IN MAY OF 1995, STRANGE HIGHWAYS BECAME THE FIRST BOOK under the Brandon Tartikoff imprint, published in hardcover by Warner Books. It was Dean’s collection of fourteen stories that had originally been part of a contract for Putnam. When Dean had moved on to Knopf, he had negotiated with Warner to revert the film rights to Oddkins by moving the collection from Putnam over to Warner. The collection included a number of previously published short stories, including “Kittens,” a revised version of the novel Chase, and a new novel, itself titled Strange Highways.
First printing was set at 500,000 copies and the collection was featured by the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club. Its first week out, it landed on the number eleven spot on The New York Times list and stayed on the list for seven weeks, unusual for a collection of stories, which generally fare less well than novels.
The title novel, Strange Highways, was set in Pennsylvania with numerous autobiographical associations. It is about life choices, of what might have been had another choice been made. The two brothers in the story form a surface metaphor of Dean’s own dual potentials: what he could become, under his father’s influence, and what he actually did to resist that by continually affirming goodness through his writing.
Joey Shannon returns home to the fictional town of Asherville after his only remaining parent, his father, has died. He has not been there in twenty years, having made nothing of his life and wanting to avoid a place filled with painful memories. As he enters his childhood home, he remembers much pain. His descriptions indicate that this is in fact the house where Dean grew up. “The house is similar, yes,” Dean admits. “And the town has the feel of Bedford — though a Bedford combined with some of these coal-mining towns in the Scranton area.”
Joey’s brother, P J, had slept in the basement of this house, near the furnace (recall Dean’s dream of the furnace immediately after his father’s death). “Why I put P J in the basement,” says Dean, “I don’t know. It just seemed that he ought to be there, removed from the rest of the family. It was a few years alter my father’s death and that dream of the furnace, so it’s strange. If I believed in repressed memory, I’d say there’s a repressed memory here.”
PJ had been a star athlete, confident and skillful in every way — and a psychotic killer. One day, while home from college (at Shippensburg), Joey had accidentally discovered his brother’s secret life. He had been forced to decide whether to turn his beloved older brother in to the cops and destroy his entire family, or “forget” what he knew. He chose the latter and consequently led a wasted, impotent life while his brother went on to fame and glory as a roving writer — what Joey himself had aspired to be. Upon Joey’s return, he finds himself back at that crossroads, given another chance to reconsider the worst decision — and most cowardly act — of his life.
Leaving town after his father’s funeral, Joey comes to a crossroads and sees before him Coal Valley Road, which has Long been closed, in fact, bulldozed away because it led to a town that long ago had collapsed into a dangerous and unquenchable underground mine fire. Turning onto this impossible road, he discovers a young woman stranded by her car. Her name is Celeste and she is the angel through whom he can make new choices that could redeem him and change everything. Twenty years earlier, she had been one of PJ’s victims. Joey finds himself back in time — on that fateful night of his youth. Celeste will become PJ’s victim again unless Joey rewrites history. They return to her town, Coal Valley.
“The town is based on Centralia, Pennsylvania,” Dean explains. “There are a couple of people still hanging on there although they were supposed to have been physically removed by the government years ago. Centralia was undermined by mine fires. Buildings and streets collapsed into the burnt-out shafts; they had the vent pipes with the sulfurous fires coming out of them — yet people were still living there. For a long time, the government tried to abandon them, and ultimately most of them were relocated at public expense. The town was condemned, and I always thought it would make an interesting background. I don’t know how many people around the country realize this place existed, but it’s so obvious for a story of the supernatural; the symbolism is almost too perfect.”
