DEAN’S FATHER, NOW ALONE, HAD SOLD THE HOUSE AND WAS living in a trailer in Bedford. He would regularly drive out to Harrisburg to see Dean and Gerda. He had girlfriends now, one after another, and he often brought them. Although Ray had no interest in Dean’s books — had never read one — If someone seemed impressed that Dean was a writer, Ray would talk him up to make himself seem more important.
“He would show up because he needed money, or because he was in trouble or he had some new girlfriend he wanted us to see,” says Dean. “He was always going to marry them, every one of them. He’d take me aside and say, ‘I think this is the one.’ Most of them were absolutely appalling. You never knew who he’d show up with, and usually he’d be drunk. Once he showed up at eight o’clock at night with this hitchhiker he had picked up and had gone drinking with. Gerda and I were furious; we had no idea who this guy was he was bringing to our apartment.”
Sometimes his father’s current enamorata was unintentionally entertaining, and once Ray brought a girlfriend who inadvertently inspired a conversation in his 1983 novel Darkfall.
“When he was married to my mother he ran around with women wrestlers, and those were the days when women wrestlers were not attractive. They looked like male wrestlers, but he liked hard-drinking women. After my mother’s death, he introduced us to this hulking woman who was unbelievably bigoted.”
At one point in the conversation, she said, “Now, something we’re beginning to see back home that I don’t like is these Neses everywhere.”
Dean shook his head, uncertain how to respond.
“Yeah,” she said, “they’re everywhere, these Neses. I saw one of them the other day. He just looked so odd to me, so I walked up to him and asked him what kind of Nese he was. And he just was rude to me.”
Finally Dean said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
She told him, “Well, all I did was ask him, is he Japanese, is he Chinese, is he Vietnamese?”
Dean and Gerda glanced at each other, suppressing their laughter. This woman was so mindlessly prejudiced that she was almost funny. Dean never forgot the conversation and gave much of it to a hooker in Darkfall who is interviewed by the male and female leads, a pair of cops investigating a grisly murder.
Eventually Dean and his father had a serious confrontation.
“I’d written a book with four-letter words in it,” Dean explains. “Now, my father certainly used every four-letter word in the book, but still he called me up.”
Ray was drunk and he was furious.
“How could you use these words in a book?” he demanded to know. “You can’t do that. You’re an embarrassment to me, you’re an embarrassment to your mother’s memory.”
This surprised Dean, because he had used such words in other novels. As it turned out, Ray had never read this novel, but someone else had told him about it. Dean tried to reason with him. He did not often use four-letter words, he pointed out, but when he did, they were necessary.
Ray proceeded to yell at him until his only recourse was to just hang up. Ray called back, crying and screaming, to continue his diatribe. When Dean tried again to talk about it calmly, Ray hung up.
Dean heard nothing for a while, and then Ray’s brother Bob called to tell him, “Your dad’s going to kill himself. He’s threatening to kill himself because of what you wrote in a book.”
Dean was annoyed. “Bob,” he said, “he’s not going to kill himself. I mean, he always threatened suicide with my mother. When nothing else worked with her, he was going to kill himself. And anyway, if he’s crazy enough to kill himself because I used the words ‘hell’ and ‘damn,’ then fine. But it’s not going to happen.”
Bob was not so sure. “He’s so disturbed, I’m going to have to drive up there and sit with him.”
Dean gave up. “Do what you have to do,” he said. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
There was a flurry of calls from Bob asking Dean to guarantee to never again use those words in a book. Dean refused.
After not hearing from Ray for a week, Dean called to see how he was feeling.
“I never want to talk to you again,” said Ray, and hung up.
They did not hear from him for six months and Gerda was delighted with the reprieve. She did not like Ray and she especially hated the way he tried to manipulate Dean.
Then one night Ray called. “I really did a stupid thing,” he admitted. “I shouldn’t have carried on with you like that. I’m sorry.”
Dean relented. “Okay, it’s forgiven,” he said.
