BY 1970, THE SCIENCE FICTION FIELD HAD GONE THROUGH some changes. Some of the writers had known the “Golden Age” in the early fifties, when the genre was still based in hard science. Common themes had revolved around discovery, time paradoxes, technological speculation, and extraterrestrial invasion. The practice in those days, and into the sixties, was to publish stories first in magazines and then reprint them in book form. Eventually the mass market boom had meant an increasing number of paperback originals. The age level at which they were aimed changed from teenagers to college-age young men, and even female authors had begun to make inroads.
With the sixties revolutions, stereotypes began to change from dashing heroes and buxom ladies in distress to teams of near-equals, with a few rare allowances for minorities. Hardcover houses opened their doors, and some writers paid more attention to literary devices and sophisticated styles. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s futuristic film, 2001, made a strong impression on the culture.
A movement called the New Wave began in the mid-sixties among writers who felt that the tried-and-true themes of science fiction had been overused. They wanted to write stories that addressed social concerns like overpopulation, ecology, and politics. In tune with some of the late sixties downbeat music, they shared an attitude of pessimism, and embraced the concept from physics of entropy — that everything inevitably breaks down. Their stories were more imagistic than the typical science fiction tale and they often utilized the “soft” sciences, like psychology and sociology, for plot and character development. “Inner space” was a key term, and true to the concerns of young people all over the country, they examined the accepted tenets of religion, were tolerant of sexuality, and dealt more deeply with psychological conflicts. This helped to bridge the differences between traditional science fiction and mainstream literature, although it also produced tension among the different camps within the genre.
Around the country, many of these writers gathered annually at fan conventions, and had been doing so since the fifties. It had become a regular tradition for some, although the fans could get a little strange. Some liked to role-play, and clubs were formed that gave an edge to those who wanted to belong to an “in” group. They had buttons, jargon, character names, and other oddities that set them apart. Dean was aware of two such conventions in his area, one in Pittsburgh and one in Philadelphia. In 1970, he decided to go to a gathering called Philcon with the hope of meeting some of the writers he admired. Gerda went with him.
“The first convention I ever went to,” Dean says, “I was agog. I kept running into all these people who were basically gods to me. We arrived on a Friday afternoon and hit the parties that evening. I was astonished that the first couple of writers I saw were falling-down drunk. These were people I’d read and admired. Then I went up to Damon Knight, who wasn’t drunk, and said, ‘Oh, Mr. Knight, I really like your work,’ and he looked at the hand I was holding out to shake and said, ‘Well,’ and turned and walked away. Mr. Knight considered himself the godfather of the New Wave and I never got along well with that whole thing. They didn’t accept me and I guess that, for this man, even his basic manners and respect for the rules of courtesy were shaped, in each instance, by his literary judgment of the writer with whom he was interacting.”
“Later I spotted Forest J. Ackerman. I’d read every edition he’d published of Famous Monsters of Filmland. He was talking to someone and I walked up and stood respectfully until he was free, and then said, ‘Mr. Ackerman, you were so important to me when I was young. I just loved your magazines.’ And he said, ‘Well, isn’t that nice,’ and walked off. I kept hitting that everywhere. It’s terrible to see people you admire acting like this. The only person who was truly nice to me at that convention was Robert Silverberg, and he went out of his way to be decent.”
Silverberg was an award-winning science fiction writer, prominent in the field since the fifties. He was prolific in fiction and nonfiction, as well as being an industrious editor of numerous anthologies. The number of short stories to his credit was astounding. His two most recent books at that point were The Masks of Time and The Man in the Maze. Dean had read many of his works and made it a point to meet him.
“He spent two hours talking to me,” Dean recalls. “I was having some trouble and I explained it to him. I had five novels that were not completed. I had written each to within forty or fifty pages of the end and then had lost confidence and put them aside. I was struggling like hell to be able to get anything finished. I would finish one book, but then there’d be three that I didn’t. Bob got this absolutely horrified look and said, ‘Now, you listen to me. This is simply ordinary self-doubt. Every writer has it. Books don’t go off the rails forty pages from the end. They go off the rails early or midpoint. This is all in your head. When you go home, I want you to finish each of them, one after the other. Send them out and they’ll sell.’”
Silverberg, too, recalls this conversation with Dean. “I remember how discouraged he was. He was writing rather undistinguished science fiction at the time and not doing very well with it. My feeling about writing a book is, if you’re a professional, you start on page one and you sit there until you finish. There’s no other option. My recollection is that I said something like, ‘You’re resisting writing these books because you really don’t want to write them. You don’t think you’re getting anywhere. The best thing is to write something else.’”
He himself had been given such a boost by senior writers when he was in his twenties, and felt he should do the same. “It wasn’t unusual in the fifties for established writers to do that,” he says. “I had a lot of help and got a very fast start.” One of those writers, Cyril Kornbluth, had said he felt an obligation to be kind to beginning writers. “I took that to heart,” says Silverberg. “I’ve always felt it was part of the system to reach around behind you and pull others along. Which is what I did with Dean. He seemed so distressed and such a nice guy.”
“I suspect Bob and I each remember a different part of that conversation,” Dean comments. “I suspect he made both of these recommendations, because I did start writing different science fiction from what I’d done previously — better work, like The Flesh in the Furnace. And then I left the field. And you know — I never really was a science fiction writer at heart. I wrote it because it was mostly what I’d read. What I eventually had a passion for writing was suspense and mainstream work. When I followed that passion, my work improved dramatically. Bob Silverberg was dead-on in both pieces of advice.”
Following this convention, Dean went home to rewrite. “I admired Bob so much that when he told me to do it, I did it. It broke through that block that I was having about finishing anything. So I owed him the fact that I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and finished these books. He couldn’t have been nicer to me.”
