shoot him repeatedly, until he must cannibalize himself in his effort to heal. Then one agent (The Network’s weak link and one of the most amusing figures in a cast with numerous comic and scary characters), who is inspired by Star Trek novels to become a hero, puts an end to the madness. He kills the other agent and helps the family to escape and acquire new identities. They take the names of Ann and John Galt, a wink at Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, for its depiction of a collapsing civilization.
This Network agent, Clocker, is the mythological guardian, inspired by a mythological universe. He is one of many such figures in Dean’s novels. “It’s appealing to believe that there are such people in life,” says Dean. “We’d all like to think, as we make our way day to day, that when crises arise, we have champions in the world who will defend us as we need them. Believing that such heroes live among us makes us feel a certain rightness about our society, makes us feel that there is a hope of justice and judgment. But the unspoken reason it has an appeal is because it implies that there’s meaning and purpose to existence, that we’re not just stumbling blindly through a random universe. When you need help, help will be there, if you know how to look for it, receive it, and accept it. That’s the appeal of the guardian angel. We want to believe we are watched over, that we are not alone.”
At the end of the novel, the Stillwater family is in perpetual hiding. Marty leaves behind his murder mysteries and best-selling career to publish under a new name the poem “Santa’s Twin” — the story he has been telling his two daughters, the plot of which parallels what has been happening to him. Fiction and reality interweave again, one reinforcing and vitalizing the other. Several years later, Dean himself returned to this poem, finished it, and published it, not as the work of “Marty Stillwater” but as his own. Fiction and reality ever interweaving.
Within the framework of this novel, Dean discusses the process of writing, both in terms of suspense and poetry. He includes many of his own beliefs about writing as therapy, promoting the writer’s instinct over that of any therapist. According to him, unless its intent is nihilistic, storytelling condenses life and gives it order. As Marty says, “You can’t analyze the deeper effects storytelling has on us, can’t figure out the why and how any more than King Arthur could understand how Merlin could do and know the things he did. … Life is so damned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn’t seem any point to so much of what we go through. Sometimes it seems the world’s a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story’s over, it meant something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had to say was simple, even naïve, but there was meaning. And that gives us hope, it’s a medicine.”5 With its structure, with its emotion, with its ability to engage the mind and the heart, fiction is hope. As it was for a small boy, Dean Koontz, who took shelter in his room with books, listening with one ear to his drunken father rage downstairs, escaping from reality into worlds on printed pages.
He also spends a lot of time developing the loving family as a womb of safety, even when the home itself is violated. Although Paige’s family had been just the opposite, she was able to overcome her horror and become a devoted mother. Marty and Paige both find great satisfaction in their two daughters, and the girls feel sure that their parents will protect them. It is the family whose members are willing to put their lives on the line for one another that holds civilization together. Whether the threat is from outside or within, a family that pulls together in love — as Dean and Gerda do — can defeat it.
As usual, Dean develops patterns of images in which a single source can house the potential for either safety or danger — just as his own family had done when he was growing up. The home, personal identity, society, the writer’s imagination, the family, the gift of stamina — even Santa Claus — are all charged positively and negatively. Freedom to choose and the determination to maintain integrity against the negative are the principal factors in preserving the good.
Mr. Murder debuted at number eight and remained on the bestsellers list for fourteen weeks, but broke Dean’s record of successive number one bestsellers. Most critics praised this book for its action and characters. As with previous novels, it was a main selection for the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club, and an alternate for the Mystery Guild.
The New York Times gave it a lot of space for review, dismissing the similes and homilies, but admitting that such “distractions counted little against “the resounding variations Mr. Koontz plays on this good story, here craftily retold. They allow him to counterpoint the new horrors among us with the old horrors always inside us.” This novel earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which said, “Playing on every emotion and keeping the story racing along, Koontz masterfully escalates the tension. He closes the narrative with the most ingenious twist ending of his career.” The Washington Post called it “superb,” while Kirkus said, “Terrific visceral energy, wonderfully creepy. Koontz nails the reader to the page.”
Savoy bought the film rights in a straight-purchase deal in 1996. They signed Dean as co-executive producer and gave him approval over the screenwriter and director. With a strong script by Stephen Tolkin, they then signed Bruce Willis for $20 million to play Marty Stillwater, and for the first time, it looked to Dean as if one of his novels was going to be made into a major motion picture of high quality. However, Savoy eventually lost so much money on its early slate of pictures that it pulled out of the film business, and Bruce Willis moved on. Ultimately ABC and producer Rob Lee brought in Tolkin to readapt Mr. Murder for a miniseries, hopefully to air in 1998.