“I’d just hate to tell you how furious I was,” said Ray, and then added something that Dean knew he meant: “For a while I was planning to come down there with a gun.”
That year, 1971, saw large-scale bombing in Vietnam, while antiwar demonstrations closed the New Jersey Turnpike. Lieutenant Calley was found guilty of murder in connection with the debacle at My-lai, and in California, the corpses of over two dozen migrant workers were unearthed on Juan Corona’s property. Gay rights became a larger issue, and George Harrison released “My Sweet Lord.”
Dean published The Crimson Witch, his only space opera, as a novel. The term “space opera” had been coined in 1941 to refer pejoratively to hackneyed spaceship tales, but then was applied to adventure stories of interplanetary conflict that have a naïve romantic element. First published as a novella in the October 1970 issue of Fantastic Stories, it went to Curtis Books for paperback issue. Completed in two weeks to get rent money, the book was billed as a “science fantasy.”
The Freudian influence is clear, as Dean makes explicit references to the id and superego. The action speeds along, with only superficial character development. The plot is a straight quest fantasy based in a power struggle, and resulting in the triumph of a hero and his lover.
Dean’s poetry-infatuated hero, twenty-one-year-old Jake Turnot, son of a munitions maker, overdoses on a drug that casts him into a postnuclear parallel world. Science is unknown here and the social hierarchies are medieval. The rulers are those who possess psionic powers. Jake acquires a superstitious talking dragon, Kaliglia, as his mount and companion, who informs him of a hole in King Lelar’s realm through which people disappear. Jake suspects it is a portal back to his world, and he will stop at nothing to find it.
Along the way, he seduces Cheryn, a witch. She tries to kill him, but then relents because she is in love. She adds her own powers to his quest and they manage to escape Lelar and return to Jake’s world. The police arrest them and the FBI wants to use Lelar’s psionic powers against the Russians. Cheryn, Jake, and Kaliglia return to the other world and Jake perceives its superiority: “It was a place of adventure for the sake of adventure, a place where a man’s wits counted for a great deal, a place where magic was never taken for granted.”1
Dean published only one short story that year, “Bruno.” It is a blend of humor, hard-boiled suspense, and science fiction, featuring a detective from a wacky parallel world — a detective who also happens to be an intelligent bear.
In his third year of full-time writing, Dean once again needed to find a way to pay the bills. The science fiction market was drying up, short stories paid almost nothing, and he did not wish to go back to writing erotica. Bob Hoskins at Lancer suggested that writing Gothic romances was fairly easy and somewhat lucrative. The demand for them was high and some publishers were putting out several novels in this line each month. The big-name novelists at the time were Victoria Holt and Dorothy Daniels, but Dean learned that nearly half of the other books in the genre were written by men using female pseudonyms. Resembling daytime soap operas, they were not too artistically demanding, and a successful Gothic writer could obtain multiple book contracts.
Dean took a look at the formula and learned that publishers believed that Gothic readers preferred timid heroines. They had decided that women most fear ending up alone, being in the dark, losing their man, or being raped. Ideally, the heroine hopes for a good marriage with a nice, strong, and highly moral man who can take care of her. This young woman then enters a realm unfamiliar to her, such as being a governess or companion in a wealthy household or in some exotic locale. Since everyone around her is a stranger, when she gets caught up in a mystery, each person’s actions are potentially suspicious and she interprets them according to her limited knowledge. The tone is usually melodramatic in its emphasis on stereotypical female fears and reactions. As romance develops, she often becomes a target of some evil. Then her man does something that casts a suspicious light on him and she must rethink her feelings about him.
Dean was uncertain about adopting a female point of view, and he felt no respect for such inflexible formula writing, so initially he declined. He wanted instead to find a subject and form that would develop and stretch his talents. His preference was to try suspense, which he had started to read under Gerda’s influence, but he did not yet feel confident in this genre. He needed time to develop, but there was no time. When financial matters pressed and his only other option was to take a part-time job, he decided that it was better for a writer to be writing, even if it meant writing books to a formula. So he changed his mind about Gothics.