At the next convention that year, held in Pittsburgh, Dean met Harlan Ellison. He was known as a man of controversial character and legendary charm. Kicked out of Ohio State University and told by a creative writing teacher he had no talent, he went on to build a tremendously prolific, award-winning career.
Ellison was a maverick who had written in many genres. He did not consider himself a science fiction writer, but he had been involved in the field since the early fifties and had produced some seminal work — infamous for its uncompromising ethic and raw presentations of urban life. His 1968 story, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” was still the subject of conversation in its startling portrayal of resistance to dehumanization.
Ellison liked to shake things up. As a founder of Science Fiction Writers of America, he was a gadfly about getting things done professionally, and his own fiction constantly pushed the envelope. “I don’t want anyone to read my stories and feel complacent,” he insists. “I want my stories to annoy people, anger people, make them beat their breasts and throw the book against the wall. It’s supposed to have a visceral effect on you. It’s not a piece of sculpture.”
He had seen a competitive spirit enter the field of late, eroding the sense of community. “In the fifties and sixties, we were all in this pot together and everybody would help everybody else,” he recalls. “Writing was hard work and we were making a penny a word or less. You didn’t see yourself in direct conflict with other writers.” He still has this attitude and has helped many writers, although he has no patience with amateurs, no matter how much they have published.
In 1968, he helped form the New Wave with his cutting-edge anthology, Dangerous Visions. He had also written scripts for television shows like “The Outer Limits” and “Star Trek.” He seemed to have no end of energy, and wherever he went, he commanded attention.
“The first time I met Harlan,” says Dean, “we were standing in a convention suite talking to Barbara and Bob Silverberg, and Harlan just exploded into the room. He came over to talk to Silverberg and he took an immediate fancy to Gerda.”
“I have few of the properly proscribed inhibitions,” says Ellison, “most of which I think are useless. I’m steeped in ethics, but have virtually no morality at all, and I’ve always made a great distinction between them.”
Ellison knew something about Dean’s writing. He had read Fear That Man and thought it showed more than a bit of talent. “Dean was just another journeyman writer,” he said. “He worked as hard as the rest of us, but his work was undistinguished and his personality wasn’t quirky enough to get him noticed.” Ellison was used to seeing crowds of strange-looking fans who walked around wearing buttons and talking about being “slans” — a science fiction in-group. By contrast, Dean was ordinary. “He didn’t have any outstanding bizarre characteristics to catch anyone’s attention, so he was not a star at the freak show.”
Ellison, then unmarried, flirted with Gerda and she responded with a remark witty enough to get a laugh from Silverberg. Ellison was startled, but met fire with fire until a group of people had gathered around them.
“I’ve never seen Gerda engage in anything like this before or since,” says Dean. “She’s usually very quiet, but she was getting the better of him and he ended up surrendering.” (Ellison finds this conclusion dubious.)
Two years later, Dean’s work interested Ellison enough for him to solicit a story for an anthology, Again, Dangerous Visions. Over time, they have become friends.
Dean went to one more of these conventions, a second one in Philadelphia, and there he was made fully aware of how the young Turks of the New Wave felt about the traditional nature of his work.
“A local TV station wanted to interview a group of writers because of this New Wave that was happening in science fiction,” Dean explains. “They wanted young writers and they gathered about ten of us. The other writers in this group made a point of not wanting to be associated with me because I was that ‘old-fashioned’ kind of writer who was a storyteller. They saw themselves as moving beyond that. I found it amusing because I always thought storytelling was at the center of writing. The New Wave was a political thing, really, and there was always this pecking order at conventions that struck me as odd and unpleasant. I was soon disabused of the idea that writers are a community. There are people like Bob Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, who will be straight with you and who will genuinely hope for your success, but most see you as a competitor or a heretic, or both — and treat you as such.”
Despite his disappointment at conferences, Dean continued to write and submit his stories to publishers. Gerda did whatever research he needed from the library. “For some reason,” Dean admits, “I never much cared to sit in a library. I feel alienated and I hate going in them. So she did the library part of the research and brought it all back to me.”
She also urged him to expand his reading and introduced him to the work of some of the suspense writers that she liked.
“She read more widely than I did at that time, in all genres,” says Dean, “and because of her, I started to broaden my own reading to some extent. When I found people that I really liked in the suspense field, I wanted to write suspense.”
He turned to such authors as Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, whom he liked for style and technique, “although Cain’s view of life is much darker than mine.” He also read a lot of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, which taught him about drawing out reader expectations as long as possible before the Big Dramatic Moment. He learned other things from the stories of Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, Evan Hunter, and Dick Francis. It seemed to him that the suspense genre had no restrictions as to form or content, and required only that the author maintain the tension. Such freedom to stretch in many directions and to create any kind of story appealed to Dean. Yet he knew it would take a lot of work to shift into this new framework. He read as much as he possibly could.
The suspense writer who most impressed him was John D. MacDonald. Best known for a series featuring Florida-based private detective Travis McGee, MacDonald also wrote non-series novels like Cape Fear; Cry Hard, Cry Fast; and Murder on the Wind. Dean picked up one of MacDonald’s books, The Damned, could not put it down, and went on to read thirty-four of them in a single month.
In MacDonald, he found a kindred spirit — someone who boldly made social commentaries, who captured the power of place, who was a poet-naturalist, and who made readers care about the story. Dean admired not only the prose and pace, but the unique and strong characterizations. “He can spend forty words on a character early in the story and it will be so vivid that when that character comes back into the story one hundred pages later, you remember him. I thought it was brilliant. He’ll do four or five pages of character background and he’ll make it so interesting that when he stops and starts the story up again, you say, ‘Wait, I want to know more about that character.’ That always amazed me.
