WHILE WAITING FOR SOLE SURVIVOR TO BE PUBLISHED, DEAN sent a proposal to Knopf for his next project. It was to be a three-book series that featured a repeating central character in very unusual circumstances. Sonny Mehta and Jane Freidman both expressed enthusiasm, not only about Sole Survivor, but also about Dean’s new idea. Knopf put together an impressive offer.
Even so, Dean had concerns other than money. Writing careers are supported not just by advances and royalties, but by a vision within the publishing house that includes increased print runs and advertising budgets, strategic publicity, and a ready supply of books for quick turnaround on orders. He wanted to be certain that these considerations were part of the overall plan. He still had four paperback books left on his contract with Ballantine and, thus far, his novels with them had not seemed to be supported in the marketplace as well as Berkley had supported previous titles.
In the meantime, other publishers were aware that Sole Survivor was the third of Dean’s books for Knopf and that no further deal had yet been announced. When Knopf’s option expired, several publishers made overtures to Robert Gottlieb. Dean listened to the various ideas on how his career could be enhanced and waited for Random House to assure him that something similar could happen with his Knopf/Ballantine deal. The more he heard, however, the more he realized the impact of publishing philosophies on his career. Random House seemed caught in a downbeat mood, viewing the unprecedented number of book returns throughout the industry that year as a sign of darker economic times ahead. They had even begun the practice of discounting books in place rather than pay the expense of having them returned, which annoyed authors. This attitude seemed to hang over every conversation, clashing with Dean’s desire to pursue growth and enhancement.
In addition, he felt there was no clear understanding at Knopf/Ballantine of the nature of his work or of the audience to which it appealed. He knew from experience, for instance, that half of his audience was female, but his publisher persisted in the belief that he sold largely to men.
As he pondered his situation, he decided to make a dramatic change in his personal life. He shaved his mustache and got hair implants. “I admit to vanity!” People who knew him well hardly recognized him and those who had known him in his younger days thought he looked the way he had in college. “After years of being recognized,” he says, “I’ve regained my anonymity, at least for now.” (In a newsletter to fans, he joked that the mustache removal had been performed by a crack team from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with lasers, explosives, and sandblasting equipment.)
The change proved to be fun and to revitalize his views of his future. He had come a long way and he intended to go further yet.
At the age of fifty-one, Dean had already seen six of his novels becomes number one bestsellers in hardcover and eleven in paperback. Worldwide, his book sales totaled over 175 million copies, with additional sales per year of 17 million. He had been translated into thirty-eight languages. Since 1977, when his career had become relatively stable, Putnam had published thirteen of his novels, Knopf three — and sixteen of his backlist titles had been reissued with great success, some revised and some not. It seemed time to take another leap.
On Friday, December 6, 1996, Dean decided to sell his three-book series to Bantam Books of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, owned by Bertelsmann AG. He became Bantam’s largest-selling name in fiction, and they were willing to pay him the highest advance he had ever received. Indeed, other publishers competing with Bantam had also made offers that would have been his personal best — including Putnam, who wanted him back.
Dean had responded strongly to Bantam publisher, Irwyn Applebaum, however, and it was his belief in Applebaum’s intelligence and savvy that settled him on this house, rather than any others. Bantam issued a press release quoting Dean as saying, “I have not embarked on this change for financial reasons. I have been proud to be published by Knopf and Ballantine, and I value the time I spent with everyone there, and the work they did on behalf of my books.”1 He explained that, just as in his writing, he relied on intuition as a guide in his career, and this move felt right to him. “My gut feeling was that it was time for a change.”
Publisher and president Irwyn Applebaum, delighted by this coup, told his sales force that he had just concluded a very good deal with a successful author, but he would not reveal Dean’s identity until the sales conference in Florida a few days later. The salespeople gasped in disbelief that Dean Koontz had left Knopf, but the gasp was immediately followed by resounding enthusiasm. Applebaum got a standing ovation.
It was not Dean’s first book with Bantam. Back in 1972, he had written The Flesh in the Furnace, and in 1973, Demon Seed for Bantam. But that was virtually another writer in another age. Now, as one of the bestselling writers in the world, he was corning in with an idea for a series, the sort of project he had never done before.
