WHEN THE SCHOOL YEAR CONCLUDED IN SAXTON, DEAN AND Gerda moved out. “In fact, we left the very day that my obligations were over,” Dean says. He had taken another job in a regular school system in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, teaching high school English. He had had enough of the politics of welfare.
Mechanicsburg was about one hundred miles from Bedford, just down the turnpike near Harrisburg. Dominated by a military facility, which was also the primary employer, the town was quite conservative. Although Dean had lost much of his liberal idealism, he was not ready to respond to anyone who might try to curb his belief in personal freedom.
In his 1974 novel, After the Last Race, Dean described what it was like to try to find a place to live there: “Although this part of Pennsylvania was one of the fastest-growing regions in the East, the rental situation was abysmal. Generally the only things available were garden apartments in look-alike complexes where the walls between neighbors were too thin to stop more than a whisper. The houses for rent were either tumble-down bargains or cramped little ranch homes squeezed into the postage-stamp lots in neighborhoods that might have been pressed whole out of plastic.”1 They were to live in this area for eight years, and Dean would set several novels here.
They found an apartment in Lemoyne, a suburb of the state capital. Although his $4,800 salary was a step up from what he had been paid in Saxton, Dean knew they would barely squeeze by. They had enough money saved to allow him to spend the summer writing, but Gerda went job hunting and soon found work overseeing accounts at a credit bureau. “It was an education,” she says, “seeing how people deal with credit. Some people played games just to see what they could get, even though they could pay their bills.”
They talked about starting a family, but knew they must put it off until they were financially stable. “When we first got married,” Gerda explains, “we thought we would have children, but we wanted to wait until we could afford a house.”
One of their favorite activities was reading. During the early years of their marriage, they kept track of the titles, week by week, and by the end of the year, counted them up. “We were such heavy readers,” says Dean. “Each of us would read between two and three hundred books a year. At the end of the year, it was kind of fun to look back and see what we had read.” They did not own a television until Dean’s parents, who could not believe they did not want one, bought a used set for them.
“We were upset,” Dean claims. “We didn’t want it. We almost never turned it on.” They preferred spending all their time and money on books.
Sometimes they shared books, but Gerda preferred mysteries and suspense. “She loathed science fiction,” says Dean. “I got her to read certain terrific science fiction books and she admitted to liking them, but she never could get into science fiction. She was always wishing I would write something else. She would say, ‘You could write a lot of stuff better than this,’ and I would say, ‘This genre is as good as anything.’ Which I still believe.”
Dean spent the summer writing a novel called Star Quest. He had sold more stories, but thus far had had a difficult time getting his novels considered for publication. He prepared himself primarily by reading other novels. “I’d read literally two thousand books. I’d been reading assiduously since I was ten or eleven. I had wiped out everything in the library. I just read, read, read. I was saturated in fiction — which was quite a preparation in itself. Other than that, I think I’d read James Blish’s criticism of the science fiction genre, The Issue at Hand.”
Dean did have one more story published that year in a men’s magazine, Mr., called “Love 2005.” It was not what he wanted to write, but it was money. “I was looking around at what markets I could write for,” he explains. “I was following the Harlan Ellison mode. I’d read all about his early career and how he could pay the rent with the stories he wrote for men’s magazines, so I did one and they bought it.” He found, however, that the editor did extensive revising, “which is one reason I did fewer short stories than most other writers. I got sick of turning in a story and finding it altered when it was published.”
As the fall semester opened toward the end of 1967, Dean found the experience of teaching at Mechanicsburg to be just as taxing as it had been at Saxton, but for different reasons. One of the first things he heard was that a longtime teacher had been called on the carpet for teaching a children’s book to high school students. That book turned about to be Orwell’s classic Animal Farm, with which the principal was completely unfamiliar. Dean could not quite believe this.
He also discovered, to his chagrin, that the administration was more concerned about keeping the kids quiet and in their classrooms than about the quality of education. They claimed they had little time to read, yet they dictated the curriculum. Dean enjoyed the students, but he disliked his contacts with the administration. Whenever he deviated, he was called to task for it. They did not like his reading lists or the way he failed to devote the proper amount of time to classics like Silas Marner that other ninth grade classes were reading. “We would get through Silas Marner in one-third the time allotted — and then read things that were fun to read.”
“I was always in trouble with the administration,” Dean admits. “They were always after me to get my hair cut, and I did not have long hair. It went over the collar a little, but that was considered unforgivable.”
Dean just gritted his teeth and did the best he could.
In 1968, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy just a few months before Martin Luther King Jr. fell to another assassin’s bullet. The Democratic Party convention in Chicago saw antiwar riots, and the arrest of the Chicago Seven. Nixon, who promised an end to the war, was elected president, and an unmanned flight to the moon proved successful. Hair, with its nudity and vulgar language, rocked the theater world, and 2001 invited audiences to contemplate space in a whole new way. Many kids watched it while dropping LSD. Mickey Mouse had his fortieth birthday.
After a year in Lemoyne, Dean and Gerda moved to a two-story garden apartment in Colonial Park, situated in a complex called Colonial Crest. It was a step up, they thought, and they stayed there for several years. Their collection of books numbered around five thousand.