That same month, Dean published a short essay in TV Guide called, “Why We Love Horror” (not his title). In it, he claims that “all of us delight in good suspense stories because the human condition itself is a long, scary movie.” He goes on to discuss the role of television in providing horrific entertainment. He cites The Outer Limits, a show from the mid-sixties, as being the “scariest television series there ever was,” because it was the first to hint that mundane reality might not be so safe. Current suspense movies, Dean says, fail to live up to the shows that he recalled from earlier years, and he discusses the many ways they cheat viewers with false suspense and poorly crafted stories. Where good story comes first, he states, the suspense is honest, and the filmmaker does not need to manipulate the viewer.
Dean’s new contract with Random House included seven backlist books for paperback release from Ballantine. The first of these, Winter Moon, was based on his 1975 novel, Invasion (by Aaron Wolfe), and came out in 1994. The title is taken from a line in one of his poems from The Book of Counted Sorrows. Dean retained the science fiction premise, but wanted the themes and characterization to be closer in style to his more mature work. He also wanted to depict the concerns of someone living in the turbulent city of Los Angeles in modern times — and by story’s end, turn pessimism into optimism, entropy into growth. This novel, too, became more of a story about the power of family than it had been before, and a denunciation of forces that contribute to the decline of society. Paranoia becomes sober realism.
In this “revision,” by the time he got to the point where Invasion’s first chapter starts, Dean had written eighty thousand words of Winter Moon. “As I got into it,” he says, “there were things I didn’t really like about the first one. I wanted this to be a very solid book; I didn’t want to dump an old title off on readers just to make a buck. I decided I wanted to open it in Los Angeles, get rid of the Vietnam War angle from Invasion, and deal with more contemporary issues. Once I did that, there was no turning back. It just started to roll, and I couldn’t stop it.” He also updated the alien, changing it from a simple insectile entity into something amorphous and stranger, something more akin to malignant greed and chaos — which he considered a more terrifying image to readers, and a better parallel to the senseless violence of the city. “Everything becomes me” the alien says.6 Dean gave the boy (still named Toby) a loyal golden retriever, and the only overlaps between novels are a section delineating the types of aliens in science fiction and Toby’s role, although he ends up as more a hero than a puppet. Otherwise, Dean claims, he did not keep a single sentence from the original novel. Instead of the fifty thousand word Invasion, he now had a tale of one hundred thirty-five thousand words.
The protagonist, Jack McGarvey, is a cop in Los Angeles who gets shot by a famous film producer who is high on PCP. In such a nihilistic society, the media soon turn this arrogant man into a dark hero, while Jack is vilified. When Jack and his wife, Heather, inherit a ranch in Montana that promises to deliver them from the encroaching violence, they decide to move. They soon learn, however, that things are just as threatening in Montana. The man who had lived in the house before them had died of fright fighting off an alien species that sought to invade him. His diary records his observations. During a blizzard, Jack is forced to seek outside help, while Heather and Toby try to ward off the alien attack. They find its source in a caretaker’s cottage, and although they manage to destroy it, they fear parts of it may have survived and be able to regenerate. Realizing that safety lies in their inner resources, they return to Los Angeles. “Home was not a perfect place. But it was the only home they had, and they could hope to make it better.”7 This is a metaphor of self, family, and humanity itself. Danger and safety are both present within, and efforts must be made to strengthen one over the other.
This novel hit number one in paperback on January 31, 1994, and stayed on the list ten weeks.
The Funhouse was also reissued that year, getting as high as number two.
Early in 1994, Dean and Gerda decided to purchase two and a half acres of land in a prestigious development known as Pelican Hills. They wanted to build a new house rather than renovate yet another. Every house they had lived in to that point had needed work, and the renovations had taken months, with considerable aggravation for them. Better, they thought, to have one built completely to their specifications while they continued to live in comfort in their home in Newport Beach. They planned a large, three-level, Italian Mediterranean-style estate that would have a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean, Catalina Island, Newport Harbor, and most of Orange County. It was projected by the media to become one of Newport Beach’s largest residences.
“We spend so much time in our home,” Dean explains, “and we needed more space. We don’t travel, so our home is very important to us. That’s what we want to spend our earnings on.”
After developing and rejecting two architectural approaches, the Koontzes hired Leason Pomeroy, an internationally acclaimed architect based in Orange County, to design a Frank Lloyd Wright — inspired house that would be intimately related to the land rather than imposed on it. Dean hired Mike Martin, a contractor he trusted, to oversee the project, which was expected to take as long as five years, including (design time.
He also had a business staff by now that included someone to answer phone calls and sort through fan mail, someone to design computer programs and track his publishing and other business interests, an executive secretary, and a fourth person to liaison with business associates and assist with research. Friends kidded him about his professed plans to cut back his work hours, and he and Gerda both realized that, despite their success, they seemed to be working harder than ever.
In March, Berkley published a trade paperback edition of The Dean Koontz Companion. It was edited by Martin Greenberg, Ed Gorman, and Bill Munster.