There are twelve residents left in the doomed town, and Joey realizes that P J wants to kill them all in symbolic style in a deconsecrated church. He wants to make himself into a dark god. Joey wants to stop PJ, but realizes that whenever his belief flags, the past he had actually lived reasserts itself, and PJ grows stronger. Celeste keeps urging him to believe in a higher power, which is difficult for him, but when he finally takes the leap, he manages to turn the tide and defeat his brother. His entire future changes. He marries Celeste and learns that he will become a published writer and the author of Strange Highways — fulfilling the dream he sacrificed when, on the first pass through his life, he made that one dreadfully wrong choice to “forget” his brother’s criminality.
The deconsecrated church was Joey’s life — he had emptied it of all meaning and had to reconsecrate it before he could do anything worthwhile. He accepted God’s presence and gained the strength he needed to set things right. There are many images of transubstantiation sprinkled throughout, from the Catholic ceremony to what Joey does with his own psyche. Transubstantiation turns wine into the blood of Christ and offers redemption to believers. Joey shares the blood of a murderer and must transform himself in order to redeem the blood and reject his brother’s taint. He does this through faith and defiance.
“The concept of Transubstantiation is fascinating,” says Dean, “and I hadn’t realized how much I’ve always used it. Catholicism is a very fleshy religion: the blood and the suffering. Protestantism is substantially dry. It’s a religion of distance. In its Catholic expression, religion is organic. It gets right into the muck of existence. Blood is such a central image, and then there’s the virgin’s tears. All Catholic families I know are generally emotional. The tears flow. When religion steps into these realms, when it’s not afraid to talk about the blood and the suffering, there’s a meaning to suffering. In Communion, this is the body and blood of Christ laid upon your tongue. It brings an intimacy to the experience that’s eerie and wonderful.”
When Joey rescues Celeste in the rain, he passes through a baptism, a cleansing. He moves from pessimism to optimism, from passivity to active commitment. The two sides of a self — the capacity for good or evil — flow into and out of each other. Joey needs not only resistance to evil, but love from and for Celeste in order to succeed. After that, with belief, all things are possible.
Allowing PJ to get away with murder in the past had dissolved Joey’s integrity. He could not become a novelist, because novelists get to the truth of things and he had turned away. Even so, as Dean did in response to his father, Joey had researched the psychotic mind extensively and had learned enough to arm himself for this extraordinary encounter, this magical second chance.
His brother was as steeped in symbolism as Joey, but had inverted it for his own purposes. When Joey had first discovered PJ’s foul deeds, PJ had offered him thirty dollars (thirty pieces of silver) to stay quiet. The basement and the furnace parallel the sinkholes and fires of the mining town. P J feels at home there because it is a dying town, like his dying soul, and it reeks of hell. He had set everything up through religious symbols in order to empower himself with their defilement. Joey had changed that and turned them back to good.
The story, for Dean, has some redemptive value.
“There are certain moments I give to characters that express lessons from my own life. I’ve learned, for instance, that what we most regret are sins of passivity. With my mother, I could have been more directly expressive. I could have told her more directly how much I loved and respected her. Of course, I grew up in a house where you didn’t talk about your feelings. But I wish, especially just before she died, that I’d been better at expressing what I felt. You do redeem yourself by writing, by letting the characters be better people than you were. Which is why I try to make the characters so compassionate. More attuned to each other. I’m saying, that is how I should have been when so often I was not.”
In a review of this collection, English professor Michael Collings wrote that “one of the trademarks of Koontz’s fiction is his ability to explore contrarieties and to leave them identified, if not always fully resolved … The title piece is an eerie search for individual meaning that couples an overtly supernatural plot with an intense psychological trauma of guilt and betrayal.”1
To promote this book in its paperback form, Dean threw a party for as many booksellers as Warner was willing to fly out to Newport Beach, and held it on board a hundred-twenty-foot luxury yacht. He invited his magician friend, sleight-of-hand artist Barry Price, to perform tricks and he devised contests to keep people entertained. For one contest, he offered to use the name of the winner in his next novel. Barbara Christman won, and she showed up in Sole Survivor.