“His books just hold up well. The Last One Left is probably the first novel anyone wrote about a sociopath that got it right. I liked Cry Hard, Cry Fast because of the amazing structure of it. The End of the Night is about a group of teenage thrill killers and it’s as good as In Cold Blood. I did read the Travis McGee novels later and loved them, but I thought his non—Travis McGee books were better.”
On a conference panel over a decade later, Dean used Mac-Donald’s work to demonstrate to other writers what good writing was — especially those who believed that excellence was to be found exclusively in the classics. Often he surprised people with MacDonald’s richness of prose and impressive sense of place. He read a paragraph without naming MacDonald as the author and made the other panel members guess who it was. It amused him that they thought it must be Henry James or some writer of that ilk. It amused him even more to let them know that an author they might have dismissed had actually impressed them.
When Dean eventually started writing his own suspense, he felt the influence keenly. “I wrote one — it might have been called Big Money — which sounded so much like MacDonald it was embarrassing. I can’t remember whether I even sent it to my agent. I might have written half of it, but at some point, I recognized it was so imitative I couldn’t possibly publish it.”
Years later, MacDonald provided quotes for Dean’s books Whispers and Strangers, and when Ballantine decided to reissue some of MacDonald’s novels a decade after his death in 1986, they asked Dean for a quote. He said: “As a young writer, all I ever wanted was to touch readers as powerfully as John D. MacDonald touched me. No price could be placed on the enormous pleasure that his books have given me. He captured the mood and the spirit of his times more accurately, more hauntingly, than any literary’ writer — yet managed always to tell a thunderingly good, intensely suspenseful tale.”
Dean continued to keep up his aggressive writing schedule, veering away from science fiction and writing outlines for suspense. He later wrote in Invasion that daily creativity requires sensitivity and even some degree of madness. “Even the worst godawful hack must believe — even if he denies it to everyone and to himself — that what he does makes a difference … in the course of human events.”1 This certainly applied to a young writer trying desperately to find his niche.
Aware that other writers were making ends meet by branching out, Dean decided to write political nonfiction that reflected some of the attitudes of the times.
That year, 1970, the Beatles recorded their final song together, “I Me Mine,” before breaking up and going their separate ways. Simon and Garfunkel released “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and the X-rated Midnight Cowboy took the Oscar for Best Picture. In response to complaints that young men could fight and die but not vote, Congress lowered the voting age to eighteen. Near the Cambodian border, U.S. troops clashed with the North Vietnamese and Nixon sent more. This prompted antiwar demonstrations, and in May, national guardsmen shot and killed four students at Kent State. Princeton University awarded an honorary doctorate to songwriter Bob Dylan, while Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died from drug overdoses.
“I just wanted to write about political things that were happening at the time that were pretty horrendous,” Dean explains. “I’d written a couple of novels that had spun out of that, so doing nonfiction seemed interesting. I made that publishing connection through Bob Hoskins.”
He wrote two nonfiction books for Aware Press, The Pig Society and The Underground Lifestyles Handbook. Gerda shared authorship with him, although she did no writing. Before these were published, Hoskins called to warn him that he had just learned that his own novels had been substantially altered by the same publisher, and that he was unhappy about it. Dean saw no proofs of either of his books, and when they arrived in final form, he was disappointed. He claims that the editor had changed the content dramatically. It seemed to him that as much as forty to sixty percent of his material had been deleted and replaced by passages that he did not — and would not — write. The books were now angry diatribes against organizations, the “establishment,” the government, and in general, any kind of repressive practices that restricted sexuality or political expression. About The Pig Society, Dean says, “That one was supposed to be a rant against Nixon and the war. Some stuff got taken out and other material put in that had nothing to do with the book I originally wrote.”
A blurb about the authors falsely identified Dean and Gerda with the hippie subculture, claiming they had lived on a commune and had been to Woodstock in 1969. It also attributed to Gerda nonexistent articles and short stories in women’s magazines. She had given some thought to writing for magazines, but had no publications to her credit. Similarly, they did not indulge in the drug culture, had never been to Haight-Ashbury, or done much of anything else typical of hippies. Dean wore his hair long, but spent most of his time writing. “I spent my life working. I would never ‘turn on’ or ‘drop out.’ Now, whether I’d ‘tune in,’ I don’t know. I’m not sure how that part of the equation worked.”
The Pig Society, illustrated by Doug Levinson and Vaughn Bode, was ostensibly a reaction to the trash of established society. Using the film Easy Rider as an example of the clash of cultures, the book claims that it sums up fears on both sides: Society is primarily fascist and the liberty of the individual is at stake. Chapters cover such subjects as the American Nazi Party, Nixon’s crime package, conservative attitudes about sexual freedom, war and the military, the police and other authority figures, marijuana, the death of religion, and even concentration camps in the United States. At the end, an “oink list” dismisses such Americans as Eisenhower, Nixon, Shirley Temple, and John Wayne. The freethinker is considered the “new American hero,” and people are urged to wake up and realize that the FBI collects files on innocent citizens, and that politicians suppress truth and want to change constitutional amendments regarding individual rights. In short, the establishment’s agenda is to suppress personal freedom.
Similarly, The Underground Lifestyles Handbook, written second, and illustrated by Doug Levinson, covers the experiences of the counterculture on such subjects as long hair, living in communes, free sex, groupies, drugs, body painting, and Woodstock. It is touted as “The First True Account of the Underground Subculture.” The “authors” claim to have researched firsthand the subjects they describe, and to tackle them “with humor and warmth.” Part One ostensibly is written by Dean, Part Two by Gerda, although Gerda insists she had nothing to do with it. “My name was on it because of the way the contract was structured,” she explains.
