A FEW YEARS AGO, WHEN I HAD FINISHED WRITING A BIOGRAPHY of Anne Rice, I pondered other possibilities. The first name that came to mind was Dean Koontz. I knew that he’d had a rough childhood with an alcoholic father, and I’d read some of his dark suspense. I thought he might have an interesting story. Yet I hesitated to contact him, because friends had told me he was quite private and very busy.
So I went on to write other books. Then one day in April 1994, I saw Dean at a breakfast that Ballantine Books was giving for authors at the American Booksellers Association convention. I thought, why not? I introduced myself. He knew my work with Rice, so I asked rather bluntly, “How about a biography of you?”
That’s not the proper way to do it, of course. I should have done some research first, should have been prepared, but he was standing right there. So I jumped in.
To my surprise, he was open to the idea — if I thought I could get an editor interested in such a project. Well, there were thousands of editors at that conference, many within a few feet of us. I knew that wouldn’t be any problem. I returned within five minutes with an assurance that there was interest, and that began the intense association that resulted in this book.
Before I had even written a proposal, Dean sent me copies of all of his books. This was the first of his generous gestures, which were to continue throughout the course of this project — and one of many that I was to hear about along the way. I also learned a lot about the business of writing, and Dean and his friends all have such a great sense of fun that I thoroughly enjoyed every interview.
I was especially pleased with how willing Dean was to explore his childhood terrain. Our interviews could go on for hours, whether over the phone or face-to-face. No matter how personal the questions, he never told me to go mind my own business. (Well, this is my business, but even so, I didn’t really expect him to answer every question.)
In the end, I had so much material that I could not possibly use it all, so I had to pick and choose according to a central theme that had gradually formed as I became familiar with his work: toxic intimacy between people closely related to each other and the dread of contamination, resisted through loving human bonds. I saw this in nearly every book, and it became quite clear that Dean had put his personal fears into motion in many different ways, formed from a childhood spent with an unpredictable, sociopathic father.
Now, before anyone accuses me of doing a Freudian analysis on an anti-Freudian writer, let me explain my basic approach. There are people who see the word “subconscious” or hear “childhood issues” and automatically think, “that’s Freud.” But that reaction is an oversimplification. A great many psychological theories utilize these notions, but in ways quite different from what Freud proposed. In fact, my approach mixes Jung’s theories and existentialism with recent work in psychoneurology. With all of that, I write psychobiography with a philosophical twist. In other words, I think the subconscious has a strong bodily component, but I leave room for a bit of conceptual finesse. I do believe that, despite the strong influence on us of many factors, we have a certain amount of free will, which means that we have some responsibility in what we become. The following account, in the most simple terms, is the way I understand it.
First, the technical part:
All systems that make up who we are — emotional, physical, mental — are organized around information. Each part processes information in its own way, and any given piece of information can be transformed through neural messengers from one system into another. Emotional stress, for example, can translate into the body as illness, and physical illness can adversely affect one’s moods. That’s common knowledge, but there is a much stronger relationship between mind and body than many people realize. According to research, emotional patterns from long-term exposure to various situations are absorbed by the body, and these become encoded at a cellular level. They are stored as body memories. What we learn — and the strength of any given memory — is contingent on our psychophysiological state at the time. Certain things can heighten emotional response, and those memories get more readily stored, often remaining imprinted for years. If we are in a state of fear, for example, hormones are released that influence our memory of that situation, and we will recall the experience more vividly than, say, something we had for breakfast two weeks ago.
In addition to emotional encoding, another factor comes into play. Our systems tend toward homeostasis — toward keeping our inner world constant. When an emotional scenario becomes physically imprinted, we tend to bring into our lives whatever will recreate that scenario, even if we find it painful. Someone who grows up attuned to the low energy level of a quiet family may have difficulty adjusting to the chaos of a spouse’s boisterous family. Or a person with many siblings may have trouble living alone later in life. Each “knows” within his body the energy level that has become part of his personal rhythms, and body memories seek to retain the status quo.
This is not to fall back on yet another form of cause-and-effect psychology. There is no one-to-one correlation between a set of circumstances and future behavior. Children from the same family may develop quite different ways of processing and storing this information, and some may be more aware than others of how to resist certain patterns. Yet it becomes clear from the patterns displayed in any person’s life just what his or her form of encoding might be. I have seen a woman who did not have osteoporosis nevertheless develop the stooped posture of her mother, who did. I have seen a man who grew up in a family that suppressed emotion have difficulty caring for his wife or children. Modeling and the household arena have a strong impact on our emotio-physical identities. Yet those patterns can be brought to awareness, and changed.