That summer after his first year of teaching, Dean decided to let his hair grow long. During college, in spite of changes in fashion all around him, the pressure to get a good job had forced him to keep it short. Now, with no one to tell him he could not, he decided to adopt a look more in keeping with other people his age. Unfortunately, when his mother visited and saw him, she believed that he had become a hippie and would quit his job. “She was very upset about it,” Gerda remembers. “She worried excessively about what he was doing.” Florence had read some of Dean’s poetry and knew of his dream to become a writer, but she hoped he would forget it and keep a responsible job. More than anything, she feared that he would end up destitute. There was nothing Dean could say to reassure her. She continued to worry, so when it was time to return to school, she was happy when Dean cut his hair and looked responsible again.
At the start of the semester, Dean prepared a list of four hundred books that he recommended to students for book reports. Six of their reports had to be on books required by the school, while three could be of anything on the list. The books they would analyze in class would be chosen by majority rule, but the minority would be able to make some other arrangement with him. He had included a few controversial books like Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and one-fourth of his list was science fiction that he himself had loved. Among them were Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Martian Chronicles; several Lovecraft collections; Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels; Heinlein’s The Star Beast and Beyond This Horizon; and works by Frederik Pohl, Jack Williamson, and other authors of science fiction classics. Dean also included his own first novel, bought by editor Donald Wollheim and published that year.
Dean’s novel was called Star Quest, and it was part of an Ace Double, two short novels published back-to-back as a single package. The second book was Doom of the Green Planet by Emil Petaja. Dean expected to receive $1,250 for it, but Wollheim told him that the other author’s contribution was longer and they had to pay him a greater share of the $2,500 advance. Dean received only $1,000, but he was happy to have it. Years later, he met the other author at a convention and learned that Petaja had been told the same thing, which meant that Ace Books apparently had pocketed the extra $500.
Star Quest takes up a theme that would reverberate throughout many of Dean’s later novels. Living in a culture of political duplicity, wherein covert and morally hypocritical actions of the government were being exposed and denounced, Dean used the story to indicate how one end of the political spectrum mirrored the other. Democrat or Republican, they had the same agenda of manipulating the masses toward their own selfish ends. Although Dean had liberal leanings — diminished somewhat by his experience in Saxton — he sensed that politics in general were prone to corruption. Where power was concerned, those who wielded it were more likely to be malignant than benign. His novel mirrored what he believed was true of society at that time.
In Star Quest, the universe in the twenty-ninth century has been ravaged by eight hundred years of warfare between two races, both of whom enslave members of races caught in the middle. One such person, Thom, is transformed into a war machine. When a brainwashing drug wears off, he enters a floating library (a symbol from Dean’s childhood of refuge, enhancement, and possibility). The library, managed by the disembodied brain of a former teacher, prepares Thom with a metaphysical history: in their war-torn world, the Fringe is a barrier of quasi-reahty between alternate universes, and races mutated by radiation who possess psionic talents want to exploit this barrier to rid their world of its warring factions. Thom joins with a “Mutie” named Hunk, who is only a head. Hunk takes Thom back to his people. The Muties realize that their best plan is to use their paranormal mental powers to encompass the parts of the universe they want to preserve, and then move everything except the warring factions into a neighboring universe. In other words, they will cut out the cancer and leave it behind.
In this novel, religion, politics, and family issues become entwined. They share the hypocrisy, deceptiveness, and cruelty that Dean finds intolerable. Whenever he rails against one or another of them, his anger seems directed at all three. He is especially enraged at those forces charged with protecting weaker beings that wantonly betray them.
The Muties are fighting hypocrisy. Nuclear war made them what they are, but those who used the weapons feel no responsibility for the Muties’ plight, and in fact vilify them. “It is an old trait in men,” says one of the Muties. “I think it is an attempt to salve their consciences for the wrong acts that caused us. If they pretend we are evil, attribute to us a relationship with the devil or with the enemy, killing us makes sense. And when they have murdered all of us, they will no longer have to face the mistake they made.”2
This is a statement against corrupt politics and the need of politicians at that time to label the nondemocratic world monolithically communist and indisputably evil. It also reflects Dean’s feelings about his father. Ray was the cancer that should be left behind. Because of him, the family had been unable to attain things held up as normal, so Dean created a world that valued abnormality and recognized its richness. “You gain something when you lose normality. Nature … smashes you about in drunken folly … and then presents you with many talents.”3 It was interesting for him to think of the Muties as “the new mythology for this world.”4 As he had been drilled in college English courses, he offered a Freudian framework, identifying the id, ego, and superego as components of this fictional world, and designating the ego as that which builds character.
One Mutie, Seer, is driven insane when he sees God. The creator, he says, is something so horrible, with so many facets of terror, that Seer cannot bear the vision. God is an indescribable demon. This indicates that Dean had moved away from his interest in Catholicism toward an antagonism against a seemingly imperfect — even sadistic — creator of a chaotic and hurtful world. Some of his future novels would carry these attacks even further.
As it turned out, this novel was — among others — one of the books that got Dean into trouble with the school administration.