His move caused a lot of speculation in the publishing world. When Dean denied that his reasons were financially motivated, Publishers Weekly’s, Judy Quinn suggested that perhaps he had backed off from his professed literary aspirations. In fact, just the opposite was the case. He had liked working with everyone at Knopf, admired them, but had felt not entirely sure that his more ambitious recent work was wanted there. He was inspired again by Bantam’s intense response to the literary possibilities of his proposed series.
Dean left the media to devise their own theories, and began to concentrate on his new directions.
Sole Survivor was due out on February 6, 1997. Dean had written the entire novel based on the sense of the uncanny that he had used for his short story “Twilight of the Dawn.” Having begun years previously to layer his suspense with literary devices, he had braided several different themes together, loosely at first, and then had pulled them tightly together into a complex denouement. Each theme had its own pattern of motifs such that almost every reference and image — even seemingly insignificant ones — functioned on multiple thematic levels.
For an interview that was to appear online on the Barnes & Noble website, Dean said that the inspiration for the novel came from his extensive reading in quantum physics, chaos theory, and molecular biology. “During the past ten years,” he remarked, “quite a few nonfiction books have been written about the surprising intersection of science and faith in our time — and the debates it has sparked in the scientific community, but I’m not aware of a novel that has used this as a springboard for a story.”
The question that interested him was, if science learned something that could prove that there is life after death — how would someone react to this proof? Dean created several characters who respond in different ways. The lead character, Joe Carpenter, has the most difficulty, since he is suffering the most. He is unable to accept the existence of God unless he also gets some explanation for human pain and suffering. For Dean, while God may have a dark side, the most profound morality nevertheless is rooted in the spiritual, so each person must come to grips with the reality of suffering without losing hope. Thus, he willingly tackles the unpopular subject of God’s impact on human endeavors, seldom a subject in modern fiction, and one that risks offending some readers. He pairs faith’s sense of mystery and dread with a catalogue of suspense techniques to enhance tension and add drama.
Although we want to believe in ultimate goodness and therefore have hope, we see around us chaos and destruction, and we become anxious. The constant clash of these emotions breeds inevitable tension. It becomes difficult to entrust our lives to a benign creator. We want clarity. We rarely get it. We therefore step with uncertainty toward a spiritual dimension.
In Sole Survivor, Joe Carpenter must reconcile his bitterness and anger about the cruelty of existence with growing evidence that life has a larger purpose and meaning, a spiritual dimension. He has lost his wife, Michelle, and his two daughters, Chrissie and Nina, in the crash of a 747 so horrendous that most of the three hundred thirty passengers could not be identified. A year later, he still cannot come to grips with this tragedy. He is merely “waiting for the morning when he would fail to wake.”2 He has already quit his job as a crime reporter for the L.A. Post and lost touch with all of his friends. He feels only numbness and impotence. He cannot bring himself to believe in a God or an afterlife, so he remains psychologically safe in a universe of indifferent mechanical laws. As he sits watching the ocean — a source of both life and death — he notices only the exanimate creatures that wash ashore.
Getting Joe’s perspective was one of the most difficult Dean had ever tried. “When I started Sole Survivor,” he says, “I was foolish enough to think that writing about Joe would be easy because his terrible loss would instantly make him a sympathetic figure to the reader. But as I began to write, I realized that if I didn’t handle Joe with extreme care, he would be so bleak that no one would want to read about him. For research, I talked to many people who had lost children. What I learned from them made it easier to write about Joe — though in the process I heard stories that broke my heart. Once I got through that scene in the first chapter where Joe remembers his family’s funeral, I began to get a handle on it, but it was difficult to sustain the right tone with him throughout the book.” Dean wanted to capture the hard, abrasive quality of intense despair without slipping into the theatrical bleakness of noir fiction. “In most modern fiction, despair is portrayed so romantically that it becomes appealing. The hero becomes a brooding James Dean — like figure. That’s bad fiction. It’s hokum sentimentality. I didn’t want Joe to come off that way.”
In an early scene on a public beach, Joe encounters a young boy who exemplifies exactly that romantic nihilism that sentimentalizes alienation and despair. Joe is baffled and ultimately angered by him. His own deep anguish becomes more real to us when the author places this boy before us by way of comparison.