Thus, there is nothing inherently Freudian when discussing subconscious factors. I believe that the subconscious can have a profound influence on who we are and what we do, but I also believe that no one is trapped by that. We can transcend such influences and initiate change that will make us into people quite different from what might be predicted from childhood factors. I think Dean Koontz exhibits this transformation. The repeated patterns in his novels of his understanding of evil show great consistency, but the way he has chosen to live in awareness of what his father was, with the determination to be something different, presents a person for whom psychological fate may have diminished force. This book therefore is a “eurography” rather than a “pathography,” in that it maps the life of a person who has become psychologically healthy.
The term “psychobiography” means that I read through the novels and stories looking for things that confirmed or illuminated aspects of Dean’s life. Often I learned things about him from the books that deepened my understanding of life experiences about which he had already told me; sometimes the books inspired me to ask questions I had not thought of during our interviews. Since there is an organic relationship between life and art, a writer’s experience and his work will each inform the other. There is a theory that the serious works of an author are always about the same theme, and that seems to hold true. Writers keep trying over and over to make sense of the world through whatever most concerns them. Since the kinds of life experiences that might preoccupy a writer are usually complicated and unfinished, it makes sense to look for repeated psychological patterns in the work.
I should make it clear that this is not an “authorized” biography as such, because Dean did not seek me out to write it or tell me what I should write; he neither guided nor endorsed my analysis of his work or my interpretation of its meaning. The word “authorized” on the biography of a living person can also imply that the subject has no intention of writing an autobiography; but Dean does, indeed, have that intention. He was a highly cooperative subject, however, helping me with sources and fact-checking.
I spoke with people from every period of his life, but when I could not reach or persuade someone to talk with me, I relied on Dean’s memory of important events. I read all of the novels, stories, poems, and articles that he has written. I also used reviews, interviews, newspaper and magazine accounts, and my own experience of the places where Dean has lived. I talked with fans and kept up with an Internet chat line to form a sense of what his readers feel about his work. Where I needed more scholarly material, such as information about adult children of alcoholics or about schizophrenia, I frequently relied on several different types of sources. A complete bibliography is listed in the back.
All quotes, unless otherwise specified, are from interviews that I personally conducted.
Admittedly there were times when I ran into dead ends, often due to the fact that some people have devised false documents and attributed them to Dean. There are letters in circulation among some collectors that purport to be his, but the facts contradict the information contained in those letters. Collectors should know that even from his earliest years as a writer, Dean used letterhead; any letter not on the stationery of that period is fraudulent. Material that was added to his early nonfiction books by Aware Press also supported a myth that he participated in things that he did not. Some collectors attribute to him pen names that were not his, such as Shane Stevens — who is a real person — or works by authors such as John Hill, whose real name happens to match one of Dean’s pseudonyms. Even Dean’s wife, Gerda, has been subject to rumors. She was supposedly married to another bestselling writer before Dean, though they have been together since high school!
I have checked everything in these pages with Dean and Gerda. Wherever one person’s memory is different from what Dean recalls and the difference seemed significant, I have supplied both accounts — with the idea that no one’s memory is one hundred percent reliable and perceptions may differ. Overall, however, this is the story of Dean Koontz, told in a way that feels authentic to him, without it being exclusively his perspective. The interpretation of the books is entirely mine.
A final note to readers: There are “spoilers” within, as they say on the Internet, remarks about the novels that give away pertinent information. This is because whenever I read biographies of other writers, I dislike the assumption that I’m familiar with all of that person’s work. With that experience in mind, I included basic plots for all of the novels, and for some, I revealed the ending if it seemed germane to the point that I wished to make. Anyone who has not read a certain novel, and wishes to do so, should skip over the paragraphs that summarize plots, and perhaps even my analysis. Except for the more ambitious novels in recent years, lack of familiarity with the plot of early books will not hinder anyone’s ability to read this biography. It should be noted that plot summaries can give the wrong impression that a book is simplistic — particularly with science fiction. No one should substitute my summaries for the fuller experience of reading any given novel.