The principle asked to see him one day during his free period. Unsure what it could be about, Dean went to his office. “The curriculum coordinator, the principal, the assistant principal, and the superintendent of schools were there,” Dean recalls. “The curriculum coordinator had a dufflebag, and he dumped the contents on the table. Out of it poured all these paperback books that were on my extra-credit reading list.”
The man eyed him and said, “Are you really allowing your students to read this book?” He held up a copy, which pictured a woman with her shoulder bared.
Dean shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, that’s on my list.”
“You’re going to allow them to read a book with all this sex in it?”
“There’s no sex in this book,” Dean insisted.
The man was not dissuaded. “I can see the cover, mister!”
Dean was astounded. Here was an educator, judging a book by its cover! Then the official went through the other books and made comments on why each was unacceptable. Yet no one in the room had read any of them.
The principal told Dean that the parents of one of his students had complained about Star Quest. Dean pressed for details and the principal said that the part where a childlike character sucks on the breast of a woman — not in a sexual sense, but for comfort — was obscene. He insisted that Dean remove this novel from his reading list. Dean declined to do so.
Then they got into the issue of how little time he spent on the classics. Every other ninth grade class spent six weeks on Silas Marner, while Dean covered it in two weeks.
“I didn’t want to spend so much time teaching Silas Marner,” Dean insists. “I said to them, this is mainly a famous work because it was the first long-form story of this type, but that doesn’t mean it’s a wonderful story or that it resonates with kids this age. Besides, it can be taught in a week. Why drag it out?”
No one was satisfied with his defense.
“I eventually got the feeling they were trying to drive me out,” Dean admits, “but it was partly because I wouldn’t do certain things. For example, this was the time when miniskirts were getting popular, so we were called to a faculty meeting after school, in which we were told that, first thing in the morning, we were to look at each girl as she came in and judge whether her skirt was too short. If so, then we had to make her kneel and then take a ruler and measure how far from the floor her skirt hung. If it was more than an inch and a half, it was too short. I thought this was an outrageous misuse of my time — and there were hundreds of similar onerous tasks. The principal had all these rules that had nothing to do with educating kids, and gradually I came to loathe the educational system.”
Shortly thereafter, the curriculum coordinator approached Dean about the fact that the classics were underrepresented on his extra-credit reading list, constituting only about twenty-five percent of the total. Dean again refused to change his list. To his delight, the students had chosen Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land for classroom discussion and it was going very well. He did not wish to interrupt this. Then a parent called him and said that Heinlein espoused communist and antireligious principles in the novel and she was not going to allow her son to finish it. Dean felt frustrated.
Soon the administration caught word of this complaint, and when Dean once again maneuvered to prevent them from undermining his classroom authority, certain members took turns sitting in on his class so as to catch him in the act of teaching some forbidden word or idea. It was an intimidation tactic and it made the students wonder what was going on.
Back at home, Dean told Gerda that he could hardly bear to go into the classroom anymore. Yet there were so few teaching jobs available, especially in the middle of the year. He was making a little money now from the sale of his stories, and Wollheim had purchased two more novels. Maybe his luck with that would continue. He wanted to write, God, how he wanted to just write!
The following year saw four more stories in print: “A Darkness in My Soul” in Fantastic Stories, “Dreambird” in Worlds of If, and “The Psychedelic Children” and “The Twelfth Bed” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Dean would later include three of these in his 1970 collection, Soft Come the Dragons.
“A Darkness in My Soul,” which is about a man exploring the convoluted mind of God, became one of Dean’s next novels. Similarly, “Dreambird” was intended for longer form. Dean got it under contract as a novel, but never wrote it. It is about what happens to a man who is searching for the Pheasant of Dreams — an animal with ESP that can telepathically read anyone’s wildest fantasies and transmit them to him as real events.
Dean thought “The Twelfth Bed” had mainstream commercial potential. It features elderly people struggling to ward off blows to their dignity by a society that has no more use for them. He sent it to magazines like Esquire and Playboy, but every editor rejected it as being too depressing or antihuman. One person even called it obscene. Only Ed Ferman saw that it was “charged with hope,” and he bought it.
Dean’s other story, “The Psychedelic Children,” takes aim at hippies who took drugs and selfishly endangered the lives of their unborn children.
While he tried to defy the school administration and teach his courses, Gerda moved on to do office work at A.B. Dick, a copying company. She also decided to attend the local college, University Center. Her family could never offer support for higher education, and now with Dean’s encouragement, she went part-time. Most of her courses were in psychology, which interested her, but she felt stifled by the experience. “The professors did not want to know what the students thought,” she complains. “They wanted their own views parroted back to them.”
“She came home from a political science course,” Dean recalls, “and said that people have to go through college when they’re young and gullible. She couldn’t stand listening to teachers who were selling their own political agendas.” Dean understood this. He had been affected only by those professors who were knowledgeable, passionate, and able to teach without bias.