Marty Greenberg had first met Dean in 1981 when he had asked about including “Soft Come the Dragons” in his anthology, Dragon Tales. He had hundreds of anthologies to his credit, and eventually became partners with Ed Gorman on Mystery Scene magazine. He also had edited companions to the work of other writers, including Tom Clancy and Tony Hillerman.
“What makes this Companion unique compared to other books like this that I’ve done is that it’s seventy percent Dean’s voice,” Greenberg says. “He was very generous.” Included is a long interview that Ed Gorman conducted, reprints of many of Dean’s articles and essays, his first short story, several articles by other writers about his style of writing, one article about the movies made from his books to that time, and a comprehensive bibliography. Dean also gave them part of one of his newsletters for fans called “The Ten Questions Readers Most Often Ask.”
Headline in England issued a hardcover edition.
In April, Dean issued a statement of copyright infringement against Mark Masztal and H&M Publishing. They had produced a sixty-page chapbook of poetry that Dean had written for his novels and had called The Book of Counted Sorrows, attributing it to “Anonymous.” They claimed they had printed only a small quantity and had distributed them only as gifts, not for profit. They had also mentioned the fact that this book had been produced without Dean’s permission. “My attorneys reached an agreement with him,” he says, “to recover and turn over to us all copies printed.” Included in Dean’s notice of copyright infringement was a warning that he would take legal action and seek punitive damages against anyone selling this chapbook to collectors. “Like a trademark,” he says, “a copyright can be lost for failure to enforce; therefore the author will have no choice but to vigorously and relentlessly pursue those who deal in even a single copy of the publication.”
Dean also received a letter from a woman who informed him that she would be writing and marketing a sequel to Watchers, although she was changing the dogs from golden retrievers to chows. Then he heard from two film students who had written a screenplay of Lightning and were already in contact with producers. They felt they needed nothing but a letter of permission from him. It was the third unauthorized screenplay in four months. Dean was stunned that people appropriated his work for their own profit — and then were often miffed when he declined to let them do so. “Film schools appear to teach nothing about ethics or intellectual property rights!”
Late in 1994, he was battling with Roger Corman over yet another sequel to the film Watchers, a straight-to-video film called Watchers III from Concorde-New Horizons. Corman was in Milan, Italy, promoting the film with the Koontz name above the title, so Dean sued him for breach of contract, claiming that no such “proprietary credit” was permitted. Corman was using his name on the packaging in a way that suggested his endorsement and involvement — while Dean, in fact, loathed all three Watchers films that Corman had made. Corman sued Dean for libel, slander, emotional distress, and conspiracy to interfere with trade. With some help from federal judge Sonja Sotomayor, a settlement was reached which gave Dean much of what he wanted. Dean’s name would still appear on the video box, but not in the large-size print that Corman had originally planned and not above the title. The sticker would read: “Based on the novel, Watchers, by Dean R. Koontz.” Subsequently both parties dropped their suits. “I spent more money on legal fees to protect my rights,” says Dean, “than I was paid for the film version in the first place — but I did so happily. I’ll go to any length in a fight like that when I know I’m in the right. Principle really does matter more than money.”
An offbeat project that Dean took on was an artist biography for Capital records to accompany the rock group Megadeth’s “Youthanasia” CD. He had listened to the music and had thought it had more substance than other heavy metal; it had an interesting positive quality that surprised him. In speaking with Dave Mustane, the group’s founder, Dean felt that he shared some common experiences with this man. He called his essay “Godzilla vs. Megadeth,” and talked humorously about the band, their exploits, and their history. “What’s important about Megadeth,” he wrote, “is that their music is fun. It’s rock n’ roll, kids. It was always meant to be about fun. About freedom. About life and getting on with it.”
He did something else that was unusual for him: He agreed to be taped for a profile to be aired on the sci-fi cable channel. It was part of the Masters of Fantasy series and was called “The Mind of Dean Koontz.” On the program, aired August 20, 1994, he explained his cross-genre style and answered questions from fans about his childhood adversities, his dreams, and his desire to stay out of the celebrity spotlight.
Gerda decided to take a trip to Europe while Dean was hard at work on his next novel. Zov had invited her along. They spent a week in Paris, a week in Provence, and then took a day trip across the border into Italy — the homeland of Gerda’s father, who was from Sicily. Gerda had always wished to travel more, but Dean’s deadlines and reluctance to fly limited these opportunities.
During the entire twelve days that she was gone, Dean was nearly frantic with worry. “I was nuts!” he exclaims. “Friends invited me to dinner, but it wasn’t the same. I was sure her plane was going to go down. I had her call me from the airport as soon as she landed, and then I felt good for a day, until I remembered that she would have to fly back. This is a burden to her, because she might have done more things on her own, but she knows I get into this state. I do feel badly about it. But we have only been apart twice in thirty years of marriage, and she is a part of me in ways mere words can never express.”