To some extent, this book foreshadows the attitudes about freedom and prejudice expressed later in Chase and Shattered. There is no doubt that Dean had some kinship with the youth subculture on issues like conformity and authoritarian attitudes. He also affirmed sexual and personal freedom, but he felt that these nonfiction books had taken his agenda much further into the hippie lifestyle than he had ever intended to go. They were also more militant.
The same publisher took his pornography under its Cameo imprint. During the late sixties and early seventies the sexual revolution had given many people permission to express their sexuality. Women were pursuing their pleasure with as much gusto as men, and gay people were coming out into the open. It was a time of freedom and experimentation. People wanted to explore the forbidden. Sexual imagery became increasingly explicit in novels and film, and books like The Story of 0, Lolita, and Candy were widely read. Even the Marquis de Sade enjoyed a renewed popularity. The debate over the censorship of pornography went to the Supreme Court, where controversial decisions lifted many of the restrictions on publishing and distributing such material.
While arguments flew back and forth in academic circles over whether pornography could be considered literature, writers cashed in. Uninterested in the “high art” value of their work, they were in it for the fast buck. These books, with their emphasis on sex over plot and character, were easy to turn out. Dean was offered the opportunity to write some. With the mounting pressure of bills to pay, he decided to go for it.
He read what the other writers were doing, as well as classic pornography by Henry Miller and Frank Harris, which he mentioned later in Prison of Ice. These novels could be written in a matter of days, and they paid from around $600 to as much as $3,000, but offered no return on subsidiary rights. He thought that only in a land of sexual hypocrisy could the situation exist wherein the racier works earned the lower advances.
In his research he quickly learned that there was a difference between what he called the “Big Sexy Novel” and the “Rough Sexy Novel.” Big Sexy Novels, written by the likes of Jacqueline Susann, Henry Sutton, and Rona Jaffe, were supposedly more subtle about sexual elements, more euphemistic, and more pretentious about plot. Anticipation was emphasized over the sexual act itself, and the hint that such novels are thinly disguised descriptions of celebrities added to their effectiveness. Dean sneered at such books.
On the other hand, Rough Sexy Novels maximized raw language and erotic scenes, the more the better. The tone was straightforward and blatantly arousing. Rich detail and explicit language were the norm for this type of writing, and no character was punished or reformed for sexually acting out. Sex was viewed by the audience for these books as healthy and exciting, and anything was permissible, short of hurting someone. In his chapter on erotica in a later book, Writing Popular Fiction, Dean recommended using multiple points of view for such books, because a greater multiplicity of characters provided variety in perspective, action, and description — with more kinds of kinky behavior possible.
An interesting cultural note in Dean’s instruction was to avoid punishing anyone in the novel with divorce, since many women who read the Big Sexy Novel are terrified of it. It was an age of vicarious thrill and little real adventure, although times were changing. In a side note, Dean mentions that this reaction might change as more women see their value as people in their own right. He seemed to prefer the Rough Sexy Novel for its portrayal of women as sexual beings who could be aggressive rather than hesitant and submissive, who could make men the focus of their desire, and who could have as much pleasure. They could be equals in a relationship that for so long had been socialized to be primarily male terrain. However, he knew that nothing meaningful could be created in this genre. At best, it afforded him a way to experiment with style that could later be applied to more serious work without risking his creative reputation.
Nevertheless, Dean quickly realized that he was unhappy spending his time on novels that led him away from his original focus. He soon learned that royalties would not be forthcoming — if even reported — and that such repetitive work could become tedious and divert him away from building a more solid reputation elsewhere. While others churned them out, Dean was happy to leave erotica behind.
He wrote one with Gerda entitled Bounce Girl, which was later reissued as Aphrodisiac Girl. Although he was not proud of these books, he admitted his authorship to close friends and even sent them copies. In later years, he was embarrassed by their crudity. Those who read them saw nothing of Dean’s talent, and were glad that he had lost interest in making money this way.
Bounce Girl is an absurdly humorous tale about the sexual adventures of a groupie for a rock band named Bounce. The plot involves a drug that enhances sexual potency. The publisher added an Introduction (removed in the revision) that he attributed to Dean.
Dean had been told this book would be published under another name, but when he received his copy, not only were his and Gerda’s names on it, but much of the content had been changed. “It was supposed to be under a pseudonym,” Dean complains. “That’s why I don’t sign it. I never wanted my name on it in the first place. What I actually wrote didn’t appear in print. I was experimenting with doing something and what I had intended with this book was not accomplished.” He was so angry he tossed it into a wastebasket.
The second novel, Hung, exploited the lusts of young men at a small college that bears many similarities to Shippensburg. This one did get published under a pseudonym, but the content was also revised according to the editor’s preferences. Dean later described his intentions with this novel in an Afterword to one of his short stories, “A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village.” According to his account, he had wanted Hung to be a mainstream novel. The title was taken from the current catchphrase “hung up,” and the story was another of his attempts to extrapolate from Marshall McLuhan’s philosophies about global compression. Along with the sexual content, he had wanted to show how a war as far away as Asia had caused, through the media, an immediate moral impact on the culture. He felt that, ultimately, he had failed in these ambitions, but he did not expect the radical changes that had been made: “Hung was supposed to be a comic novel. I had thought this editor had wanted to do something different, and that’s the way I had written it, but I think he had lost his nerve. It didn’t get printed the way I wrote it. He fancied himself a writer, so he thought he could turn my books into anything he wanted. It was such an astounding shock. I knew all kinds of people who worked for him briefly and that’s exactly what he did to them.”