He also knew what it meant to be pressured to abide by rules that he found confining. He was having similar troubles. Then one day, he attended a retirement party for one of his colleagues. It was a small gathering, with cake and punch, and someone had taken up a collection to purchase a gift. As this man’s working life wound down to its end, he opened the package to find a white shirt and tie. Dean was disturbed to think that this man’s colleagues knew so little about him — or cared so little about getting a truly personal gift. Was this all the man’s contribution amounted to: a shirt and tie at the end of his long tenure? And what need did he have of that anyway?
The party forced Dean to take stock. Was this all he might aspire to? Is this how it would end for him four decades hence? It seemed abysmal, impossible, particularly in light of how much he struggled with the administration. He could not imagine years of this. His teaching career thus far had been inordinately stressful. What did he have to look forward to? Dean came home and expressed his despair to Gerda. He wanted to be a writer but things were so uncertain. He had sold three novels, the combined advances for which did not quite match his teaching salary. There was no certainty about when he would sell another, and short stories paid almost nothing.
“I was at the point in Mechanicsburg of being ready to bash my head into the wall,” he says. “It didn’t seem worth trying to educate anyone anymore.”
Gerda had learned a lot about strength and determination in her difficult years at home. She had worked hard to earn money, she had made her own clothes, and she had found time to be involved in school activities. There were ways to get through this. She reminded Dean that at least he was selling his writing, and pointed out that the educational system was declining anyway. The public schools appeared to be in serious trouble. In the long term, teaching might prove to be a shaky career. Resourceful and familiar with commitment, Gerda estimated that between what she made and what Dean might manage to bring in, they could pay the bills. They lived cheaply and could adjust to even more spartan conditions if need be. She made him a momentous offer: She would work and be his sole support for five years while he tried to make it as a writer.
“If you can’t make it in five years,” she said, “you’ll never make it.”
Dean jumped at this opportunity. It was January, the start of the second semester, but he handed in his notice of resignation.
Now he was liberated from employer harassment and free to pursue his dream. He would give it everything he had. He had no intention, however, of living the chaotic life that his father had pursued. To his mind, he was nothing like his father and he would prove it.
This decision meant putting off again the idea of starting a family. It was going to be tight for a while, maybe for years, but he and Gerda both wanted to see what would happen if Dean put his full efforts into writing. They were partners.
Even as Dean struggled with the school district, another concern weighed heavily. Late in 1968, his mother had suffered a serious stroke and was rushed to the hospital. Not long afterward came a second stroke that began to affect her mind and ensured that she would remain hospitalized for an extended period of time. Dean and Gerda visited her often. She tried to talk, but it was difficult for her. “She had a gruesome, halting kind of speech,” says Dean. “She was aphasic. She could get ideas across, but she had a lot of problems.” At times, when she could talk a little, she would recall a brief memory from her past that had been pleasant. While Dean found such moments poignant, he sensed that they signaled life slowly leaving and he felt helpless to do anything.
At first, Florence seemed to improve. She had been in Bedford Memorial for two months, and during the period in which she was doing better, her doctor sent her to Presbyterian-University Hospital in Pittsburgh for an angiogram and further treatment. With better diagnostic facilities, they would be able to tell if there was a blockage that might respond to surgery. So Florence went to Pittsburgh, which meant that Dean and Gerda spent considerable time during the month of January driving over one hundred fifty miles each way. They could not do it every day, but they went as often as possible.
After the angiogram, Florence’s neck suddenly swelled up as big as her head and turned a dark purple. Dean wondered if the treatment itself had made her worse. “I was convinced it had been badly done.”
More strokes quickly followed, making Florence more aphasic and less able to let people know what she was feeling. Dean was later to write a story, “Shambolain,” that expressed some of the emotions he experienced at her bedside: “With her dying, Della had created a pocket in existence and we had crawled inside to await the end with her.”5 Dean and Gerda spent hours at her bedside, leaving for only the most necessary tasks. There was no need to tell Florence that Dean had quit his job. It was clear that she was declining and this was something that she should not have to worry about.
Dean wanted to assure his mother that he would be all right. His heart was set on being a writer, yet so far he had shown her only a few short stories and a science fiction novel that she had not appreciated. It was better to say nothing.
One day as they stood nearby, she labored to speak. She seemed to have something urgent to say. Such moments were so rare now that Dean knew it must be important. He leaned closer to hear. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you about your father,” she struggled to say. “You’ve got to know.”
At that moment, Ray walked in. Florence looked at him with fear in her eyes, glanced at Dean, and whispered, “Later.” Whatever she had to reveal, she obviously felt she could not say it in front of her husband. Dean could not imagine what it might be. Nor was he ever to know.
One morning, Dean and Gerda took leave of Florence to return to their jobs. As they reached Harris burg and walked through the door, the phone rang. There had been another crisis. They turned around and drove at high speed all the way back. Before reaching Pittsburgh, Dean was pulled over by a patrol car and when he explained that his mother was in the hospital, the police officer put away his ticket book and sent them on their way. His kindness was the one bright spot of the day.
Florence was still hanging on when they got there, but not fully conscious. They stayed in her room for a while and then went into a waiting room for families of intensive care patients. It was there that they were told that Florence had passed away.