The theme of loneliness is a constant throughout Dean’s novels, from first to last. Although most of the protagonists are loners of one sort or another, they all seek connection and attempt to build some semblance of family. “I probably write best about loneliness because it’s a genuine fear,” Dean acknowledges. “You can’t help but write out of your own fears. I define myself by my relationships with friends, but with Gerda most of all. I sit alone in a room by choice to work, but it would be intolerable for me not to have connections that matter deeply to me.”
Late in 1994, Dean saw the publication of the first book on his new contract for Alfred A. Knopf Publishing Group, an imprint which had long been associated with literary tradition. Since 1960, they had been part of Random House, owned by the Newhouse media empire. They prided themselves on publishing major voices worldwide and enjoyed priority among reviewers and award competitions. Among their authors were many Nobel Prize winners.
Dean’s editor was Knopf president, Sonny Mehta, who also oversaw the Vintage and Pantheon imprints at Random House. He had been hired in 1990, and his background and ideas caused quite a stir at the venerable house. Some critics feared that his love of commercial fiction might diminish Knopf’s reputation. He was an Indian from New Delhi, educated at Cambridge, and known as a passionate reader and a marketing whiz. He was also known for his inscrutable moods. He edited some twenty authors a year and conducted the marketing programs for many others, among them Carl Hiaasen, Josephine Hart, and Bret Easton Ellis. He liked to say that publishing should be provocative, and he invariably came up with ideas that would get booksellers’ attention. His number two person was Jane Friedman. Together they handled Dean’s editing and promotion.
Considered a major contributor to Knopf’s successful growth, Jane Friedman had joined Random House in 1968 in the publicity department. She was currently executive vice president at Knopf, publisher of Vintage, and president of Random House audio, which she had founded.
Dean had told Sonny Mehta that he was writing something very different from what he had done previously, and Mehta encouraged him to follow his instinct.
“You’ve made numerous changes in the past,” Mehta told him, “and your readers have always gone with you.”
Dean was pleased. He had expected the usual caution and concern over his career. “I’d never felt so free,” he says. “Unconsciously, I had been reining myself in to minimize the arguments, and I only became aware of that when I considered some of the ideas that were bouncing around in my head — and suddenly realized why I had been postponing them.”
After eleven months and three weeks of writing sixty hours a week, Dean turned in the manuscript of Dark Rivers of the Heart, his most ambitious book to date, both from a literary and political perspective. Mehta read it, made notes to help sharpen some scenes, and gave it back to Dean to polish. Dean felt he had received a very professional editing job. What Mehta said had been insightful, precise, and succinct. There were no struggles over endings, titles, or subject matter. It seemed to Dean that he had found a publishing home where he would be able to go in many directions.
In the book, Dean tackles a number of political issues: government use of high technology to spy on its citizens, victimology as a corruption of justice, and the chilling effects of asset-forfeiture laws. He sees bloated government budgets as inspiring zealots to extend their jurisdiction beyond its original boundaries, and he explores the growing trend of police agencies to become dangerous paramilitary organizations. Since there was no element of the fantastic in this book, he used numerous techniques to convey the feeling of the fantastic through style and mood. “I also tried to convey it through a tone that I might call ‘hyper-real,’ which involves using numerous pumped-up narrative techniques, and a density of character and plot, that bring the book as close as possible to going over the top without actually letting it go over the top.”8 He wanted to assault both the “lie of political solutions” and the “he of Freudian theory.”
Although he had sprinkled his political leanings throughout his books and had been called a libertarian by many critics, Dean was not interested in being so firmly categorized. A libertarian calls for a severely limited government, elimination of entitlements, and a totally free market. Only freedom, they say, enables people to live the most fully human lives. Dean had even included libertarian characters in some of his novels, and although he agreed with many libertarian positions, he disagreed with others. Despite what some critics claimed about his “libertarian” soapboxes, his political philosophy was, he felt, more complex.
“There are things I’m libertarian about,” says Dean, “there are things I’m liberal about, and there are things I’m conservative about. In matters of religious faith, most libertarians are nonbelievers. Most of them don’t believe there’s any role for religion in public life, and I think that if we’re going to have a meaningful public policy that has a moral base, there must be something that gives law a moral basis — and that something is, for me, the belief in God-given rights that no law can abridge. I’m also strong on civil rights and minority participation in every aspect of public and private life — while many libertarians are laissez faire on the issue. I hate being labeled and pigeonholed, when issues like abortion or immigration are so complex. “
In Dark Rivers of the Heart, and in an Introduction to Alan Bock’s Ambush at Ruby Ridge, Dean took a stand on an issue of great importance to him: What happens when a powerful faction of the government becomes pathological? The FBI’s violent raid on the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, had disturbed him, as had the ambush at Ruby Ridge on the Randy Weaver family in which Weaver’s wife and son were unaccountably shot and killed. “They had different beliefs, but they weren’t harming anyone,” says Dean. “The government’s argument was that they launched this violent assault [at Waco] to save the children — but they killed all the children. We saw paramilitary operations where we should have seen responsible police operations. Authority run amok.”