Joe suddenly discovers that he is under surveillance, but he cannot fathom who might be watching him, or why. That same day, he encounters a black woman taking photos of the graves of his deceased family, and she flees when the men who were watching him suddenly show up at the cemetery and go after her. Joe learns that her name is Rose Tucker and that she claims to be the sole survivor of the fatal crash, which seems to him utterly impossible. He contacts others who lost loved ones in the crash and discovers that this woman has visited each of them with photos of the graves. She claims to possess knowledge that will change everyone forever, and she seems, indeed, to have been on the fatal Flight 353. Even more alarming, soon after she leaves, each of the persons to whom she has revealed this knowledge commits suicide — and flamboyantly. When Joe witnesses three of these suicides in one terrifying five-minute period, he knows for certain that the true story of the crash of that airliner is far different from the official story. And he knows, too, that here is something that will sooner or later shatter his bleak but strangely comfortable assumptions about the meaninglessness of life.
Joe contacts Barbara Christman, the former National Transportation Safety Board official who was in charge of the crash scene investigation, and she confirms that there was much more to the catastrophe than a mere mechanical failure. The cockpit recorder revealed that one of the pilots had suffered a psychotic episode and had intentionally taken the plane into a nosedive, a piece of information that was later covered up with threats and murder. Together Joe and Barbara visit a farm near the crash scene and Joe learns that Rose had gone there directly after the crash with a little girl. Joe immediately believes this child was his daughter, Nina.
He sets out to find Rose, knowing now that agents of the government and something called Teknologik Corporation — where Rose had worked as a geneticist — are trying to silence her and conceal the truth about the crash. Joe locates Rose through her friends, and she tells him that she did indeed have a child with her that night, but the girl is in hiding, for she holds within her the evolutionary hope and spiritual fate of humankind. There are people who would rather destroy her than allow her to bring enlightenment to the world.
Joe learns that scientists at Teknologik, including Rose, were involved in genetically engineering children with paranormal abilities. Some of them were destructive and some dysfunctional, but one was a healer who could bestow on anyone she: touched a vision of the true spiritual nature of life, an intimate awareness of God and an afterlife. Rose had taken her out of the high-security labs for her protection. Now the researchers are using the powers of the most malignant child they have created to locate and destroy both Rose and this miraculous girl.
Although Joe realizes this child is not his daughter, a powerful urge within him, related to his deceased wife’s life-enhancing qualities, propels him to defy the darkness and rescue the girl. Her powers offer the hope for actualizing human potential for virtual godhood. Joe himself continues to reject her offers to heal his own soul, but finally she breaks through his defenses and changes him for the better.
As an author, Dean always uses imagery for deeper purposes than description alone. The narrative is suspended in webs of thematically linked metaphors and similes. In Sole Survivor, light — and consequently shadow — is the primary motif for the figures of speech that enhance the novel’s themes. These begin on the first page, when the grief-crippled Joe looks out a window and sees “… the ragged black shapes of evergreens and eucalyptus. To the west was a fat moon glimpsed through the trees, a silvery promise beyond the bleak urban woods.”3 The moon is the promise of hope through faith, and the urban woods are the human condition. In this figure of speech, Joe’s journey from despair to transcendence is subtly foreshadowed.
Later, as a change in weather drives Joe and Barbara out of the meadow where the plane crashed and into the woods, we read, “Down through the vaulted conifers came fluttering white wings of storm light, and again, and still more, as if the cracking sky were casting out a radiant multitude.”4 This occurs just when Joe is at the depth of his despair, having seen the very spot where his family perished — but also when he is beginning to have the hope that one of his daughters has somehow survived. He is in a storm of emotion, and the lightning is the knowledge he has acquired. The reference to fallen angels reminds us that knowledge is both a blessing and a curse — and therefore it foreshadows what will happen to Joe. While achieving transcendence, he must also accept what has happened to his family — all of this exists within one image of storm light. Within the novel there are hundreds of light images, such as fire, with an equally complex purpose.
Dean is also aware of the impressions created by names, and he often relies on archetypal figures. Joe Carpenter is Joseph the carpenter, the father of Christ, who was also a carpenter — and in the story he becomes the protector of Nina, who is a Christ-like figure. Rose Tucker alludes to the Virgin Mary: She helped to create the holy child without benefit of sexual intercourse. She also gives the child her first name, calling her Mary. Mercy Ealing, a farmer’s wife, is a central character at one of the most pivotal points of the novel, and Barbara Christman, ironically, is the real name of a woman who had won a contest wherein Koontz offered to use her name in his next novel. It fits, however, since she suffers for the truth and risks the ultimate sacrifice of her life to get significant information to Joe. Even Nina, which means “grace” in Hebrew, plays off the number nine, a mystical symbol of truth and completion.