Eventually Dean found other ways to get published. Those two are the only erotic novels he has written, although collectors believe he has produced as many as ten. They have also credited him with books written as Shane Stevens. However, Shane Stevens is definitely another person and not a pen name. In 1972, Dean wrote in Again, Dangerous Visions that he had sold forty novels by that time and had placed seven more with his agent. In the 1973 anthology The Edge of Never, he took credit for forty-four novels, which seems to support the speculation that he has written more books under pseudonyms. A number of interviews during the mid-seventies quote him as saying that he has written fifty novels and expects to have one hundred by the time he is fifty, but he explains it:
“There were a lot of books I make claim to that I was writing, but never published. I sold most of them on outlines, but some of those books never got written — as many as ten books, I suspect. Contracts were paid back. There was a mainstream book I was working on about the American Nazi movement, but I didn’t have the skills for it. It didn’t have a title and it never got anywhere, and it’s long destroyed. It was my first idea to break out into mainstream, but it just didn’t work. This was the period where I was trying to find my way rather desperately to what it was that would finally break me out, and every time it seemed like I had it, I’d start to write, but between the time I’d sold the book and wrote it, things sometimes happened. I’d mention somewhere that I intended to publish it, and I’d get quite a way into it, but then throw it away.
“Two Lancer books were never published because Lancer went under. One was an anthology and one was a science fiction novel, and there was an Anthony North book that I had to take back. I was in the Isaac Asimov mode — quantity was everything. I even wrote two books in the Robert Ludlum mode. I wrote a portion of all of those books, but I’d start writing and then say, ‘This isn’t it.’ I’d realize it wasn’t a direction that was going to bear fruit.”
Dean met and made friends with people of like mind, one of whom was the controversial, award-winning artist Vaughn Bode, whom he had met in 1969. Vaughn had a volatile, brooding personality, even exasperating, and he shifted his interests so quickly it was difficult to get a commitment from him. His motto was to seize the day, to do all the art he possibly could “before I am no more me.” His art was often satirical.
He became close friends with Dean and together they planned a series of illustrated “McLuhan-esque” projects which never got off the ground. Vaughn managed only to illustrate The Pig Society and an article called “Diligently Corrupting Young Minds” that Dean wrote for Science Fiction Review.
“I just fell in love with his cartoons,” says Dean. “He and his wife Barbara were living in Syracuse. They came down for a weekend and he brought this big portfolio of stuff. When I run into talented artists, I can spend days looking through their portfolio. Really creative artists have this mountain of material that no one’s ever seen. Vaughn brought these comic strips he’d developed and we sat around looking through them all weekend. He had an off-the-wall sense of humor and so did I, so we got along pretty well. But gradually he seemed to become stranger and more alienated.
“He was always, at core, the same person, but he was troubled; he was like a child. There was a great sense of innocence about him, which was the center of his talent, but at one point in his life he started trying to destroy it. He let his fingernails grow three inches long and started wearing makeup, but I doubt he was genuinely bisexual. It was part of his game-playing. He liked to shock people. Once we went out to dinner in Hershey at this Italian restaurant, and he wore makeup and heavy eye color. He had these long nails that he had painted and decorated with little sequin inlays. He acted with us like he’d always been — the same person inside, but he took a childish delight in the effect he had on other people. I thought he just was never happy with himself. As he got more serious about these personas, he got more detached. It seemed at some point that he lost track of who he was.”
Dean wrote a Foreword for George Beahm to a book of Vaughn’s creations. In it he points out the central theme: “Vaughn does produce pretty pictures, marvelous fantasies; but every one of them is a piece in the mosaic theme that has occupied him for all his creative life: death.” Dean’s words were never published, but he describes a nightmare he had that was populated by characters from Bode’s cartoon strips. He had been working twelve-hour days to meet all of his publishing deadlines and, as he says, “I was close to mental and physical collapse. I started having nightmares from which I woke shaking and sweating.” The most persistent one involved him standing before a door in an old house that opens out to a clearing in a forest. Bode characters — evil in appearance — danced around a toadstool. Dean felt an imminent sense of dread and knew he must shut the door before it was too late. “I am no mystic, but I do believe if I had walked into that clearing in the dream, I surely would have died in my sleep. I suspect the dream was a warning that I had subconsciously fashioned for myself: I was that close to death,”
Then, on the afternoon of July 18, 1975, four days short of his thirty-fourth birthday, Vaughn Bode committed suicide. His ex-wife called Dean to tell him.
“I was devastated,” Dean says. “My first thought was that I had seen this descent over the years and I had the feeling that I could have done something to change it. If I’d been there at the right time or had said the right thing. That’s the same as with my father — if I’d just had the right conversation, I could have fixed all this. But of course, I couldn’t, because whatever was going on was so deep that he seemed to be engaged in a monologue that was not open to comment. So that was a real bad day. It’s hard to understand that someone can be as talented as Vaughn was, but on some level, the talent couldn’t save him. Vaughn was absolutely singular. If he could have held himself together, he would have become enormously famous.”
Another person Dean encountered in the late sixties was Lisa Turtle, a student at Syracuse University who was coediting a magazine called Tomorrow and … with Jerry Lapidus. Jerry knew Vaughn Bode, and through him, Dean. From an early age, Lisa had wanted to be a writer, and eventually she went on to write and publish fantasy. She had read some of Dean’s short stones and one of his novels, so she sent him a copy of the fanzine in the hope that he would contribute something.
Dean sent a piece from The Pig Society. In a letter, he described himself as having long hair and no steady job, being nonreligious, disrespectful of government, and “unmindful of his morals or anyone else’s code.” Lisa later met him at Philcon, the science fiction convention in Philadelphia, and they developed a friendship. She and Dean and Gerda talked together for hours about books, politics, philosophy, and life in the seventies. “I think the main reason we became friends,” she observes, “was a shared sense of humor and a devouring passion for fiction of all kinds.”