He wrote the first book, Demon Child, in two weeks under the pseudonym “Deanna Dwyer.” It was about a young woman named Jenny Brighton who goes to the ancestral home of relatives in Pennsylvania. A young girl there named Freya believes herself to be a wolf. Jenny discovers that a gypsy had cursed the family. Jenny’s Aunt Cora believes in the curse, but Jenny’s cousin Richard insists that the girl simply needs psychiatric help. Yet during Freya’s strange comas, a horse, a rabbit, and then the veterinarian are all savagely mauled and killed. Jenny suspects Richard. Finally the family invites a psychologist, Walter Hobarth, to treat Freya. Jenny falls for him and he turns out to be the murderer. When he attempts to kill Jenny, Richard saves her. Jenny then realizes that her need for stability in a world of chaos had made her vulnerable to Hobarth and guarded against Richard.
Dean tells the story true to formula, but seems to insert an excessive amount of explanation into the mouth of the psychologist — indicating his own fascination with the discipline of psychology. Hobarth describes in detail how he had set everyone up. He even analyzes Jenny while holding a gun on her. When his plan fails, he crumples and falls to his death in a sinkhole on the estate — a metaphor of how his own theories cracked when they failed to work. While a bit obvious, it shows Dean’s attempt to utilize literary devices even in such superficial novels.
Dean sent this novel to Hoskins, who read it, suggested a few changes, and then bought it for $1,500. It was published in 1971. For Dean, it was fairly easy money — $750 per week — and he soon tried another.
Writing this novel, Dean realized that formulas for Gothics reflected old-fashioned values that did not accommodate social changes for women. Although the feminist movement (known then as the women’s liberation movement, or women’s lib) was making waves in 1970, there was no room for it among the Gothic readership. Strong, independent women were viewed suspiciously as bullish, unromantic, and even unfeminme. Sinister settings required someone who trembled and cried. Dean was well aware of what an independent woman could do, having witnessed such spirit in both his mother and his wife, but he realized that, were such a woman to be a lead character in one these novels, she would take care of things herself — which would then bring a quick end to the story.
Dean understood that Gothics had their own special rhythm and mood, because the central mystery must develop slowly against a sinister atmosphere. There is usually a murder, and the sexual tone is romantic, but gentle and chaste.
After three months, Dean wrote a second Gothic romance, Legacy of Terror, about a woman, Elaine Sherred, who is prone to pessimism. She expects the worst, is suspicious of the wealthy, and copes with most situations by reducing them to their simplest terms. When she becomes a nurse to the aging Jacob Matherly, she is plunged into all that she fears and she must let go of simplistic attitudes before she can find love and happiness. That is, she must learn to accommodate the brighter side of life, because her penchant for a sober approach repels the hero and bonds her with the killer. A more optimistic approach, she realizes, is key to balance.
Dean shows in this book, and the three that follow, that his idea of menace derives from a disordered mind rather than from any brute or supernatural force. He also reveals early his personal fear that madness is genetic and may be passed from parent to child. That was the theme of this second Gothic, and rather than use this novel as a way to challenge and defuse such ideas, he draws them out in predictable ways.
In Legacy of Terror, when Elaine arrives at the mansion, Jacob tells her that someone in the house is insane and wants to kill him. He warns her that his daughter-in-law, Amelia, had been insane, as had her father before her, and he believes that either Amelia’s brother, Paul, or one of her sons, Gordon or Dennis, may carry the same genetic fault. Subsequently Jenny learns that Amelia had murdered her twin infant daughters before falling down the stairs to her death.
Elaine is drawn to Gordon. She thinks the mad one may be Paul (an echo of Ray Koontz), who is alcoholic and who cannot hold a job or tolerate bosses (“it’s in his blood”). Or it may be Dennis, the frivolous artist who has painted a blood-spattered portrait of his mother, calling it “Madness.”
However, the psychotic murderer is Gordon, who thinks himself possessed by his mother’s spirit and who feels he must rid the place of females who might rob her of her family. Dennis saves Elaine, and she realizes that her judgment on frivolous people had prevented her from seeing the adaptive value of a playful mind.