In interviews promoting the publication of Dark Rivers of the Heart at the end of 1994, Dean had expressed a certain degree of confidence that he had faced down those issues about his father still hovering from childhood. The novel had seemed to him cathartic. “I remember finishing Dark Rivers and saying, ‘Now that’s behind me — the issue of how you get through terrible trauma and overcome it and don’t let it taint you — but then look at Intensity. The same concerns are expressed through a female character and it’s not behind her. If there’s any book where those issues are in the foreground, it’s Intensity. How weird that they’re such a major piece of Dark Rivers and I’m thinking that I’ve put them behind me — yet in the very next book, they’re the centerpiece. In fact, I think I dealt with them better in this book than ever. More directly, more honestly, more powerfully.”
Dean dedicated Intensity to his mother, who had been his guardian as a child and to whom he owed his belief in human resilience. In his opening poem, he emphasized love, hope, faith, and courage as key factors in resisting the darkness. He had needed about six months of seventy-hour weeks to write this novel, and he had worked hard on patterns of archetypal images and metaphors — among them knights and dragons.
In the opening sentence, the “dragon,” Edgier Foreman Vess, a muscular “homicidal adventurer” who seeks power and control, is bathed in red, and there are many images of fire as Dean describes the sunset. “He seems to be ablaze,” says Dean, “which foreshadows what will happen to him. And you see that he is strangely attuned to the natural world. He’s as much animal as human, and his perception of the world is different from that of an ordinary person. There are many blood images — the sun is red as it sinks; the grass turns red.”
Subliminally Vess then is associated with the lead character as she and her friend come into a shimmering red light. The shadows flicker “shark-swift” across the windshield of their car, which suggests the presence of a predator. Dean continues to use setting, forces of nature, and objects all around to set mood and pace, subtly tying one paragraph to another so that one image leads readers continually toward the next in a progression. When Dean wants a heightened sense in a certain setting, he focuses on concrete details, such as what Chyna first sees on opening a nightstand drawer in a room where murder has been committed: “In the mortal fall of light, she discovered a pair of reading glasses with yellow reflections in the half-moon lenses, a paperback men’s adventure novel, a box of Kleenex, a tube of lip balm, but no weapon.”2
“There’s something about that set of words,” says Dean, “that is more real than having her see Kleenex and lip balm, or just see a book. It feels hyper-real.” He also describes objects with words that convey motion and feeling.
As the scene moves away from Vess, Chyna Shepherd enters. She is a twenty-six-year-old grad student, a “multichannel worrier,” who is interested in criminal psychology, in part because she is burdened by past abuse from her cruel mother. She goes home for the weekend with a friend, Laura Templeton, who has been targeted that night by Vess. Chyna hides as he goes through the house and destroys the family, one by one. Her first instinct is to protect herself, as she has done all through her life, by hiding under the bed. “Until this experience,” says Dean, “Chyna is a case of arrested development. Part of her is still a child because there are a lot of things she’s afraid of. She’s built a decent life, but she’s still in a survival mode. I think that’s me in some ways. I’ve often said I don’t think that I’d have become successful if I hadn’t had the bad example of my father, the determination to be unlike him, and the street savvy that told me how to take care of myself. Without that same combination of motives and qualities, Chyna would not survive the night she endures in Intensity.”
Chyna finally comes out and realizes that Laura is just barely alive. When Vess carries Laura outside to his motor home, Chyna gets in to rescue her friend. Laura dies and Chyna discovers yet another body inside. The place is an abattoir on wheels. She then learns that Vess has imprisoned a young girl in his home, and if Chyna fails to make a personal commitment to save this girl — Ariel — then the girl will die. Until this point, she believed that survival meant not taking chances. Now she begins to realize that physical survival means nothing if it comes at the discovery of her own emotional frigidity and spiritual poverty. Her heroism gradually grows out of her humanity. Chyna hides herself in the motor home until they arrive at Vess’s house. Vess is aware of her presence and decides to let her live so he can study her.