Through the character of Roy Miro in Dark Rivers we see the consequences of having someone in power who believes that power is its own justification. Dean had collected numerous stories depicting what he considered to be governmental abuse of citizens, such as cases involving misuse of the asset-forfeiture laws and the antidrug statutes. “In the newspaper,” he said in an interview, “I read about the government trying to gain control of everyone’s computer for the purpose of illegal eavesdropping, by requiring the ‘clipper chip.’ This gives them the power to monitor us at all times without the niceties of court orders, search warrants, and the rules of law.” He was especially concerned that innocent citizens could be stripped of their property and livelihood, and even their lives, by people acting on totalitarian principles. To his mind, when something like the asset-forfeiture law was applied not merely to drug lords, but in more than two hundred other types of criminal situations, its interpretation was too fluid to be safe in the hands of zealous law enforcers. Dean clearly explains what he means by this in his Afterword to the hardcover edition of Dark Rivers of the Heart.
This is the novel in which Dean also felt he was finally more directly approaching the subject of his father. Ray was now-deceased, and Dean wanted to dig into the psychological ramifications of being the son of a sociopath. “That was the first time I dealt bluntly, head-on, with those issues,” he says. “Spencer’s father is far worse than mine was, so it’s hyperbole, but I dealt with it in that fashion to highlight the issues. In various books, I’ve struggled to work out the consequences of a childhood gone wrong due to abuse. But I was on a more conscious level in Dark Rivers.”
He dedicated the novel to his friends, Gary and Zov Karamardian, owners of the restaurant that he and Gerda frequented, and opened it with his own poetry, which expressed the idea that we may be moved by a force we cannot see — the force of destiny. The destiny of place, time, culture, and genetics. There are a number of characters whose personalities and actions mirror those of others, as well as numerous significant symbols that move the story along. Dean also worked with patterns in nature — most strongly apparent in the scene in the desert — to emphasize or reinforce thematic points.
Spencer Grant, forty-six, is a former police officer and part of the Multi Agency Task Force on Computer Crime. He bears a deep scar on his face from a childhood incident, which is a reminder of the psychological scars he bears from his father, Steven Ackblom, who murdered forty-two women (including Spencer’s mother). Spencer fears that the same “dark rivers” course through his own heart via shared blood, and he shuns the possibility. He rescues an abused dog that he names Rocky (after the character in the eponymous movie) and these two parallel each other throughout the novel in their fear and courage. Both appear to be cowed by their pasts, yet when pushed to it, both confront what they must.
Subconsciously motivated by the repressed memory of a bloodstained door, Spencer enters a bar called The Red Door and meets a waitress who interests him.
“The first sentence sets up the whole book,” says Dean. “‘With the woman on his mind and a deep uneasiness in his heart, Spencer Grant drove through the glistening night, searching for the red door.’ The woman could refer to the waitress, or to a woman he thinks he might have killed on a terrible long-ago night when he was under his father’s spell, or it could be his mother. Setting up subtle references to key women in the story was intentional — but the red door as a deeply buried symbol in Spencer’s psyche was not part of my conscious plan. I got to the end of Part One and only then realized I was going to have the words ‘red door’ again and that they would refer to the bloody palm prints. I remember my excitement. The image resonates on so many levels when you get to it the second time, and you know you’ve only just begun to understand the way the outer story and inner story of this character connect. When I wrote the first sentence, I didn’t know that the red door would have further significance — or at least didn’t know it on a conscious level.
“All of his life, Spencer has been trying to find his way back through the red door, back across that threshold he crossed on that terrible night in his youth. When he goes into this bar, pushes open this red door and finds this waitress, Valerie, he’s round the way out of the nightmare of his life. I think the more you polish and enrich the text on a surface level, the more engaged you become on a subconscious level and the more things you do you’re not even aware of — until later.
“My original intention was to write a variation on the old movie Laura, in which a cop investigates the murder of a woman, and in talking to people about her and seeing her photograph, he falls in love with her. You’ve got this fascinating situation where he’s falling in love with someone he could never know — because she’s dead — and then it turns out she’s not dead after all! Dark Rivers is a variation on that. Spencer meets Valerie once and then she’s gone from his life — but it’s the first real human connection he’s had in so long that he’s compelled to follow through to find her, to give himself to the possibility of hope.”