Dean got a slightly better advance for this book, $1,750, which was the same advance he got for his third Gothic, Dance with the Devil, published in 1973.
In this story, Katherine Sellers arrives at Owlsden, a mansion in the country, to become a companion to the wealthy Lydia Boland. At the age of eight, Katherine had lost her parents in a flash flood and was subsequently raised in an orphanage. She survived the experience by becoming an optimist, believing that as long as she sees the bright side, nothing bad can happen. She dislikes Lydia’s son Alex, who is moody and pessimistic, as are all of his friends. Instead, she gravitates to people with charm and a positive outlook.
She arrives during a snowstorm and meets Michael Harrison, who offers her a ride to the mansion. She learns of animosity between him and Alex. She also hears about a band of Satanists in the area who make animal sacrifices. When one of the house servants who had warned Katherine against this cult is murdered, she seeks help from Michael. He urges her to meet him in a secluded spot. She soon discovers it is a trap and that he is the leader of the Satanists, who want to sacrifice her. Alex and his friends rescue her and she realizes that being so determined to align herself with optimists had robbed her of perspective. She and Alex then find romance.
Not everyone thought that Dean was making good use of his time by writing such books. “I had writer acquaintances who accused me of prostituting myself,” he recalls. “I said, ‘I’d rather do these books during lean times and at least be able to keep writing.’” He watched these people quit writing to get regular jobs to pay the bills. They fully expected to return to writing, they assured him, but some never did. Dean decided to just let them think he was cheapening his talent. He was writing these novels to get money so that eventually he could take his time writing those that he cared about.
Dean also talked Gerda into writing some to add to their limited income. Gerda wrote two, but only one was published before Lancer folded. Her book, A Darker Heritage, came out in 1973 under her maiden name, Cerra.
More Hawthornesque than any of Dean’s had been, Gerda’s novel has a classically Gothic setting and explicit references to evil. Yet it also has a political edge regarding social attitudes toward independent women. Although book collectors favor the idea that Dean is the true author, there is a difference in style. Dean offered substantial editorial advice, but Gerda wrote it. Her character, Leigh Kavanaugh, is less timid and more able to stand up for herself than the heroines that Dean had portrayed, and Gerda inserts commentary rather than the longer explanations that Dean favored.
In A Darker Heritage, Leigh Kavanaugh inherits Polk Mansion from her Uncle Silas, who had been involved in devil worship. A young attorney, to whom she is attracted, urges her to sell, but she insists that she is self-reliant enough to manage it. As an orphan, she had never had a place to call her own and she dislikes any attempts to make her believe that, as a woman, she should be less independent. When she reads her uncle’s gruesome diary, however, and finds body parts, she fears there may be more to this house than she can handle. A neighbor, Will, appears to be part of the cult and she fears his approaches, but he becomes her savior when the attorney turns out to be the cult’s high priest. Leigh learns that, while self-reliance is a positive quality, taken to an extreme it can endanger her.
Gerda’s second novel, for which she received the advance before the publisher went out of business, was set in a carnival atmosphere. About her short-lived writing career, she says, “These books were formula. If you knew how to write a sentence and structure a paragraph, you could write them. It was the same story over and over.” Since she was taking courses, working at a fulltime job, researching, and proofreading, she did not want to do any more. She announced that one writer in the family was enough. “I wasn’t driven to write,” she says.
Children of the Storm was Dean’s fourth Gothic. Published in 1972, it again involves a schizophrenic whose “evil” is explained as insanity. This novel was set on a private Caribbean island, Distingue, where Sonya Carter takes a job as governess to two children. She soon learns that someone has threatened the children and that another couple on the island, the Blenwells, want to control it. Their son, Ken, has a dark personality and seems a likely candidate. Sonya is attracted to Bill, the boatman, but soon discovers in the midst of a hurricane that Bill is in fact psychotic, and it falls to her to protect the children from his attacks. Ken helps her and she realizes that her own naiveté had set her up to move toward the wrong man.