He keeps four highly trained Doberman pinschers to guard his property, but he lets Chyna enter his house, then traps her. Tied up and afraid, she nevertheless confronts him. As she tries to understand his weird worldview based on what she has learned of psychological theory, he plays mental games with her, and finally insists that he is a singularity — none of her theories fit his case. Madness, he insists, is not always about some set cause and effect. He was not abused as a child. He loves killing for its own sake.
Vess gets empowered from playing word games with his name: From the letters, he makes as many words as he can that have striking associations, such as “God fears me.” Dean had seen the name, Edgier, in a newspaper and it had seemed ugly to him. “That’s why it stuck in my head,” he explains. “And I just thought that Vess was a good villain’s name. The sibilants are like the hiss of a snake.” Vess also derives power from concentrating fully on physical sensation — pleasure or pain — to produce a state of synesthesia, in which the senses blend together, so that he might feel an odor or see a sound. It is a state of consciousness often described by saints in deep meditation, but Vess shows that it can as easily become a tool of the deranged mind. To convey Vess’s point of view effectively, the author crafted metaphors and similes with a synesthesiac quality, a daring device that definitely conveys the strangeness of Vess’s mind.
Vess views himself as a Nietzschean superman, as suggested by his command word, Nietzsche, for his guard dogs. He interprets this to mean that he is “beyond good and evil” and thus has no accountability save to himself; he lives like a god, with no remorse, no limits, total need. What feels right is right. His type, he says, wind up in politics. His point of view is written in present tense to emphasize his immersion in the sensations of the moment — having no past and no future — and his total narcissism isolates him inside his own world view. He is reptilian, a Palmetto bug, and the spider is his totem.
Dean had based him in part on a real life serial killer, Edmund Kemper III, whose crimes had shocked the nation. As a child, Kemper prayed that everyone in the world but him would die. He killed pets and mutilated dolls. At the age of fifteen, he shot and killed his grandparents just to see what it would be like. He was arrested and institutionalized, but with his mother’s help, he was freed at age twenty-one. He tried to convince three psychiatrists to recommend that his juvenile record be sealed so that he could pursue his interest in law enforcement. When he could not achieve this, he befriended police officers in Santa Cruz. At six feet nine inches tall and two hundred eighty pounds, he was an intimidating figure with an IQ of 136 and seemingly gentle ways. He idolized John Wayne. However, he claimed to suffer from “zapples” that sent him into a state of murderous rage. In the early seventies, Kemper began to pick up girls, murder and mutilate them, and have sex with their corpses. He exulted that he was winning over death. “I was the hunter and they were the hunted,” he later told a psychiatrist.4 He also carved flesh from the: legs of two victims to eat, thereby making them part of him and possessing them forever. He then killed his mother, whom he hated, and a friend of hers that he had invited over. Not long afterward, he turned himself in to face eight counts of murder. He asked to be executed, but was given life imprisonment instead. After the trial, psychiatrist Herbert McGrew said, “Kemper is a marvelous example of the fact that psychiatrists don’t know everything.”5
Vess leaves to go to his job, and Chyna frees herself and finds the imprisoned girl, Ariel. They escape together in the motor home, but encounter a sheriff — who turns out to be Vess. Just when it seems there is truly no escape, Chyna uses a cigarette lighter to ignite spilled gasoline and engulf Vess in flames. She is the knight delivering the maiden from the fire-breathing dragon.
Since Ariel’s parents are dead, Chyna gets custody. She realizes that life is about taking risks on behalf of others and making connections. In the final words of the novel: “It is the purpose for which we exist. This reckless caring.” She ditches psychology for fiction, believing there is more about human nature in the pages of novels. Out of the letters of her name, she forms the word “peace.”
“This book is an argument against the cynicism of modern times,” says Dean. “We’re told that people are essentially self-centered and that there are no heroes. I don’t believe that. I think there are heroes everywhere.”