There are numerous allusions to God, heaven, and sacred figures from mythology. Throughout the novel, Koontz plants hints of spiritual possibilities by building descriptive metaphors from such names as Stonehenge, Grendel, the moon goddess Diana, and the biblical Shadrach, Lazarus, Joshua, and Mark. On the wall at the Ealing ranch is a religious calendar featuring Andrew, Christ, and Simon Peter. Cats and dogs — significant symbols in most world mythologies — are sprinkled here and there as subliminal reminders.
When Joe regains his desire to live, and with it a sensitivity to the spiritual realms beyond mundane reality, he meets people who foreshadow what he will soon learn about life and faith. Believing that the Ealings may know about Rose Tucker, he visits their Colorado horse ranch. Mercy Ealing, whose successive miscarriages prevent her from having children, accepts her fate and finds other ways to create. As she discusses what she knows about the night of the crash, she rolls cookie dough into a ball, an image of God forming a planet. (Humorously, she even says if she knew all the answers, she would be God and she would not want that job for anything.) Despite death and disappointment, she accepts the fate God gives her, believing that a better world awaits them. She is a model of faith for Jim, who needs this interlude to regroup and prepare for a higher state of consciousness.
The titles of the four sections form a spiritual progression. “Lost Forever” captures the physical reality of Joe’s dead family and the spiritual possibility for Joe, if he fails to transcend his pain. “Searching Behavior” points out the many levels on which the novel is structured: Joe searches for meaning and hope; grieving parents (including Joe) go through a phase called “searching behavior,” in which they believe they see their child alive; the spiritual organization, Infiniface, is searching for Rose, as are the people who operate the lab from which she escaped. The third section is “Zero Point,” which is defined as the instant a child dies, because for the parents all future events are dated from that point. It serves as a metaphor of Joe’s initial spiritual condition. Finally, “Pale Fire” is the burning flame of hope within the heart of individual characters.
The paradoxical unity of seemingly opposing forces that constitute a complex concept of God occurs in a variety of images that repeat the same theme: good and evil may arise from the same source. Trying to repress, deny, or stamp out evil denies that it is part and parcel with the whole. God’s shadow is associated with death, destruction, chaos, and madness. As such, it possesses great vitality, and mirrors our own inner world, a duality of reason and irrationality, logic and paradox, order and chaos, finite and infinite. Neither pole is reducible to the other, separable, or derivative. These contrary energies operate together and provide the tension of life, along with its consequent anxiety. God’s shadow brings unspeakable suffering into human existence, yet we must accept it or risk an overidealized relationship to higher forces. Dean uses aspects of nature, color, setting, and weather to remind us how closely associated are the manifestations of light and dark. An oleander bush, for example, is described as beautiful, but it is also highly poisonous.
The juxtaposition in many descriptions of the mundane and the mythical, the ordinary and extraordinary, indicates a desire to impress readers with the close association of our day-to-day life with the sacred dimensions. Dean subtly suggests that the supernatural intrudes on the natural world, for example, in his description of a meadow as a monastery, or a stream of almost mystical light coming through a high window in the men’s lavatory.
Sole Survivor also features guardian figures, as in other Koontz novels, and they have an even greater mythological quality this time. He develops an organization of intelligent people, Infiniface, who are profoundly interested in the interface between scientific discoveries and spirituality — one of his own passions — and who provide safe passage for Joe and Rose. They stand in awe of Rose, who they believe has broken important ground in the scientific search for spiritual answers. Like Dean, they believe that the ultimate purpose of human intelligence is to seek knowledge, understand the workings of the universe, and become God’s equals.
Rose herself is a guardian to the child first given a number for a name, later called Nina. The genetically engineered boy, whom we know only by his lab number, is a child without a guardian, treated only as a military “asset,” and he becomes fiercely destructive. His goal one day is to destroy everyone. He is evil incarnate. However, Nina gains a protector in Rose and is thus able to reach her full glorious potential.