In this novel, Dean again includes more than the heroine’s point of view, but the method seems erratic and its intent unclear. Sometimes he shows the perspective of the psychotic, as if attempting to explore this mindset, and only once, toward the end, does he insert Ken Blenwell’s point of view.
Dean’s knowledge of psychology at this stage in his life was superficial. He equated schizophrenia with murderous psychosis, although in fact his description pointed to the diagnosis of multiple personality and antisocial behavior. Bill, the boatman, has a counterpart in a man named Jeremy whose delusions fuel his aggression. It was as if Dean had decided that schizophrenia was the most dangerous and uncontrolled type of insanity and was therefore at the heart of the evil acts perpetrated by madmen who kill. Interestingly, one character comments that madmen do not work in pairs, and because of this the tandem killers go undetected at first. It foreshadows The Face of Fear, still several years away.
Dean’s fifth Gothic, The Dark of Summer, returns to a traditional setting, an estate in Massachusetts. Gwyn Keller is about to inherit her father’s vast fortune. Her parents and twin sister Ginny are dead, and her wealthy uncle invites her to spend the summer. She meets Jack Younger, a lighthearted lobster fisherman, who tells her that her uncle plans to develop the beachfront property and prohibit the fishermen from pursuing their trade. When confronted, Gwyn’s uncle has a different explanation. The ambiguity makes Gwyn feel paranoid. This worries her because after her parents’ death, she had suffered a mental breakdown. Then she starts to see her twin sister, who urges Gwyn to join her in death. In fact, the ghost is an actress hired by Gwyn’s uncle to make her think she is going insane. She sees through the pretense and resists.
Although this Gothic is not as romantic as those preceding it, Dean showed his ability to find variety within this rigid formula. Thus far, he had managed to diversify the setting and form, but this time he tampered a bit with the idea that the heroine must fall in love. It is also the only one of his Gothics in which the heroine is wealthy.
He wrote this novel over a weekend to fill an open slot. What they needed was a “queen-size” Gothic, which was about twenty thousand words longer than the standard books Dean had been writing. “Lancer called me on a Friday at eleven o’clock,” Dean remembers. “They had found out that one of the Gothics they had scheduled was plagiarized and they had to pull it. They were doing something like nine Gothics a month and if they lost that space on the rack, they wouldn’t get it back. There were no books in their list that they could just move forward without causing the same problem two weeks later, so they needed a book by Monday. I talked them into Tuesday. They were willing to pay me $4,000. As soon as I hung up the phone, I started writing, and I think we actually had to drive it into Manhattan on Tuesday morning.”
The editor told him it was one of the best Gothics he had seen in months, and to Dean’s surprise, it was later published in Norway and various other countries — the first of his Gothics to be translated.
Finally he was tired of these books. “After five of them,” Dean declares, “I didn’t care how quickly I could write them. I knew I’d never write another. When I look at my early books, I’m horrified that I wrote some of that stuff, but I know that I was learning every inch of the way. There were techniques I was able to try, experiments that I could get away with, because in those Gothic novel lines for a while, everything sold well — and publishers didn’t care what else you did as long as you adhered to the central formula. So I used them as practice ground.”
Having written in several genres, Dean was ready to try non-fiction again. He combined his penchant for explanation with his writing expertise at the age of twenty-six to teach everything he thought important to know in his Writer’s Digest book, Writing Popular Fiction. With a dedication to Robert Hoskins, from whom he had learned much of what he put into the book, he divided the genre categories into science fiction and fantasy, mystery, suspense, Gothic romance, Westerns, and erotica. He felt that mastering one genre makes it easier to cross over into another: Developing this flexibility may ensure the writer’s survival, as genres wax and wane in popularity. Whenever he discussed a genre in which he had written, he used examples from his own work, such as Beastchild and Legacy of Terror, to illustrate his points. Otherwise, he recommended books he had read.
