ALTHOUGH MOST OF HIS PROFESSORS DISMISSED GENRE FICTION, Dean Koontz continued to read science fiction, fantasy, and suspense throughout his college years. As a boy, he had found in these stories an escape from unpleasant reality, and he now wanted to write such tales himself.
Since his freshman year, he had sat in classes listening to educated people telling him about the merits of the classics and the Great Ideas of the Western world; he also heard their opinions that the types of writing he liked were shallow and uninspired. Yet it still seemed to him that the force of fiction lay in telling a good story. That’s what he liked. No matter what his professors claimed, he felt that the style and subject should not matter. Science fiction and suspense were as good as anything else. Therefore, when it came time for him to commit his own words to paper for a short story class, he ignored pressure to imitate the literary styles that his professors used as models, and chose instead to just tell a good story. He knew what felt right. His tale, “The Kittens,” was about a girl who repays her father’s cruelty in a particularly shocking way. He finished it and turned it in.
He then showed “The Kittens” to the advisor for the college’s literary magazine. She saw merit in his work, and submitted the story to The Atlantic Monthly’s contest for college students. Since this was a prestigious contest with a lot of competition no one had high expectations. Yet a few months later, to everyone’s surprise, Dean’s story won a top prize. It also won respect from his teachers. That same year, he sold it to a literary magazine and earned, with his own voice, his first professional money.
He had successfully followed his instincts, against the advice of those who claimed to know better, and had proven standard wisdom to be only a perspective — one that could be mistaken.
It would not be the last time.