On February 8, 1969, Florence Koontz ended her fifty-three years on earth. She was never to see the coming years of struggle for Dean that might have alarmed her, but neither would she see his success. For the rest of his life that would be a bitter realization. And he would always wonder whether the revelation about his father would have been a life-changing event for him. For all he knew, it was merely some small fact of which he was already aware but which had somehow become more significant to his mother’s deteriorating mind. It would not be for many years that he would have cause to consider her last words to him in a strange new way.
The viewing was held in the Louis V. Geisel Funeral Chapel in Bedford, and it was here that another event occurred that would have painful repercussions for Dean in the years to come.
He walked over to Florence’s casket, near to his Aunt Kate, who was talking to someone. He overheard her say, “See what that stroke did to her; it put that little twist in her nose.”
Dean sought to correct her. “Oh, no, Aunt Kate, her nose was always like that.”
Kate looked at him a moment and then turned to the other woman. “He’s just like his damn father,” she said. This surprised Dean. Here was the Logue family bickering that had always kept his aunts at odds with one another; now it had become intergenerational.
Annoyed, Dean said, “This isn’t the place for this.”
Kate reacted dramatically. “How dare you say that to me!” she shouted. Her sister Betty came running over, threw an arm around her, and led her out of the room. Then Betty returned and confronted Dean, making him feel like a villain at his own mother’s funeral. Accusations were flung around and Dean was mortified. It was his Uncle Ray who managed to get things settled. And that was the last time Dean ever saw him.
Florence Koontz was buried in Bedford Memorial Park. As Dean stood by the graveside in the cold winter wind, he felt helpless and guilty. It seemed that he should have been able to do something to save her. He was sure her life had been shortened by the unrelenting stress of living with his father. Yet he could not change things now. She was gone.
Dean had a flat stone designed for a double plot for both his mother and his father. However, when the time came many years later to bury his father, he could not bear to disturb his mother’s rest, so he placed his father’s ashes in a separate place.
After the funeral, Dean and Gerda went through some of Florence’s things. They found nearly five hundred dollars in an envelope marked “Florida.” They understood that to mean she had kept money away from Ray so that one day she could visit again the place where she had experienced a rare escape from a life of constant struggle.
In the culture at large in 1969, there was a measurable decline in the importance of religion, and people worried about the state of society. The first U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam. Some seventy-five thousand came back home, although over half a million remained. Mary Jo Kopechne drowned at Chappaquiddick while Ted Kennedy survived, and Lieutenant Calley was ordered to stand trial for the massacre at My-lai. The big movies were Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider. Four hundred-thousand people gathered at Woodstock, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. published his strange antiwar, time-paradox novel, Slaughterhouse Five. After fifty-eight years, the Saturday Evening Post suspended publication, signaling the end of an era for high-profile short stories. With pressures from the burgeoning women’s movement, pants became acceptable wear for women and many schools were forced to ease up on dress codes. In California, Charles Manson directed the Tate and LaBianca murders.
While Gerda left each morning for A.B. Dick, Dean sat down at his typewriter and began to spin tales of science fiction and fantasy. Gerda’s generous offer was not without pressure, primarily from Dean himself. Relatives on both sides viewed his decision to quit his teaching job as frivolous, and felt he was headed for trouble. It seemed an affirmation that he was just like his father and would never focus on a good job. However, Dean knew he was responsible. He would not let Gerda down. He would work hard and try his best, even if it meant suffering the withering remarks of people who wanted him to live according to their values.
Keeping his workplace neat and professional, he set himself a regular goal of four thousand words per day. Eventually he moved into a schedule that demanded ten to twelve hours, six to seven days per week. Often he worked late in the day, from afternoon until late at night.
“There was a time when I sure was cranking them out,” Dean says. “Four thousand words is about fourteen pages. In those days, my stories didn’t get as much polish. I was working out of sheer desperation because we didn’t have anything.”
The schedule was grueling, but he felt he was accomplishing a lot. Unlike his father, he disciplined himself to sit for hours at a desk, polishing each page as he went along. Gerda helped with research, and proofread the pages as Dean finished. “She was my toughest critic. She’d read everything before I sent it in and she’d tell me what she thought ought to be changed. In the timeless male manner, I’d rant and rave — and then go in my office and look at it and do most of what she said. Mainly she’d be able to catch me in excess. She’d point out that this scene or that was way over the top and I’d see that she was right.”
“What I had to learn,” Gerda admits, “is to say what was good about it, too. I tended to tell him about only what was wrong.”
Dean was optimistic that applying himself so diligently would soon pay off. He worked on one story after another and sent them out to the magazines he knew. One hundred dollars here, two hundred there — any little bit would help.
Several months went by and to his chagrin, Dean counted up seventy-five rejections. Gerda’s small paycheck just managed to cover their expenses, but left nothing for luxuries or emergencies. “We limped from paycheck to paycheck” Dean says. He became frantic. Nothing he had written was selling and he wondered whether his earlier sales had been a fluke — maybe he had been kidding himself about his talent. Quitting his job might have been a terrible mistake.
“The first six months were gruesome,” Dean admits, “because when Gerda made the offer, I had work reaching fruition and I had things to submit. Suddenly nothing was selling. It was pretty horrifying.”