One of the key themes in the back story of this tale is the negative impact of Freudian theory on our culture. There is a hint of this when Chyna comes into Laura’s room after Vess has been there, and sees a picture of Freud looking down upon the mayhem. His theory seems as impotent in that moment as Chyna, who has studied him in school. He cannot illuminate Vess’s behavior any more than she can stop it.
“In essence, Freud says we’re not responsible for what we do,” Dean says, “we’re formed by parents and society and culture. I came across a statement of Nabokov’s to the effect that the two great evils of the century are Freudianism and Marxism. Too true. I think Freudianism has saturated our culture and corrupted our law. [The first] two juries could not decide what to do with the Menendez brothers, for instance, because they bought into the Freudian idea that we are what we are solely because of what others have done to us. By this logic, the Menendez brothers are victims. So is Kemper. By this logic they deserve pity and rehabilitation. But they can’t be rehabilitated. No one has ever been able to rehabilitate a genuine sociopath. They are lost forever. Evil does exist. And because of Freud’s victimology theories, they are turned loose.
“The other effect of Freudian theory on society is that it encourages people to feel that they are not responsible for their actions. It’s the idea that there’s no real good and evil. That expands in people’s minds and leads to cynicism about standards of conduct. I think these are terrible influences on society. It leads to a huge decline of civility, to popular entertainment that panders without having any moral function, and to a loss of people’s ability to tell the difference.”
While that attitude seems pessimistic, Dean actually intends for it to be the starting point for readers to recognize that they are not victims of their pasts and not irrevocably shaped by the forces of childhood. “One of the reasons I wrote Intensity,” Dean says, “is to say you don’t have to be what others make you. I was always determined to get out of my situation. I was not dragged down by it. If you allow yourself to be dragged down, then the person who abused you has won.” Chyna, a victim of abuse, can rise above it and take responsibility for transforming from a self-protective coward to a self-sacrificing heroine. “Chyna isn’t going to turn out according to Freud’s expectations,” says Dean. “She’s going to make herself into a happy, productive, and heroic person. Freud’s view of the human mind is too simplistic. He sees us as machines, easily programmed, but not easily re-programmed.” The toxic bond between mother and daughter need not infect Chyna’s life choices or her sense of self. She can make life what she wants it to be rather than believing that “sooner or later in every dream there’s a boogeyman.”6
The character of Vess reveals that Dean’s understanding of evil has evolved. Even in Dark Rivers of the Heart, the psychiatrist in charge of Steven Ackblom says to Roy Miro, “… there is evil in the world. Evil that exists without cause, without rationalizations. Evil that doesn’t arise from trauma or abuse or deprivation.”7 She points out that Ackblom is sane and knows the difference between right and wrong. As a prime example of the sociopathic mind, he chooses without compulsion to do monstrous things, fully knowing they are monstrous. The psychiatrist’s condemnation of Freud and Jung, and her disillusionment with psychiatry’s need and ability to explain such human behavior, echoes Dean’s attitude.
“I wince when I look back on Whispers, in which every character is explained,” he says. “Up through Whispers, that was the way I developed bad guys. Even in Watchers, The Outsider is a created creature that didn’t ask to be born, so you can build a natural sympathy for it.
“But my understanding of evil has evolved in the sense that I’ve come to believe that evil is not wholly a product of society and culture and parental malfeasance. We all have a capacity for evil, but some of us have an absolute love of doing the wrong thing. Therefore, I’ve come around to the attitude that evil is a real force in the world. Having to support my father those fourteen years, going through hell with him when I was a child, then being up close to him again as an adult — that helped finally to push me to an anti-Freudian position.
“There is absolutely no known case of anybody rehabilitating a true sociopath. Whatever is wrong with those people may be genetic. Someday we’ll recognize certain genetic damage that’s the same in every sociopathic personality. Then some people would say, well, that’s not evil if it’s a medical condition. Yes and no. It’s an incurable medical condition — at least at this stage — and it results in tremendous human pain and suffering for the victims of these people. So on a practical level, what is the difference between that and true evil? To me, there are identifiably evil acts, and society needs to separate those from crimes of passion or circumstance and never excuse them.