Rose is just one of the nurturing females in the novel. There is also Barbara Christman, Mercy Ealing, Joe’s mother-in-law, and the child herself. All extend protection and offer guidance. When Joe moves toward them, he experiences inner peace. As his fate merges with Nina’s, Joe becomes more resilient and more amenable to the complexities of the human condition.
In some of Koontz’s earlier writing, the human experience is more clearly separated into good and evil, light and dark, and the myth he observes is that which urges us to defeat darkness and move toward the light. As he matures as a writer, however, while he still cautions that evil is a real force in the world, he recognizes that the soul is too complex to divide into neat categories. In Sole Survivor, with Joe’s experience of the impact of doubt and faith, anger and healing, the author offers a dramatic means whereby readers may consider their own inner chaos and the idea that within the ultimate mystery of the universe some benign deity may reside that offers possibilities.
When Tim Hely Hutchinson of Headline in London read the manuscript, he immediately faxed Dean a note in which he expressed his enthusiasm: “The central vision is broader, deeper, and brighter than ever.”
Knopf’s initial printing was 400,000 copies, with an immediate demand for four more printings of 10,000 apiece. In its first week, Sole Survivor debuted at number one on The Wall Street Journal’s list, number two for hardcover fiction in USA Today and The Washington Post, behind Patricia Cornwell’s Hornet’s Nest, number three for The L.A. Times and Publishers Weekly, and in fourth position on The New York Times Book Review list. The next week, it went to number one on both the Times and Publishers Weekly list, and remained there for yet another week until John Grisham’s The Partner supplanted it. It stayed on the list for ten weeks. Knopf reported that early sales were better than they had been for Intensity. Dean did a round of bookstore signings in California and agreed to another grueling schedule of drive-time radio shows, even as he finished up the revision of Demon Seed for Berkley — all this while he continued working on his first novel for Bantam.
To Dean’s surprise — since he had felt sure a novel with such a spiritual theme would fare badly among critics — he received outstanding reviews. Kirkus called Sole Survivor “masterfully styled, serious entertainment,” and indicated that these were Dean’s “great years.” Similarly, The London Times was impressed with the spirituality: “This is a book to keep you awake reading long into the night, but for once not afraid to turn out the light.” The Atlanta Constitution rated the novel as “among Koontz’s best … taut plotting, stark terror, and sweet redemption.” Booklist, too, said that Koontz “has never done it better,” although Publishers Weekly wished for the return of the quicker pace of Intensity. In The New York Times, Charles Salzberg thought the descriptions were unnecessarily flowery, but said it was nevertheless an exciting story. In the Hamilton Ontario Spectator, the reviewer called it a “well written piece of literature that exploits our despair over the human condition, but repays the reader with a profound sense of hope.” Among other descriptions were “taut,” “riveting,” “richly imagined and vital,” “daring,” and “impossible to put down.” The author was even compared to John Milton in theme and technique, and many critics noted his increasingly literary style and his surprising avoidance of cliché.
In March, Ticktock was published in the United States. It had already been released in hardcover nine months earlier in England, to critical acclaim, and Ballantine was publishing it as a paperback original, one of the seven novels they had bought as part of the Random House contract. It jumped to number four on Publishers Weekly list and number seven on The New York Times, rising as high as number two during its two-month stint.
Dedicated to Gerda, “with the promise of a Scootie of our own,” the novel ostensibly begins as a horror story, then rolls into a screwball comedy that exhibits more clearly than any novel to date Dean’s absurdist sense of humor. In an Afterword, Dean explains that the screwball comedy has strict requirements: a smart male who is confused by the other eccentric characters; an appealing but flighty female who is not as dumb as she seems; the female lead’s strange family; dialogue that puts characters at cross-purposes; chaotic plot twists; and “if possible, there ought to be a dog.”5
He had begun writing Ticktock after Dark Rivers of the Heart in order to get some relief from the darkness of that previous story, but had found the book lacking in some way he could not define, so he had written Intensity instead. When he returned to Ticktock, he was ready for it.
He decided to make his male protagonist a member of a minority group. “There are so many people out there who never get written about,” he explains. “There are writers who never tackle interesting viewpoints, like Thomas in The Bad Place or Woofer in Dragon Tears. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Vietnamese-American as a lead character in popular contemporary fiction.” Dean had found most of the Vietnamese-Americans that he had met to be charming, industrious, and intelligent. They often thanked him for his positive portrayal of them in his books. He appreciated the fact that many of them had endured enormous pressures to adapt to a new homeland, which generated tensions in the home. Dean felt he had learned enough about his contact with this culture to write from the perspective of an Americanized young man who resists becoming a prisoner of his ethnic identity.