Dean pulled no punches. Writing is hard work, he claimed. It is lonely and frustrating, and the markets are unpredictable. Although earlier in his career, he had written ten to twelve hours each day, every day, by this third year, he had settled into a schedule of eight hours, five or six days a week. That would soon change.
To research a genre, he read what he could find and noted the prominent publishers. He took advantage of the market listings in Writer’s Digest magazine, read Publishers Weekly, and looked through the annual Writer’s Market. He paid attention to which genres were hot and which were losing steam. His advice was for people who wanted to work as writers, although as the market shifted in years to come, so did his own habits. At the time, genre fiction was more widely read than mainstream. He was experienced only in the paperback market, which was successful, if low-paying. What he believed about writing then reveals his sense of professionalism and his awareness of the importance of running his writing career as a business. Much of his later success came from this early discipline.
Having been exposed as a student to the prejudices of English teachers that literary immortality was to be had only in serious mainstream fiction, Dean strove to point out how many authors now honored by the critics, such as Poe, Stevenson, and Twain, in fact had been genre writers. He insisted that category fiction could transcend formula and have artistic scope and literary merit.
According to him, genre stories involve five elements: a strong plot, a hero or heroine, clear and believable motivations (which he lists), lots of action, and a colorful background. He discusses each of these elements in detail, even recommending children’s books for research when expertise is otherwise too technical.
After going through the expectations for novels in each of the six genres, Dean then addresses the business side of writing. He describes how he plays with words and sounds to come up with provocative titles, believing they must evoke the impression of at least one of four elements — sex, violence, suspense, or exotic events. Since he believes that fiction is not a reflection of reality, but a sifting of reality’s essence, he describes how hard he works on the opening sentence and scene, how he keeps notebooks for free association, and how he has developed his own discipline. He believes that the most successful writers will set a goal for a certain amount of pages or words each day.
Since writing provides psychological structure, which has strong allure for him, it is not as difficult for him as it might be for others, to sit for hours at a time, day after day, typing up his stories. He insists that writers must keep their workplace clear, orderly, and professional, dismissing the idea that a disorderly desk fosters creativity.
Above all, he says, style is what a writer has to offer, but one should refrain from a conscious effort to develop it. Style evolves naturally. “If you make a conscious effort to form an individual style, you will more often end by imitating the work of writers whom you admire.”2 The rule to follow, he suggests is “say it as simply, as clearly, and as shortly as possible.”3
Most instructive in this book is Dean’s description of his writing method. After confessing amazement at the amateurish idea of writing a first draft quickly, and then polishing it in subsequent drafts, he insists that this method is a sign of sloppiness and that professionals polish as they go. Writers should write as clean and sound a first draft as possible. With each novel, he wrote on heavy bond paper with carbon paper and a second sheet beneath. (Photocopy was available but expensive.) “If a paragraph is not going well, I rip that set of papers out of the typewriter and begin the page again, but I never go on until that page is finalized and cleanly typed in finished copy. I waste a lot of paper. But I save a lot of time.”4
In anticipation of readers’ needs, as well as to be thorough, he raises the questions he feels are important to the process of writing, and answers them from his own experience. From royalties to manuscript format, from subsidiary rights to accounting and taxes, he covers the field. As a sign of the times, he encourages writers to submit their own work for the first couple of years. Not only will they understand the process of marketing, but they will work their way toward a good agent, who will not look at a novelist until he or she has sold at least one book.
Writing Popular Fiction is written with the authority of a born teacher, but with the naïveté of a twenty-six-year-old man who has known moderate success with small publishers. Dean clearly had confidence that his success would continue.
In January, he published another article in Writer’s Digest, which emphasized the demand for paperback “category” novels. Much of it echoed the book.
As 1972 got into swing, Dean was about to realize the results of his most prolific year to date.
1Dean R. Koontz, The Crimson Witch (New York: Curtis, 1971), p. 166.
2Dean R. Koontz, Writing Popular Fiction (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Press, 1972), p. 166.
3Ibid., p. 167.
4Ibid., p. 177.