“Vess believes that violence is glamorous, fun, and he is darkly compelling, because evil does have its appeal. So Chyna has to be tremendously interesting as a character, has to have triumphed against terrible odds. I wanted her to be Vess’s equivalent. I don’t want the reader to finish the book with more of an interest in Vess than in Chyna. That often happens in books like this: They celebrate the dark side, as does Vess himself. I am not that kind of writer.
“We have built a world in which we pretend that we don’t believe in evil. We claim that all human motivation is in tones of gray, no pure black and white. Yet in movies and books we are fascinated with vile characters with no redeeming qualities, like Hannibal Lecter [from Silence of the Lambs] and his ilk. We are fascinated because we know on a visceral level that these depictions of pure evil are true — and that our sophisticated pretensions to a belief in the Freudian gray are just that — pretensions. In our hearts, we know that evil walks the world.”
Another of Intensity’s background themes is the idea of the uncanny. Twice, majestic elk appear in unlikely places just when Chyna is most desperate. This seems a mystical event to her, as if they symbolize a higher power that is assuring her she will survive. She interprets the strange appearance of these animals to mean that she is not alone, and each time she regains both her physical strength and her will. The fact that she does survive against all odds suggests that the elk do indeed represent a higher power, but the issue remains — as with all symbols of the uncanny — ambiguous. The reader decides.
Dean wrote a Preface to this novel for Intensity’s Franklin Mint edition in which he discussed how he was driven to write it by outrage and by the need to understand the changing roles of evil and heroism in “a society increasingly willing; to accommodate the former out of misplaced compassion, while viewing the latter with skepticism.” He claims to have envisioned Chyna full-blown as a character who disproves, through her heroism, all theories that insist on the helplessness of the abused. She thus becomes his own alter-ego, the person who acts out what he seeks to believe: that no one need be held back by the difficulties of childhood and, conversely, that evil has no simple causal explanations.
He confirmed this in an interview with Robert Morrish: “I am very much like Chyna in Intensity — or would like to think I am. I identified so strongly with her and with her journey from an abusive childhood to a life of decency and hope, that I could literally feel her terror and exhilaration and despair as she was struggling through that story.”8
Intensity’s cover design featured a bright chartreuse and orange geometric pattern that created an almost optical illusion of movement. It was eye-catching and different from anything done previously for Dean’s books. Artist Chip Kidd designed it after reading the book and realizing that the cover art had to be bold. He used “two colors of equal value that vibrate and fight against each other.”
Because he liked the aggressive way that Knopf was packaging him, Dean agreed again to do promotional work. It was an exhausting schedule that included four Fridays of radio tours, each one involving six hours of interviews with disc jockeys and talk-show hosts from all over the country during prime-time driving hours — 135 interviews altogether. He also did book signings, newspaper interviews, and television shows. Knopf used television spots, newspaper ads, a blitz of copies to booksellers, and floor displays in bookstores to promote the novel. The strategies worked as, in its first crucial weeks, Intensity outsold Dark Rivers four to one.
The first printing was set at 525,000. Intensity debuted at number nine on the Times bestsellers list and went to number one the second week. It stayed there for three weeks and remained on the list for thirteen.
Publishers Weekly said the story raced fast enough to give readers whiplash and that it might be “the most viscerally exciting thriller of the year.” Kirkus agreed, calling the novel “a suspense masterpiece that leaves its competitors in the dust.” Some critics thought it had gratuitous violence, while Mark Harris thought it unbelievably effective and said in Entertainment Weekly, “Intensity scared me stupid.” Peter Millar in the London Times said it was a novel about catharsis and the power to do good as well as evil: “There are sound undercurrents in Koontz’s work, [and] they run very deep.” The New York Times cited the “tumbling, hallucinogenic prose,” and said, “Serious writers might do well to examine his technique.”