She noticed that even at that time, Dean had no intention of being labeled a one-track writer. He was writing science fiction but he was not about to let it become a trap. “He didn’t see it as the highest or only form of fiction.” What was important to her was that Dean took her seriously as a writer. “I recognized that Dean provided a good role model for the working writer. I found his obvious dedication and the sheer hard work necessary to make a living as a writer impressive and inspirational.” Dean, she knew, had made some compromises to keep involved in his profession, such as “writing books you wouldn’t want to admit to.” It made her reevaluate just how much she was willing to do to achieve her own goals.
Dean dedicated Starblood to Lisa Tuttle, although for no apparent reason, a printer changed the dedication to read, “To Dad.” Dean was mortified, but managed to include her in the list of dedicatees for Beastchild.
Concentrating on science fiction, Dean published seven novels that year, including a collection of previously published short stories. He also continued to submit new short stories, and eight were published.
Ed Ferman’s Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published “A Third Hand” in January and “The Mystery of His Flesh” in July. Both grew into novels. “A Third Hand,” which became Starblood two years later, straddled traditional and New Wave attitudes, since it was told in a linear manner but had an unusual hero. Timothy is a mutant genius, rather than a ruggedly handsome man, who witnesses a murder and must defend himself against a criminal conspiracy.
Although Dean knew that he was not accepted by New Wave writers, he did state at that time that he expected that once the New Wave subsided, “we will have devised a science fiction that is molded from the best of the stylistic principles of mainstream and the best story-telling concepts of science fiction. That will be one helluva literature!”2
In “The Mystery of His Flesh,” a man helps an android to escape the society that had created him and now wants him destroyed. This supergenius immortal can heal and even resurrect people, so in a world of nine billion, he is considered a menace. He needs three days to transform into his real form, which turns out to be God. As the archetypal man in his original shape, he shows that humans can become God. Even so, they fear the possibility and would rather destroy than explore it.
Venture published a novella-length version of “Beastchild” in August, while Fantastic Stories did the same for “The Crimson Witch” in October. Both were then published as paperback novels, with a few scenes added to Beastchild. Fantastic Stories also published “The Good Ship Lookoutworld” earlier that year, a story about the battle between entropy and meaning. Two men scavenging an alien ship that dissolves around them must find a way to understand it before it dissolves them, too. They learn to see it as an illusion, and only then can they resist it. This idea would show up in some of Dean’s future novels, such as Dragon Tears and Cold Fire.
Dean placed “Unseen Warriors” with Worlds of Tomorrow and “Nightmare Gang” with Infinity One, the first in a series of anthologies by Robert Hoskins that would regularly include him. “Unseen Warriors” was a postnuclear story about the possibility of breeding monsters in the act of human procreation. Each fetus may potentially be a “Brain” that destroys humans. The story features a couple who meet and go through the trauma of killing one of these creatures, which makes them opt to have no children for fear of generating yet another one. Although Dean and Gerda had not, at this point, decided against children, eventually Dean’s fears that he might pass on a genetic defect from his own father would influence their decision to forgo having a family.
“Nightmare Gang” is told in first person by a character who rides with a violent gang led by a charismatic man named Louis who is gifted with special powers. He can warp the reality between life and death and then raise the dead, which he does whenever he finds a potentially interesting member for his gang. They are immortal, driven to mindless violence at Louis’s command, and will indulge in murderous rampages for eternity.
Of the few novels that Dean wrote that did not sell was one he called All Other Men. “It was my first attempt to break out of science fiction,” says Dean. “It got wonderful rejection letters. This would have been in the early seventies. It was told entirely from the point of view of a madman, written in first person, present tense, and it was mostly comprised of one- and two-line paragraphs. It was about a group of people forming a commune who move into a small town where this resident sees them as the embodiment of all the destructive forces in society. He begins plotting everyone’s murder. To the exterior world, he is an upstanding citizen, but actually he’s completely gone. It was an eerie kind of story because it didn’t develop along normal plot lines.”
The rejection letters were fairly positive. Larry Ashmead at Doubleday told Dean it was a brilliant book that left him drained, but the sexual content — which was important to the story — was too explicit. He offered to recommend it to another editor, but nothing came of that.
“That was a real letdown,” Dean remembers, “because I felt I really had something with that book. It was the first time I did a total exercise in viewpoint. It’s from the point of view of an insane person. The title came from a quote: ‘To the lunatic, all other men are dangerous.’
“Someday I will probably haul that book out and be horrified by the low quality of it. I’ve left it buried, because it’s something I want to remember fondly. If it’s as good as I remember, then at some point I might include it as one of three pieces of a similar length in an omnibus. I’d have to recast the story in our time because it was set during the era of antiwar protests and would seem dated now.”
In frustration, Dean expanded his short story “The Mystery of His Flesh” into a novel. He had wanted to give it the same title, but the editor who bought it insisted that the title sounded too gay. She wanted something less controversial, so she renamed it Anti-Man. Dean thought that sounded like the title for a comic book, but that is the one they used, and it was published by Paperback Library.
In the story, Dr. Jacob Kennelman tries to save an android — which he refers to as He or Him for its archetypal perfection — from destruction by the World Authority. He takes the android to a cabin in the wilderness and watches Him devour huge quantities of food so He can transform Himself into a creature of great strength and immunity. Jacob wonders if He might one day destroy humankind. Eventually the android becomes a giant protoplasmic creature that claims to be God, but some evil part of itself has split away to do deeds of destruction. Jacob helps to destroy the evil part, and God transforms Him into an immortal of great perception who can spread this transformation to others.
This story shows the same concern as Fear That Man that God might be psychotic and therefore dangerous — although there is ultimately a desire to do some good. Another common theme was that we were created to struggle to become equal to God. In this novel, God has created an overpopulated, over-controlled world that shows a serious imbalance. Clearly Dean viewed God as imperfect, vulnerable, limited, and prone to mistakes. True goodness, Dean felt, lies in the intellectual awareness and compassion that Jacob displays.