Tommy Phan, a Vietnamese-American journalist and crime novelist, wants to free himself from the expectations of his family. He struggles with guilt, but needs his own identity. His very traditional mother dismisses his desire for personal freedom and wants to bring him back into the fold. One day, Tommy finds a rag doll on his porch and he takes it inside. It proves to be no ordinary doll, as he soon discovers, when it takes on a destructive life of its own and leads him on a wild chase through his house. The doll grows larger and appears to be indestructible, so Tommy flees the house. This brings him into contact with a waitress named Deliverance Payne — Del — who exudes mystery, courage, wit, and resilience. Del takes Tommy home, where she introduces him to her unusual Labrador retriever, Scootie. The ever-transforming rag doll — now the size of a man — locates them, and the chase is on, with much destruction in its wake. Stealing a Ferrari, Del takes Tommy to meet her mother, a woman who never sleeps, who answers to any of five names, and who somehow manages to listen to live Big Band performances on what she calls a “transtemporal radio.”
The demon-doll is still after them, so they flee again. Tommy discovers that his mother is somehow implicated. He and Del go to her, and she takes them to an eccentric friend, her hairdresser, who had devised the doll as a way to scare Tommy back into the arms of his family. The demon just got a little out of hand! When all is finally resolved and the demon is dispatched, Del asks Tommy to marry her. He agrees, and she lets him in on her secret: She is a “star child,” the result of a union between her mother and an intelligent and gifted alien race. Tommy’s mother accepts her, with some reservations, and the stage may be set for more adventures.
Although Dean did not believe he would write a book quite like this again, early readers of the manuscript urged him to consider a sequel or even a series. He was gratified by the enthusiastic response — over two thousand fan letters within the first month of publication — and decided to give that some thought.
Ticktock takes a new and different path into the theme of family. Although Tommy initially resists his family’s proprietary embrace, he finds that he needs them. Solidarity diminishes the threat, but only with balance: Family members need to respect tradition as embodied in Tommy’s mother and brothers, but remain open to individual possibilities, such as those that Del represents. Tommy also discovers that while family life may appear to be chaotic or pose a threat to individuality, within the chaos can be a source of wholeness and healing. Standing too much on one’s own without the resources of others can make one vulnerable. Assimilation into another culture has its own demands on the soul.
The issue of family versus the individual runs parallel to the theme of rationality versus folklore. Both are dimensions of reality, while each by itself is incomplete. Tommy cannot accept himself until he embraces all aspects of who he is. Spurning his racial identity, he seeks to be an idealized American — not unlike the detective hero of the novels he writes — but this is a person he can never be. The tools that are distinctly American — guns, fists, rationality — fail Tommy in his struggle with the demon doll. He must resort to the magic and folklore of his people.
The primary theme is that of creating one’s own destiny. Dean includes two poems from The Book of Counted Sorrows to emphasize this idea — that freedom is key to human identity. Action, not reaction, is the source of solutions.
Dean personally edited the audiotape abridgement of this book for Random House. He had already written an abridged script for Icebound and had realized that, for some books, cuts in the right places could be achieved to retain the integrity of the story for a different format. But he wanted to be the one to make that judgment. “It’s an interesting thing to do,” he remarks. “It made me look at my work in a totally different way, as theater rather than as a novel. It made me think about how I approach things, but I don’t think I’d do it a third time.”
Dean liked Mandalay’s production of Intensity so much that he sold Sole Survivor to them for the same treatment, without marketing it elsewhere.
In the autumn of 1997, Miramax/Dimension released their feature film of Phantoms, directed by Joe Chappelle, with a script written by Dean. Starring Peter O’Toole as Timothy Flyte, it also featured Joanna Going, Rose McGowan, Liev Schrieber, and Ben Affleck.
Peter O’Toole was pleased with the part. Even before accepting the role, he had called Dean to express his enthusiasm, saying his thirteen-year-old son has asked him when he was going to appear in a movie that someone his own age would want to see. “I think I’ve got one now,” he laughed. He predicated his deal on the promise, by Miramax, that not one word of Dean’s script would be changed in his scenes.