Dean was embarrassed about letting Gerda down. He was contributing nothing to the household income and his humiliation was exacerbated by relatives who continued to wonder out loud when he would get a job. He had grown his hair long again and he knew what they were thinking: He’s a hippie, a layabout. Just like his father. Poor Gerda.
But Gerda had faith in her husband. One thing she knew: He was persistent and he would keep at it until something broke.
Although he had sold his first three novels on his own, he listened to other writers explain the benefits of a well-connected agent. Dean knew people who were writing science fiction and who were also working at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in New York. This was the same place that had once sent him a useless critique, but he decided to try it again.
“I eventually got Scott Meredith for a year,” Dean says. “He handled Norman Mailer and lots of other well-known writers, which impressed me, and he agreed to handle me without a fee. Bob Hoskins was my subagent at Meredith for a while, but he left to become an editor. Then I got Ted Chichak, but I don’t think it mattered because everyone at Scott Meredith was grossly overworked and no one had time to do the job well. I don’t think I really had a personal agent.”
Chichak submitted Dean’s novels to Bob Hoskins over at Lancer. Hoskins said they were close but not quite there, and he invited Dean to call. “We had a long conversation on the phone about one of them,” Dean remembers. “He told me what it needed and I sat down and revised it and he bought it. We walked our way through two novels and after the second one, I said, ‘Oh, I see.’ Then I revised the others and he ended up buying all five. He gave me that little click of insight which had to do with plotting. Then, as soon as I grasped the techniques, I applied them.”
Thus, after the first six months on his five-year contract with his wife, Dean finally made a sale. He and Gerda celebrated by going out to a cozy little bar called the Red Lantern and having spaghetti and meatballs.
That summer, NASA accomplished the first manned moon landing. The astronauts of Apollo 11 left behind a plaque that read, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July, 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
It was a momentous event for science fiction writers. Donald Wollheim revised an anthology of stories from 1958 called Men on the Moon that had predicted a moon landing before NASA ever existed. He then asked writers in the field, including Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Silverberg, to respond with essays to a dour comment made by political commentator I. F. Stone, who believed that idealism would give way to the reality that wherever men go, they cause destruction. “Let the rest of the universe beware,” he said.
Dean was one of those writers who responded. Aware of both peaceful and aggressive traits in the human soul, he affirmed the potential for peace with the coming of a new age. Since NASA was not a military organization, and its goal was to conquer nature not men, there should be no weaponry. The lure of the universe, he believed, would defy the negativism from gatekeepers of the status quo. “Surely,” he said, “the maturation of the new infant mankind is already evident.”6
Dean published seven short stories that year, including two that formed his third novel. In Perihelion, “The Face in His Belly” was published in two parts. Like many of Dean’s tales, its hero is a mutated man who, because of his deformity, is an outsider. His name is Link Forrester and his task is to infiltrate a cult of Muties and kill God. This time, God is not responsible for the mutations but is kin to those who bear them. His own face is on his torso. When Link ultimately confronts God, he plays out his part in a prophecy, showing Dean’s early penchant for the quirks of destiny.
A short story published in Amazing Stories’ January issue that year was “Temple of Sorrow.” Editor Barry Malzberg introduced the story with: “The most interesting thing about it is to speculate just how good Mr. Koontz is going to be.”7 The story follows a man who must locate a stolen A-bomb. He infiltrates a religious cult that plans to destroy the world. The cult captures and brainwashes him, but he recovers in time to join his Mutie partner and a renegade woman in saving humanity. Dean had hoped to expand this story into a novel, but never finished it.
The next story, “Killerbot,” came out in May, in Galaxy. War on a future Earth escalates when outcast human beings are revamped with implanted defense systems; they become semirobotic killers, masquerading as ordinary citizens — the ultimate guerrilla warriors. When the value of life recedes against the ideal of preserving the inanimate world, the protagonist diagnoses this as a society going mad. “When frustrations reached an unbearable limit, when family could be dissolved in a hail of bullets … the human mind rebelled against responsibility. Men … indulged in a season for freedom … freedom to do anything.”8
“Killerbot” was republished in a 1977 anthology, The Future Now, under the title, “A Season for Freedom.” Dean wrote an Introduction in which he wondered if human life might ultimately become so devalued that people could actually be used as weapons. He feared the encroaching insensitivity he saw in society, with its lack of moral accountability, and believed humans might one day be capable of the atrocities he describes.
“I wrote ‘A Season For Freedom’ when the Vietnam War was escalating daily,” he explains, “when many Americans’ respect for human life, both at home and abroad, was at an all-time low. I saw a trend in our society that frightened me.”9 He drew a parallel between American prejudices toward the Vietnamese and toward college students (as evidenced when National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State in 1970 — after he wrote this story).
In August, when Dean was beginning to really sweat about his dearth of sales, “A Dragon in the Land” appeared in Venture Science Fiction. He had some brief comfort in seeing something of his in print. It begins with a mystery about what has killed eleven million people in China. The story was influenced by “McLuhanism” — the prediction that the world would become a global village and that being so close-knit would eventually end the instinct to fight. This idea had been proposed by Canadian cultural critic Marshall McLuhan, whose The Medium is the Message was published in 1967. The book investigated the social and psychological consequences of mass media and technology, and described how the media works us over. McLuhan’s ideas had stimulated Dean to write about two enemies who meet during the final world war and discover that caring for others does not require racial or national kinship. The dragon is a “good beast” that influences people toward peaceful relations.