When the waitress disappears under mysterious circumstances that involve armed federal agents, Spencer traces her to Las Vegas and discovers that her real name is Ellie Summerton. Like him, she has been traveling under a pseudonym. (Grant had taken his own false name from two actors who often played men of courage and strong principles.) He pursues her to offer his help, but nearly drowns in a flooded river (a metaphor of being nearly overcome by the “dark river” inside him). A rat — his frightening inner self — gets close to him, but drowns before it can bite him. This incident foreshadows the rats that live in torture chambers under the barn where Spencer’s father had committed his atrocities. “Rats represent a lot of things in this book,” Dean explains. “They are an externalization of the twisted side of human nature. They symbolize the things that Spencer is afraid exist in his own mind. They live mostly below our level of awareness — in wells and shadows — and when we encounter them, we are repelled by them, but they’re always there, quietly operating.”
Ellie, a nurturing female who parallels his mother, rescues him. He admits to her that he is Michael Ackblom and she reveals that she was married to a computer genius who was the son of a corrupt politician. The politician has had his own son and Ellie’s parents killed, but she escaped and he has sent out government forces in pursuit. To track her down, he uses the very computer network — “Mama” — that his son had invented to serve as a formidable anticrime resource. Each time federal forces learn of her whereabouts and nearly capture her, she leaves behind cockroaches stuck on pins to remind her father-in-law of what he is and to warn him that she will nail him if she can.
The man in charge of finding and eliminating Ellie is Roy Miro, who loves Pooh characters, yet heads a secret government agency which is supported by redirected government funding under the control of the Justice Department. “His name, Miro,” Dean notes, “means that he mirrors many aspects of our society, especially that we pretend to admire compassion but actually reward ruthlessness.” On the side, Roy “euthanizes” people whom he believes lead lives that cause them pain. He views this activity as a holy calling — a service to his victims and a step toward improving society by weeding out the sick, the disabled, and the despairing. In that respect, he also mirrors Spencer’s father, who thought that pain was the most intense expression of life and who viewed his killings as part of his art. Both subsume human life to an aesthetic ideal. (Ackblom even thinks he could be a successful politician in today’s world.)
Roy also abuses the asset-forfeiture law by using it to strip from a man who had crossed him nearly everything of value — his home, his bank account, his good name. “Morality was relative, and nothing done in the service of correct ideals could be a crime,”9 according to Roy.
The principal difference between Roy and Spencer is the way they approach moral issues: “Roy never agonizes,” says Dean. “He knows what’s right. He feels himself to be superior and understands what’s best for everyone. Spencer thinks through the ramifications of everything he does. A moral person is someone who has to think about his actions, about his impact on other people. My fear of large institutions is that so many people, when they become part of that big organization or great cause, surrender their judgment and accept as received wisdom a pat series of answers. They stop thinking. To buy into a set of political answers is to lose your humanity. You become increasingly capable of doing terrible things and feeling morally justified. Roy is the organizational individual who never questions his motivations, who believes that good intentions matter more than what horrors might result from them.”
During Roy’s pursuit of Spencer, he encounters a woman, Eve Jammer, who kills people strictly for money. They are two of a kind and they pursue a bizarre relationship of mutual admiration for each other’s methods and motives. “Eve is the ultimate narcissist,” says Dean. “She comes close to solipsism — which is the opposite of Ellie, who lives for other people.” When Dean was writing this, he realized how unusual it was to have two such mentally unbalanced people bond, and he delighted in seeing where this “romance” would go. He called this subplot “psychos in love.”
When Roy realizes that Spencer is with Ellie, he discovers Spencer’s connection to Ackblom. He then uses his credentials to free Ackblom from prison and bring him to where he suspects Spencer is going — his former family home outside Vail, Colorado.
There Spencer confronts his childhood nightmares. As a boy, he was roused from sleep by a distant cry. Drawn to the barn where his father’s art studio was housed, Spencer had discovered his father in the act of murder. He had also seen his father’s handiwork: corpses of women in various stages of decomposition, plastered into various poses in a wall “sculpture.” As an adult, he still half believes that he may have had a hand in killing the last victim. The red door is his passage into his own subconscious. The two red doors — the one at the bar and the one in the barn — are the roads inward, one to evil, the other to good.
As memories surface and illuminate for Spencer what “the red door” really is, Roy shows up with Spencer’s father. Steven Ackblom shoots Roy to get him out of the way, and then taunts Spencer with the suggestion that he, too, is capable of such atrocities because he has his father’s dark blood. Rocky attacks Ackblom, triggering Spencer’s own burst of courage. Spencer then resists “genetic destiny” with his realization that he had tried to save the dying woman — that he has his mother’s blood, too, and thus has the potential to be good. He kills his father and purges his soul.
“I’ve been writing books about fate and destiny, and in this book that theme is very strong,” Dean acknowledges. “The text is saturated with water and blood imagery, and the title is Dark Rivers of the Heart, which refers to destiny. In the book, there are three aspects to destiny. First, destiny is our blood, our family. Second, destiny is in the stars, our own course set within us when we were born, because life has a spiritual purpose. Third, destiny is a result of how we choose to exercise our free will, for we can reject the power of blood (genetics) if we are strong enough to be what we want to be. All three of those are reflected in the book.”