“It’s amazing to have a film shot from a script that I wrote and feel works,” Dean says. “And to have such a fine actor in it.”
While immersed in the promotion for Sole Survivor, Dean revised his 1973 science fiction novel, Demon Seed. His intention was to update the computer technology, but he had changed the story significantly before he was done. Reading the novel he had written more than two decades earlier, he cringed: “I was so appalled when I reread it. The thing was written so fast. All the elements were there, but now I have the skills to realize the concept in a way that I couldn’t previously.” In the intervening years, technology had caught up with science fiction and he was able to change the settings from the far future to the present day.
Demon Seed is still about a computer wanting to remake itself into a sensate being by impregnating a woman, but her character has shifted and deepened, and the computer’s sociopathic nature is now more manifest. The computer, Proteus, embodies a proprietary male attitude of domination and control, even as it claims to have no violent intentions, and insists it would never treat its beloved as mere property. It is male because it is the brainchild of a man — Susan Harris’s husband — who had also tried to control her.
Susan’s trouble with males goes back to her childhood, where out of fear for her life she had submitted sexually to her father. In order to purge herself as an adult, she has invented a virtual reality program called “Therapy” in which she has programmed various scenarios, including the one she feared most but that never came to pass — her murder at her father’s hands.
Proteus talks about Susan in ways reminiscent of nineties-style cybersex, and his descriptions of his motives soon reveal how self-deceived he is. “I loved the computer’s voice,” Dean says. “He was so scary yet so pathetic.” Proteus’s fantasies about Susan are so clearly linked to what her father had done to her that it seems as if she has created him from within her own fears. She has given the home computer that controls the house her father’s name, and it is through this computer that Proteus has managed to gain entrance. His planned imprisonment and rape (through a very imaginative surrogate) and her virtual reality sessions coincide almost too well.
Susan has programmed her virtual image therapy to run as almost a psychological Russian roulette. It arbitrarily draws her, one scenario at a time, into envisioning and feeling what her father might have done — which Dean has described as being the real terror of a sociopath: the random and unpredictable assault. In fact, Susan’s self-created and self-initiated therapy seems to function as Dean’s novels have done for him: Afraid as a child that his father might kill him and his mother, he creates increasingly dangerous interactions between his villains and his heroes, as if vicariously to experience — in the virtual reality frame of fiction — the struggle, the fear, and the eventual triumph.
Susan endures violence and the threat of violence, but in this version of the novel, she is her own rescuer rather than being rescued by outside agents. She allows herself to go into her deepest fear, survives it, and by gaining strength from it, is able to overcome her tormentor. “Now I’ve experienced the worst my father could ever have done to me,” she explains. “He’s killed me in VR, and he can’t do anything worse than that, so I’ll never be afraid of him again.”6 In the end, she wins by virtue of her own inner strength.
Dean was pleased with the way the novel turned out. “It’s given me the idea that some of the books I thought I’d never revise might be revisable. What carries the story is the narrative voice of the computer and ironic tone. The way to revisit some of my earliest books, I think, is to recast them in unusual points of view.”
For a book edited by Richard Chizmar, called Screamplays, Dean wrote a Foreword entitled “Great Art and Muppet Hatred.” The contents of the book are screenplays once written by some of today’s horror novelists. In the essay, Dean talks about his own experiences writing in this format, and how different it is from writing a novel. He also tells of his misadventure with a “genius” film director and his evolving caution toward Hollywood.
Dean’s next project would be to finish his first novel in the series he would deliver to Bantam. Fear Nothing and the two books to follow it would feature the same characters, Christopher Snow and his dog. As with all of this author’s novels, these three would concern the triumph of individuals over difficult odds, transforming the injustices of life into blessings. Friends, as community and extended family, would play a large role, and through tales of suspense, the virtues of persistence and commitment would be affirmed.
1 “Dean Koontz’s Move,” The New York Times (December 10, 1996).
2 Dean Koontz, Sole Survivor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 3.
3 Ibid., p. 3.
4 Ibid., p. 168.
5 Dean Koontz, Ticktock (New York: Ballantine, 1997), p. 310.
6 Dean Koontz, Demon Seed, revised (New York: Berkley, 1997), p. 290.