Film rights were sold to Mandalay Television Entertainment in association with Tri-Star Television for a four-hour miniseries to premier on the Fox network. John C. McGinley was cast as Vess and Molly Parker as Chyna. Stephen Tolkin wrote the script and Yves Simoneau was chosen as director. It was intended to come out simultaneously with Dean’s next novel, but delays forced it to air later in the year, during the first week of August. There were numerous changes to the story. For example, white wolves were substituted for the elk; a woman encountered Chyna during her pursuit of Vess and alerted police; a police officer got involved; and the ending involved a fire inside Vess’s house. However, Dean felt that the essence of the story remained. Having experienced so many disappointments, he was delighted with this film. “For the first time, filmmakers succeed in capturing the essence of what I do — the thematic cross-currents and especially the emotional content. They realized I’m not a horror writer.”
The Eyes of Darkness was reissued by Berkley in paperback that year, debuting at number seven on The New York Times list, and climbing up one more rung, to stay on the list for seven weeks. Dean had changed some of the Cold War references, but kept the story essentially the same.
In November 1996, HarperCollins issued Dean’s illustrated book, Santa’s Twin. Dean’s editor there was John Silbersack.
Dean had finished the poem he had started in Mr. Murder, in which Marty Stillwater told his daughters about Santa’s infamous brother, Bob. It seems Bob is messing up Christmas, so two girls, Emily and Charlotte, go to the North Pole to rescue Santa and restore order. Despite its overt thrust as a Christmas story, it still reveals Dean’s concerns with the toxic bond of family — how the same source can produce both good and evil, and how one brother’s badness can threaten to topple the other’s goodness. In the end, innocence and love provide the conduit for good to triumph. The prankster, Bob, changes his tune when he realizes how much what he has done would hurt his sweet mother.
“Phil Parks [the illustrator] just knocked himself out and did some of the best work he’s ever done,” says Dean. “When he puts a pen to paper, wow! My agent wanted to take it to someone who has a reputation for thinking in especially creative ways about odd properties like this, so he took it to John Silbersack.”
With a limited release of 130,000 copies, this book sold out long before Christmas. Phil Parks added the humorous twist of placing snowmen strategically in each illustration, in a “Where’s Waldo?” format. Sometimes they were obvious, sometimes hidden. He also placed a picture of Dean in the bedroom of the little girls. It was his thirteenth illustrated book with Dean, and since his work was being done on spec, Dean bought all of the original art in advance. That way, Phil was able to concentrate on the art without worrying about paying the bills.
“It was a lot different than illustrating a novel,” says Phil, “because you had to figure how many lines of verse to each page and try to pull a piece of action from each scene. I use a cinematic approach. I go over the story and then try to reel it out in my head like a film. The struggle is to bring that out on paper, getting the composition and the placement of the characters right. I had to keep it moving. If there wasn’t much action for several pages, I had to change the perspective to keep it visually interesting.”
Nearly simultaneous with Santa’s Twin was a lengthy Foreword that Dean wrote for a book of David Robinson’s cemetery photographs, titled Beautiful Death. In it, he writes about his mother’s grave, the difficult years, and his suspicion that he is not the true son of Ray Koontz. Many people back in Bedford were surprised by some of Dean’s revelations — particularly his speculation about Uncle Ray. Nancy Eckard was certain that her father-in-law had been overseas and could not have been Dean’s father. Dean continued to believe in the possibility.
1 Mystery Scene (no. 49, 1994).
2 Dean Koontz, Intensity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 36.
4 Margaret Cheney, Why: The Serial Killer in America (Saratoga, CA: R&E Publishers, 1992), xi.
5 Ibid., p. 159.
6 Intensity, p. 5.
7 Dean Koontz, Dark Rivers of the Heart (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 459.
8 Cemetery Dance, Summer 1997.