Spencer and Ellie escape, adopt new identities, and, assisted by a guardian group of citizens opposed to totalitarianism and corruption (who had also helped the victim of the asset-forfeiture law), they marry and start a family. The unborn child is a symbol of hope for Spencer’s psychological legacy.
The resistance group in this novel serves as the mythical guardian. Its members are citizens who have lost their rights due to legal abuses. They insist that information is protection — “knowledge should be the first and foremost weapon in any resistance.”10
Yet even as the novel ends on Dean’s typical optimistic note, he indicates that all is not well. Roy has survived and, with Eve, is planning his political triumph via manipulation and presidential assassination. Then Eve and Roy can freely carry out their “mercy killings” without the hindrance of accountability.
“I believe very strongly that good always triumphs, but usually in the long run,” says Dean, “not always in the short run. There are short-term advantages to being able to do wicked things. Life is an endless moral contest, a struggle against opposing forces. And neither side triumphs every time. Roy and Eve go on … as evil always does.”
Before the paperback of this novel was issued, subsequent changes made the Afterword dated, so Dean deleted it. “There had been a change of Congress right after the hardcover was published. The first thing they passed was a rule change requiring that any law that Congress passed had to apply to all members of Congress, past, present, and future. Prior to that, they exempted themselves from the laws they imposed on the rest of us! Then there was a court decision on the asset-forfeiture laws that changed it — not enough, but somewhat. The Afterword no longer applied. The issues dealt with in the book are dynamic, always changing, and I didn’t want to have to update the Afterword every year. So I removed it and allowed the story to speak for itself.”
Dean had long feared his own heritage from an abusive, schizotypal father. Now that his father was dead, he felt free to explore the deep pockets of his fears to try to purge himself of the anger and the need to compulsively examine himself for any sign of his father’s traits. He is like Spencer, who believes he must revisit his childhood trauma to heal. Even if he was destined to follow certain psychological patterns — which he refused to accept — he knew that he could triumph over those received from his father by embracing those from his mother. The novel affirms that he is an agent with free will and initiative rather than ruled by something in his blood against which he may have no defense. Genetics is not destiny, or if it is, then hopefully it can be modified by kindness, mercy, honesty, and virtue. “Otherwise,” says Spencer, “I can’t tolerate the person I will become, the things I will do, or the end that will be mine.”11 He has changed identities in an effort to rid himself of his father’s curse, which reminds us of Dean’s belief that his real father might in fact be someone else. The fantasies provide needed separation. His hope is that our lives are free of the chains of fate, except for the one destiny that is freedom.
“I identify with Spencer,” Dean admits. “I hate the idea of even unintentionally hurting someone, and Spencer is like this. He kills someone and it’s justifiable, yet it gnaws at him and he overanalyzes it. I’m always looking for that sign of my father, who was quick to take offense at anything from anybody. My behavior comes from never wanting to be like that.”
Steven Ackblom, as a parallel to Roy Miro, symbolizes a government that has forgotten its paternal position and has become pathological in its desire to control rather than serve and enable citizens. There is sometimes a fine line between federal agent and thug. The fears of the citizens of this country, Dean believes, should be the same as those that Spencer harbors: The source of what we believe to be our protection may well be dangerous. The misshapen rats that live beneath the barn where Ackblom took his women represent government agencies that operate in a clandestine manner, abnormal in their moral development. Roy is the epitome of this breed. He is a rat, but like the rat in the river that had threatened Spencer, was stopped short before he could carry out his aggression. Dean writes, “As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community, people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions.”12
On that fateful night in his youth, as Spencer approached the barn, a white owl flew at him out of the night, startling him. Briefly he mistook it for a guardian angel — his mother. But perhaps it was indeed just that. This is similar to the phone call that Dean received just before the nearly deadly encounter with his own father. Interestingly, both Spencer’s father and Dean’s were wielding knives. Spencer had felt guilty all his life because he could not save his mother from his father, just as Dean wished he could have rescued his own mother from his father’s cruelty. “I see my mother as having been killed by a lifetime of stress,” Dean says. “She died young. There was nothing I could do about it. When I was a kid, I felt very frustrated. It seemed as if there should have been something I could do, but I had no power.”
Rocky, Ellie, and Spencer all mirror one another in their triumph over past abuse and their ability to show courage where needed. They refuse to be battered down, no matter how great the forces against them. Destiny drew them together to heal.
“This novel took a long time to write and I was exhausted,” Dean recalls. “But I also had an exhilarated feeling. It was written out of deep concern over things I saw going wrong in society. The writing was cathartic. Seeing the government increasingly assuming the role of a parent and seeming to become dysfunctional and crazy — this was too much a reflection of what my father was like when I was a kid. In this book, I pulled those elements together. Much of what our government does has a profound impact on each of us, and when it’s out of control … well, that’s like living in a house with a psychotic parent.”