A month later, “Muse” was published in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It followed similar principles — that all living creatures are linked and ought to join together in a common cause of survival and life-enhancement. It was a surprisingly intuitive story prefiguring Dean’s own psychological issues. “Muse” features a famous musician, Leonard Chris, whose talent derives from a symbiotic alien slug that attaches to his body. Despite the beauty his music brings to the world, there are those, including his own father, who cannot tolerate “symbiotes” — people who merge with slugs. Leonard objects to their view of the slugs as creepy vampires. “They take, yes,” he says, “but they also give.”10 Ultimately the father confronts him and in an attempt to redeem him, kills the slug, thereby destroying Leonard’s musical genius. “The things I wanted to say,” he tells his father about the slug, “he said for me.”11 Leonard tries to kill his father and, failing that, retreats into a diminished self.
The story was reprinted in 1984 in Isaac Asimov’s Supermen anthology, devoted to possible destinies of humankind. Uncannily, it seems to predict how Dean’s own talent would be coupled with a “handicap” related to his father — the frustration, anger, and ultimate revulsion engendered in him by his father’s sociopathic attitudes and acts. His father’s behavior, although always a burden to Dean, inspired characters and story lines that won him as much fame in years to come as Leonard Chris in “Muse” had gained.
One of Dean’s more moving stories, “Shambolain,” was inspired when he and Gerda went to a carnival one day toward the end of the year and listened to people gawking at a freak show. Dean had heard such comments before, but this time it struck him that the people who paid to look at deformed human beings did so to feel superior, which then made them feel better about themselves. Dean was reminded of his mother, how her illness and economic deprivation had forced her to live outside the norm of society and how she had died young because of this — exacerbated by her stressful marriage.
These two events — the freak show and his mother’s tragic life — converged into a story about freaks who attack an alien who desires to be part of their group. His difference gives even these outcasts someone toward whom they can feel superior. Finally they kill him because he is not human. One of the freaks, a man with a third foot growing out of his calf, comes to realize that it is not physical differences that dehumanize people. Such prejudices are based in fear and lead only to loss. In fact, the alien had been the most human of all because his gestures were noble and life-affirming — like Dean’s mother. Dean sold this story to the science fiction magazine, Worlds of If, which published it the following year.
A portion of a short story that has surfaced among collectors was also written around this time, but was never published. It was called “The Dreamlet of the Hawk.” Dean does not recall if he actually wrote it or what he had intended to do with it. “It was supposedly part of a novel I was working on, but I have no recollection.” It was about a hunter who has an “emotio-link” with a hawk. Dean had used that term in one of his other stories, but since science fiction jargon is often shared or borrowed, there is no way to establish with certainty that Dean actually penned this story fragment.
A collection of stories that Dean had planned about the mythological figures Theseus and Mandarin, which was never completed, shows Dean’s early attempt to incorporate archetypal images and themes into his science fiction. As he matured, he would place more emphasis on this device.
He had also sent an article to Writer’s Digest on character motivation in the paperback novel. It was published in March. He believed at the time that motivation should be formed before character is developed, and he lists the possibilities as love, curiosity, greed, revenge, duty, self-discovery, and self-preservation.
Although Dean was not selling as quickly as he had hoped, he did see the publication of his second and third novels in 1969, which he had sold while still teaching. Each of them had advances of $1,250.
The Fail of the Dream Machine, one half of another Ace Double with Kenneth Bulmer’s The Star Venturers, was inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the electronic age would make the printed word passé and would form the world into a global village. In the Foreword to this short novel, Dean wrote: “It frightens me to think of a future where all artistic outlets are electronic, where all of life becomes an open, sterile, and public thing.” He describes the novel that follows as being developed along the lines of McLuhan’s philosophy, but pointing out its logical extreme. It is about a village society in which people are so subliminally connected to one another via the electronic media that they lose their individuality and meld together into a single consciousness. The implication is that they return to their origins, God.
A character named Anaxemander Cockley wants to rule the world. He devises “The Show,” through which viewers can fully experience the feelings of the performers. Via their televisions, Cockley turns seven hundred million people into zombies. Yet, compressing the greater consciousness into an intimate container nearly annihilates humanity altogether, because part of the viewing addiction entails such a total loss of self that death ensues.
An underground resistance group that wants to preserve humanity and bring back the love of books captures Mike, The Show’s lead performer. They surgically alter him and send him to rescue Lisa, his leading lady. Together these two then act out a scenario on television of hatred. This repels the audience and breaks the mass addiction. By the end of the story, Mike has experienced the pleasure of reading. He finds that mindful engagement is far superior to the passive experience of “The Show.”
Dean’s other novel that year, Fear That Man, was an odd juxtaposition of two novellas, “In the Shield,” published in Worlds of If in January, and “Where the Beast Runs,” published in July. They comprise two separate episodes in the same alien world. It was part of an Ace Double, the flip side of which was E. C. Tubb’s Toyman. Dean dedicated this to friends Vaughn Bode and Andy Wickstrom. The cover price for each of Dean’s first three books was sixty cents.
