Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.
— John Gardner
IN A BIOGRAPHY SUCH AS THIS, IN WHICH PSYCHOLOGICAL PAT-terns are grounded in the work — and vice versa — it needs to be stated that discussing the inner world of the writer is not about reducing that person’s work to basic psychological elements. It means merely that there are interesting parallels to be found between life and fiction when an imagination is as rich as that of Dean Koontz. The patterns are there, but the way the biographer interprets them is often highly personal. Patterns that stand out to one person may do so every bit as much because of who that person is as because of who the subject is.
Dean spent his childhood in a home where tension and uncertainty reigned. The chaos alarmed him. Only his mother’s attention and good humor reassured him. When he was four, he found a warm, stable place, where reading and family gave him the feeling of acceptance, warmth, and security. It was a magical place that became part of his memories, side by side with the chaos. Both the safety of stability and the frightening unpredictability of disorder were absorbed by him through sustained exposure, and it seems that he has spent his life recreating this safe place, but has done it, paradoxically, by also recreating chaos.
In part, his father’s moods frightened him — but also gave him the motivation to explore his own mind and talent. Ray’s dysfunctional modeling, and perhaps his genetic legacy, seems to have provided Dean with access to his own diverse mental threads, so that what was madness in one became creativity in the other. Studies on creativity and schizophrenia have shown an interesting link: Both display the richness and versatility of the human mind, and both involve an imaginative world where metaphor gains supremacy — they add something to the way the world is, to make it more tolerable. The essential difference is that the creative person can direct his mental processes to become productive, while the mentally ill person tends to become disoriented and potentially destructive.
Dean’s writing is filled with images of chaos — aliens, madness, drugs, hybrids, mindless violence, entropy, renegade organizations, and deranged deities — so that he could use his best skills to impose order and transform them. He has repeatedly tested his inner power to purify corruption and turn chaos into stability by writing increasingly ambitious books and by diving ever more deeply into his complex layers. He also has kept his professional life in flux by taking on not only the uncertainties of freelance writing, but numerous projects simultaneously. He puts himself under constant pressure to live with and defeat the chaos by challenging himself to keep it all organized and deliver it according to a plan — with ever the threat that he might not manage. Control has been firm, but still has an underlying fragility that drives him to seek greater mastery. Yet he has managed to retain the stability needed to ensure that the chaos remains an instrument of creativity. And for that, he draws on the strength of his mother and of those people who sought to help him on his way.
In her book The Transcendent Child, psychologist Lilian Rubin describes the sort of person who can survive the difficulties of such a family. Dean’s life shows many parallels to her examples: He was the child who distanced himself from aspects of his family and insisted that he would be different. He would not be victimized. He was able to leave it behind and to gravitate to people who acted as guardians or surrogate parents — teachers, friends, business associates, and his wife, Gerda. From them, he learned about the possibilities of another type of life, and from feelings of marginaliry, he developed a vision for himself that helped him confront his fears and seek mastery over them. He learned to be vigilant toward challenges to his vision and to reinvent himself in whatever way was necessary to achieve what he set out to do.
Thus, those inner parts of himself that potentially conflict have been held together in a dynamic tension that fuels his drive and motivates his continuous production of stories. Parallel to the content of his novels, the actual writing of them has been essential to reconciling his body memories. Although he has feared his father’s influence, he has sensed that as long as he affirms the ability to turn his destiny in the way he desires, control and sanity will triumph. Over and over he asserts his own will. He avoids situations that might give some unknown agent control over his life, and wherever possible, keeps signposts of stability always at hand — a solid marriage, an organized office, reliable personnel, a steady supply of ideas, an ambitious reading program. This kind of anchoring allows him to venture ever further into the dark realms of his imagination.
Where such unrelenting challenge might defeat someone else, it works for him, in part because he generalizes these same conflicts to society at large. Ever alert to how social agencies that are set up to protect us are also in a position to inflict harm, Dean has used his books to develop in readers a broad social conscience. In the same way that he armed himself with knowledge about his father’s abnormal condition, he urges people to defend themselves against the inherent dangers of encroaching social and political institutions that have lost their moral code. In this way, he is a writer who finds ways to ensure not only his own health and safety, but that of others around him.
His numerous transforming encounters with “guardians” along the way have helped him to focus his vision and maintain his belief in the essential goodness of humankind. To him, they are like people giving water to the long-distance runner who must constantly strive to break his own record. Through different guises of chaos and insanity, he persists with the message that such forces must not be allowed to reign, and he ensures that his characters form bonds that provide purpose and peace. A family remade out of kindred souls is his primary symbol of refuge and redemption. A new birth within such a family symbolizes a fresh start and the hope for a better life.
Yet the end point for Dean is not mere victory over chaos, or even self-protection. It is more ambitious than that. He must redeem the madness — purify it of its destructive elements and imbue it with purpose. Via his own humanity, he seeks to make the devil into God. He wants to transubstantiate dark forces into something positive, to make the space of manhood that his father had vilified into something secure and even sacred. Rather than move toward the feminine where it feels safe, he brings the feminine into the masculine by making his female characters strong, resilient, and credible. That way, he develops a sense of manhood without having to associate it with the tainted masculinity of his father. He also creates a world of equals wherein anyone, male or female, can — and should — look to their own resources to make life on this planet a better place for everyone.
If he were to leave one thing behind, it would be a positive message: to defy all forces that make people victims and affirm those that inspire initiative and responsibility. “I want to say to the reader,” Koontz states, “‘Take my hand. We’re going to go through this terrible place, and things will happen that are too horrifying to think about, but it’s going to be all right at the other end. There’s going to be meaning and a purpose to this. Trust me.”