Dark Rivers got as high as number seven on The New York Times bestsellers list and stayed on the list for almost three months. First printing was set at 650,000. In paperback, it went as high as number two.
Kirkus said this novel had “unrelenting excitement, truly memorable characters and ample food for thought.” According to Locus, this was “the best book he has ever written.” Boston Magazine noted the mix of optimism and pessimism regarding the “dark rivers” in everyone’s heart, and The New York Times, which cut back on the space they had allotted to his last novel, called it a “believable high-tech thriller.” Entertainment Weekly compared Koontz to King and thought there was more substance in Dark Rivers. A few reviewers noted the similarities to George Orwell’s 1984, with the rats and the “Big Brother” atmosphere; some thought it paranoid or exaggerated, but Cosmopolitan called it “timely.” The Denver Tost considered the writing “as usual … flawless: clean, clear exposition, colorful description, precise narration, and realistic dialogue.”
Even Dean’s agent, Robert Gottlieb, was impressed enough to make a comment: “Every so often in a creative person’s life, there comes a defining moment when he moves up to another plateau. I see that in Dark Rivers. It’s a watershed novel.”13
Although Dean still did not wish to do promotional tours, he felt that Mehta and Friedman had been so supportive of his new direction that he owed them some cooperation. He agreed to field questions from radio talk show hosts, newspapers, and magazines, and even went on television — eventually giving a hundred interviews. He did more book signings than usual, but still did not agree to anything that required getting on an airplane.
The Washington State Bar News requested permission to reprint the section that Dean had written about the victim of the asset-forfeiture law. He granted it in the hope that more lawyers would come to understand the dangers of such statutes.
When Dean later wrote a Foreword to Alan W Bock’s Ambush at Ruby Ridge, he was quick to say that he did not have much in common with Randy Weaver, the separatist who lost his wife and son when the FBI opened fire on his cabin. Even so, a difference of beliefs — even if those beliefs are distasteful — can never justify shooting someone. He felt that the government dealt with the Weaver situation neither sanely nor democratically. He observes the entrapment, trickery, and inappropriate use of force as a sign of increasing government repression. If we, as citizens, fail to hold the government accountable — and we can only do that if we are informed about the potential for oppression — then we are the victims only of ourselves. Dean then mentions that his research for Dark Rivers involved information about assaults against citizens similar to the Weavers and the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas. “The number of such incidents seems to argue that the Department of Justice, as currently constituted, is either blind to the need for visible justice for all citizens … or is so preoccupied with avoiding the political fallout that comes with admission of mistakes that it risks creating the widespread impression of bias and conspiracy.”14 His own feeling about politicians, which he has expressed from his very first novels, is that they are not so much conspirators as incompetent people in pursuit of petty self-advantage. No matter which end of the spectrum they support, they all have essentially the same motives.
Film rights were sold to CBS, and Lawrence Cohen was hired to write a screenplay for a miniseries. The project took a long time to develop, and after an executive change at CBS, it was dropped from the network’s schedule.
With the sale that year of a sixteen-book package to Indonesia, Dean was now being translated into thirty-four languages.
The next revision for Ballantine was Icebound, published in 1995, based on Dean’s David Axton novel, Prison of Ice. Dean updated it and deepened the characterizations, but left the plot essentially intact. First printing was set at two million copies, and it went directly to the number one spot for mass market paperbacks.
“He’s managed his career well,” said Claire Ferraro, editor-in-chief at Ballantine. “He always had his eye on the long haul, because he realized that if he were successful some day, those backlist titles would be worth a great deal more.” About his extensive revisions, Ferraro said, “Dean feels strongly a commitment to his readers and wants to make sure they enjoy his earlier books to the same degree they do his later books.”
In April, Berkley reissued his revised The Key to Midnight in paperback under his own name and sold over two million copies. It remained a bestseller for two months.
1 Dean Koontz, Mr. Murder (New York: Putnam, 1993), p. 29.
2 Ibid., p. 109.
3 Ibid., p. 40.
4 Ibid., p. 14.
5 Ibid., p. 251–53.
6 Dean Koontz, Winter Moon (New York: Ballantine, 1994), p. 326.
7 Ibid., p. 472.
8 Michael Collings, “Dean Koontz,” Mystery Scene (no. 45, 1994).
9 Dean Koontz, Dark Rivers of the Heart (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 114.
10 Ibid., p. 482.
11 Ibid., p. 247.
12 Ibid., p. 87.
13 Orange Coast (November, 1994), p. 45.
14 Dean Koontz, Foreword, Ambush at Ruby Ridge by Alan W. Bock (New York: Berkley, 1996), xi-xii.