In Fear That Man, a character with amnesia finds himself on a spaceship in the year 3456. He rescues a mutated creature named Hurkos, who tells him that the human race has evolved away from violence and religion. They join a poet named Gnossos and go to a place called Hope, the capital of the universe. There they learn how violence has been controlled by making people who inflict pain on others feel it ten times greater within themselves. The only truly dangerous people are the masochists. Sam, the amnesiac, learns that his mission is to destroy an energy shield that has kept God imprisoned for a millennium. God, however, has used so much energy to draw him forth that God is now very weak. Hurkos sees that God is nothing more than a pink worm, so he lifts a chair and smashes it against God, killing Him.
In the second part, three hunters of diverse species show up on Hope and learn that another god has come on the scene, who must also be killed. They use one of the masochists to accomplish the deed and the deity collapses from the paradox of someone who moves toward pain rather than away from it.
Much of Dean’s early science fiction shows a decided anger against God, even a desire to replace this chaotic, destructive deity with the more rational humankind.
“There was a brief period where I would have said I was an atheist,” he admits, “probably for a year or so. I think that was tied pretty closely to my mother’s death. When she died, I developed a bleak attitude. Then I gradually moved toward believing there’s a purpose in life.”
Later in Twilight Eyes, he would express this attitude through his protagonist Slim, who says his relationship with God is strongly adversarial. He could not understand how God could let people die or allow nice people to grow sick. He also could not accept the doctrine of infinite goodness in the face of obvious cruelty and suffering in the world — not unless there were demons causing all the problems.12
“I think where that attitude often comes out,” says Dean, “is when you’re sort of bitter … you rage at God. You don’t not believe in Him, but you rage at Him. In Fear That Man, God turns out to be a worm and they stomp Him. Don Wollheim later told me that he’d agonized about publishing it. He assumed that he was going to get outraged mail, but he went ahead, and he never received a single letter. He said he realized then that society was changing. I was very young at that point and just thrashing around. There certainly was anger and sometimes the anger was aimed at God.”
The themes of this double novella echoed much of what science fiction was doing at the time: examining categories of personhood, promoting the bonding of separate species, and denouncing the rigidity of ignorance. Yet Dean’s anger, underlined by his sense of personal loss and his fear of potentially finding himself responsible for the one parent with whom he wanted little association, gave his work its idiosyncratic qualities. One of his themes would be repeated throughout his novels for decades to come — the idea that from within the same source grows the potential for both benefit and harm. In this case, God the creator is also psychotic, and our own negative traits come from God’s schizoid personality. The only recourse for humankind’s sanity is to stand up to the bully or to hope God becomes impotent enough to be tricked, and then destroyed and replaced.
Dean plants in this narrative numerous arguments against God’s existence and/or goodness, many of which would surface again almost two decades later in the mouth of his atheistic character in the short story “The Twilight of the Dawn.” God is a weak father, not the omnipotent being of myth — not what we want Him to be. According to Dean in this novel, “The purpose of life is to overcome your creator.”13 If God Himself is truly demented, this diminishes us, His creatures, and we must avoid adopting that dementia and instead forge our greatness from within ourselves.
The following year, Dean would write that he had finally derived a clear picture of the god in which he believes: “He or it or them is a sort of easy-going power/person/force that doesn’t care what we do down here, as long as we don’t hurt each other.”14
Dean may have been angry at God on his mother’s account, but he was clearly imbuing God with his father’s sociopathic traits: The benign, loving father of cultural mythology was in fact demented and dangerous. The son, adversely affected (i.e., mutated), had to “kill” him in his own psyche in order to create some degree of personal strength and identity. Dean shared this anger with many young men of the sixties, but in his case, the image of power from his childhood universe truly had to be replaced with a more healthy ideal if Dean was to move successfully into manhood. He needed a better role model, and he set about creating it for himself in his fiction.
1Dean R. Koontz, After the Last Race (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 57.
2Dean R. Koontz, Star Quest (New York: Ace, 1968), p. 65.
3Ibid., p. 71.
4Ibid., p. 73.
5Dean R. Koontz, “Shambolain,” Worlds of If (November 1970), p. 174.
6Dean R. Koontz, essay in Men on the Moon, edited by Donald Wollheim (New York: Ace, 1969), p. 160.
7Amazing Stories (January 1969), p. 36.
8Dean R. Koontz, “Killerbot,” Galaxy Science Fiction (1968), p. 95 — 96.
9Dean R. Koontz, Introduction, “A Season For Freedom,” The Future Now (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1977), p. 146.
10Dean R. Koontz, “Muse,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (September 1969), p. 63.
11Ibid., p. 65.
12Dean R. Koontz, Twilight Eyes (New York: Berkley, 1987), pp. 96–97.
13Dean R. Koontz, Fear That Man (New York: Ace, 1969), p. 53.
14Dean R. Koontz, Soft Come the Dragons (New York: Ace, 1970), p. 51.