Dean was also at work on the theme of toxic intimacy — that bonding with someone of a dangerous species may have detrimental results. The fluidity of boundaries implies that evil can flow into good, abnormal into normal, madness into sanity. He feared the inescapable merging of polarities that might cause harm. “Our personalities crossed, webbed, and formed something, though what it was remained a mystery insoluble.”3 In this case, the God-creature is an unknown. It is the dark part of the psyche that has resources of ambiguous worth; it might enhance growth or cause destruction. Jacob’s dream reveals his fear of the inner self — that what he creates can turn on him. One of the section titles, in fact, is “The Enemy is Self.” In the end, we learn that one needs to face oneself. Change comes from within by resolving fears and surrendering to personal integration.
Another novel, Hell’s Gate, was published by Lancer. Dean dedicated it to Gerda. It features a man, Victor Salsbury, who feels that what he knows about himself is artificial, as if it has been implanted rather than lived. He kills a man and purchases his home from Lynda March. Lynda’s ex-husband is based on Dean’s father: “There is a sort of man who can never face his own inadequacies, who must find a scapegoat. … He drives his women to despair, eventually breaks them. … They kill human dignity. But first they torture it. Relatively few women escape them.”4 When Victor is attacked by “lizard things with sucking mouths,”5 he starts to realize that he is someone’s puppet. Eventually he discovers he is an android sent from an alternate “worldline” to stop an invasion that will result in a Nazi-like occupation of the Earth.
Back in 1968, Dean had written a novel called The Dark Symphony, which at the time he considered one of his best efforts. He had sent it out, but editors told him it was too morbid. Finally he placed it at Lancer and dedicated it to Bob Hoskins, his editor there.
Dean had spent a lot of time listening to the rhythms of music in order to write what seemed to him a rather ambitious far-future story. He structured it like a nineteenth century symphony. It is about a rebellion of the mutant class against a society of aristocratic musicians who place all emphasis on musical talent. Throughout, Dean identifies religion with madness, and the established system as corrupt.
The Musicians have driven the mutants, known as Populars, into the ruins on the edge of established society. One of the Populars, Strong, sees himself in a demented vision as a prophet, and he schemes to replace the firstborn son of a high-placed Musician official with his own child, implanted with a program set to provoke him to lead a rebellion. This boy, Guil, grows up but fails to demonstrate musical talent — which means he will be destroyed. The program then reveals his true identity and he sets off for the ruins.
Another character, Tisha, has talent but is not allowed to gain any honors because she is female. Tisha goes with Guil to the ruins, but when Strong tries to have her removed, Guil kills him with a knife. There is some irony in this, since nearly two decades later, Dean’s own demented father would try to come between him and Gerda, and would use a knife to make an attempt on his life.
Some of the political ideas that Dean expresses in this novel, aside from an early defense of women, is that “the system devoured and never produced,”6 a theme common in the early seventies among disgruntled young people. To stay in the system was to be used by it. Yet even when people realized this, some refused to resist the system’s dehumanizing ways because they saw some advantage, or because they felt trapped and perceived that only submission brings peace from harassment. The Musician’s society is sick at the core, similar to Strong with his manic-depressive visions. Although they masquerade behind great composers, they are impotent and inevitably self-destructive.
This tale is another early expression of the theme of the unprotected child. Guil’s real father is demented and Guil is raised by a father with whom he is equally unsafe. Tisha, too, is unprotected. All they have is each other and they must make their way together through a treacherous world, for alone they would perish. “No child,” Dean writes with a feeling of anger, “owed anything to its parents.”7
One of Dean’s most significant novels that year was Beastchild, published by Lancer and dedicated to friends encountered in science fiction fandom, Lisa Turtle, Danny Jennings, and Jack Cordes. The story was initially inspired by unwarranted prejudices: Dean had met a veteran returning from Vietnam who had expressed negative opinions on the Vietnamese based only on limited encounters with the worst elements of that society. Such ideas, Dean felt, can motivate undeserved violence toward others. The novel was also a social commentary on the evils of capitalism, such as greed and the soulless pursuit of one’s own advantage: “Capitalism was fine. As long as man used it. But when the system had become so big that it guided the destiny of society rather than society regulating it, then capitalism had become dangerous.”8
In the novel, the lizard-like naoli have just won a war on Earth against humans. Based on their encounters with politicians and greedy merchants, they had concluded that humans were coldhearted and dangerously aggressive, so to protect trade routes, the naoli have nearly exterminated them. The few survivors hole up in places like The Haven. A naoli archaeologist, Hulann, encounters a young boy, Leo, who saves his life. Unable to turn Leo in, Hulann escapes with him across the country from Boston to join the human survivors in California. They spend a lot of time in snowstorms in Pennsylvania, near where Dean lived.
A naoli Hunter, programmed to kill, pursues them, but they escape his various weapons. Then they encounter a lone writer, David (a character who shares some of Dean’s traits), who is heading to California as well. Once they reach The Haven, humans kill Hulann, unaware that he is in fact their ally. Leo buries him and vows to make both sides in this struggle understand that not all members of a race are to be judged by its worst elements; Hulann reincarnates back to his home planet, taking with him the insight that the naoli Hunters have no soul. If humans judged all naoli by them, they would be mistaken. David writes the entire story into a book, with the understanding that the naoli and the “beastchild” had become as father and son — two different species joined in a familial bond. Without his naoli guardian, Leo would have been defenseless, an unprotected child, and would have been eliminated by the sociopathic Hunters. Joined together, they both find redemption via insight and the determination to cooperate across species differences.
Beastchild foreshadowed Midnight in its depiction of the Hunter as being comfortable merging with a machine, which exemplifies metaphorically the lack of soul in the human sociopath. It was a finalist for a Hugo, a prestigious science fiction award, for Best Novella of the Year. Unbeknownst to Dean, however, the book contained many grammatical and phrasing errors. He had never read the version in Venture, nor had he seen proofs of the Lancer novel. He had wrongly assumed that the magazine had published his story as he had written it.
In was not until 1990, when Joe Stefko of Charnel House spoke to Dean about doing a limited edition of Beastchild in hardcover, that Dean learned differently. When he saw the proofs that Joe had prepared, he was astonished by all the errors. “I looked at this and said, what the hell happened here? Joe must have lost his mind. So I got out the Lancer book edition and compared it, line by line, and discovered that the errors had been in the first edition.” Dean then checked the original manuscript, only to confirm that his story had never been published as he had written it. “The Venture magazine version had hundreds and hundreds of little changes — apparently contributed by an assistant editor, as I know Ed Ferman would never have done such a thing — and they had been carried forward into the Lancer version.” He told Joe that he wanted to see his original story in print, so Joe reset the proofs and, in 1992, published a version of Beastchild that had never been seen before.
“It astonished me,” says Dean, “that the bastardized form with all its errors ever made an award ballot.”
Dean collected many of the short stories he had published through 1970 into a book that featured as the title one of his best pieces: Soft Come the Dragons. This collection was part of an Ace Double along with another novel of his called Dark of the Woods. He dedicated the whole thing to Donald Wollheim. Along with each of the stories, Dean offered a brief essay in explanation of its origin, and then added a commentary on the entire project.
Dean was twenty-three when he wrote Dark of the Woods, one of his early attempts to show how good and evil can issue from a single source — in this case, the woods. Since he was under the influence of Freudian interpretation, we can assume the woods represent the murky regions of the subconscious. And, in fact, this novel reveals something of Dean’s own inner conflicts and desires.
A famous historical novelist of the future, Stauffer Davis, arrives on the planet Demos, ostensibly to write propaganda as a cover for the unwarranted genocide of a winged species of people who had once inhabited it. Instead, he intends to expose this atrocity. A few females are still alive and he falls in love with one named Leah — an act of political rebellion. He discovers that her race had been superior to humans in their ability to experience joy. She is lighter and freer, and Stauffer can take this form only by shedding his former ways. Leah teaches him true intimacy, and he decides to stay with her, despite the costs. They flee together into the woods, but Stauffer is killed. Leah transfers his brain into a new body. Yet they must take even stronger measures to elude those who want to destroy them, so they metamorphose into bird-like creatures. Leah has regained her lost fertility and they make plans to reproduce.
In this society, the ability to commit violence is programmed out of people. Yet it remains latent and resurfaces in Stauffer as manic rage, which allows him to break through his conditioning. It is a novel of metamorphosis, physical and emotional. It is also about the remaking of families by joining beings of different species. In it, Dean has worked with the feelings he has about his own inner darkness — its heaviness — and his need to lighten up, which can occur in the company of someone he loves.
Although he was living in Harrisburg, Dean tried to keep in touch with his relatives. One day he called Aunt Ginny, and in the course of the conversation, asked about Uncle Ray. Ginny was quiet for a moment.
“Didn’t anyone tell you?” she asked. “Ray died a few months ago.”
Dean was stunned. His Uncle Ray dead? It did not seem possible. He knew that Ray had suffered from some health problems, but he had not thought they were that serious. Even worse, no one had called to tell him.
“Well, that’s Kate,” was all Aunt Ginny would say.
Dean had not had a last chance to see the man he had looked to as a father. He had even missed the funeral and was unable to find out what had actually happened.
“It was a total, horrible shock to me to find out he was dead,” says Dean. “I never knew the full circumstances.”
“Ray had circulatory problems,” says Nancy (Mock) Eckard, Ray’s daughter-in-law. “He needed surgery to remove veins that ran down his legs and replace them with plastic tubes. They thought at one point that he might have to have a leg amputated because he hobbled when he walked. The surgeon in Bedford was reluctant to do it, but Ray insisted. He didn’t want to go to Pittsburgh. The surgery wasn’t successful, so they rushed him by ambulance to Pittsburgh, but the doctors there couldn’t redo it. It was too late.”
Ray Mock was buried in Bedford. When Dean and Gerda visited his mother’s grave a few months later, Dean went to find his Uncle Ray’s grave and take his leave. He felt bitter that things had gotten so out of hand with Kate and her feuds that he had missed the last years of his uncle’s life. He had expected that eventually the problems would recede, but the fact that no one had called him told him that Kate had poisoned the well among his relatives. The idea made him ill.
“Someday I’d like to write a novel with a character like her,” Dean says, “because I know that kind of person really well. It’s not dissimilar to what my father could do. He had the ability, in spite of what he was, to charm people, and he could convince them of outlandish things, bring them to believe in his oddball business enterprises. My Aunt Kate could do a similar thing; she could envelope people in a kind of web of deceit and make them part of her little feud.”
All Dean had left of his Uncle Ray were memories of their good times together. In 1997, he would dedicate Sole Survivor to this gentle, fun-loving man.
1Dean Koontz writing as Aaron Wolfe, Invasion (New York: Laser, 1975), p. 104.
2Dean R. Koontz, essay in The Double: Bill Symposium, edited by Bill Bowers and Bill Mallardi (Washington, DC: D:B Press, 1969).
3Dean R. Koontz, Anti-Man (New York: Paperback Library, 1970), p. 75.
4Dean R. Koontz, Hell’s Gate (New York: Lancer, 1970), p. 76.
5Ibid, p. 53.
6Dean R. Koontz, The Dark Symphony (New York: Lancer, 1970), p. 187.
7Ibid., p. 106.
8Dean R. Koontz, Beastchild (New York: Lancer, 1970), p. 75.