Dean Koontz, the suspense novelist responsible for best-selling page-turners like Watchers, Odd Thomas, The Good Guy, and The Darkest Evening of the Year, is literature’s Rodney Dangerfield: He gets precious little respect. But while most critics haven’t glommed onto Koontz’s vivid prose and hairpin plot turns, readers can’t seem to get enough, snatching up nearly 325 million copies of his books over the past 40 years. A creative chameleon with a seemingly superhuman resistance to writer’s block, Koontz delights in bending genres and defying expectations — he might follow a gritty chase-thriller with a supernatural white-knuckler and then a heart-wrenching adventure saga. If you take a look around, someone nearby is probably reading a book by Koontz right now and loving every minute of it.

In 2007, you released two new novels. The Good Guy is a crackerjack thriller, and The Darkest Evening of the Year is a suspense novel featuring a golden retriever as one of its main characters. They couldn’t be more different.
In my younger days as a writer, I was always in trouble with publishers because I didn’t write the same book twice. This irritates publishers, generally speaking, who like to label books, package books, and slot them conveniently into their release schedules. They like it when authors write the same book, or the same kind of book, over and over. I don’t really do that. I once got into a fight with a publisher who said they couldn’t publish one of my books for seven years, or it would destroy my career. They said it was that different from the book that had come before it. We fought over it for four months. It, of course, went on to be the most successful book to that point in my career. [Laughs.]

Wouldn’t writing the same types of books come more naturally?
I need to mix it up like that to keep myself from being bored. I’m a slacker at heart, and I have a low threshold for boredom. I work really hard to keep myself entertained when I sit down to write.

You started writing stories when you were eight. What were they like?
There were two different kinds — the ones with puppies and dogs and sweet stuff, and then there were the ones with scary monsters and all the things kids are afraid of. I would write them on tablet paper and draw a cover, and I’d staple the edges and, being a really considerate kid, I’d cover the staples with electrician’s tape so no one would hurt their fingers. Then I peddled them to relatives for a nickel. [Laughs.]

You endured a really torturous upbringing — extreme poverty and a frighteningly abusive, alcoholic father. Many artists claim that psychic scars can lead to greater creative output. What do you think?
I may be deluding myself, but I don’t think I have great psychic scars. [Laughs.] I haven’t talked much about this, because it gives too much power to my father to say that he was the most important thing in my life or that he’s responsible for my career. It’s just not true. You could probably say that I became a writer because of my childhood — not so that I could analyze it, but so I could escape it. As a survivor of these kinds of experiences, I believe you can let the person who has impacted your life continue to do so, even long after they’re dead, as my father is, so that they essentially win. But I refuse to let that be the case for me, ever.

Beyond that, I never had this dark, terrible, moping childhood. There were a lot of terrible things in my childhood, but I was also a pretty happy kid. I remember looking around at the world and seeing beauty almost everywhere. A lot of times I was looking in books, and that always pushed away the darkness for me. Books were an escape, but they were also a teaching mechanism for me. I saw in books that all families weren’t the same as mine, and that was a very good thing for me.

To me, your books seem to convey the point of view that we can survive anything, no matter how grim, and that beauty is always within our reach. Would you agree?
Readers tell me that my books have changed their attitudes about life, that somehow my books helped them to see that life is more than hopeless. So maybe there’s something to what you’re saying. I occasionally get letters from people who discovered my books recently and then read 30 of them in six months — so they get kind of saturated by the world view. That always pleases me, because I believe life is meaningful and full of purpose. We only need to seek out that reason and pursue it. We’re all here for a reason, and hopefully that’s part of what my books are about. When people feel that coming through in the books, that’s the best thing I could hope for.

Beyond that fundamental optimism, what do you think it is about your writing that connects with such a vast audience?
I try not to think too much about it. You can overanalyze yourself and fall into trouble that way. But judging by the mail I get and the things people say when I meet them at signings, it comes down, basically, to three things. Number one is characters. It’s the same for readers as it is for me. If characters come alive on the page when I’m working, then I know the book’s going to work. If I don’t fall in love with the characters, then I have to give up the book, and that’s happened.

Then, number two, my stories move, and people like that. I’ve written some rather large books, and every page I publish goes through 20 or 30 drafts, so that by the time I’m done, no matter how large the book, there’s nothing left to cut. That means the story’s really well-paced.

Finally, I believe readers appreciate the care I put into the words themselves. They love the metaphor, the simile, the imagery. When I use language to full effect in my books, my readers tell me it creates a sense of magic.

I’ve taken some heat for it. I’ve been told that you can’t be a best-selling author with a vocabulary of more than 500 words. I think that’s ridiculous. My dog has a vocabulary of at least 300 words. But I don’t like to analyze this too much. I don’t want to block what I do and have to go find honest work.

I understand music plays a key role in your creative process, that you sometimes play a single CD over and over until a novel is finished.
That’s true. Sometimes I write without music, but usually I write with it, and it has to be something I’ve listened to before — new music will always distract me. I wrote an entire novel, Life Expectancy, to Paul Simon’s Graceland, and I’ve written two novels to the music of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, a Hawaiian singer who does this gorgeous medley of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “What A Wonderful World.” I’ve played that song 50 times in a row sometimes! I choose music that fits the mood of what I’m writing. I’ve written some novels to nothing but swing, others to the music of Chris Isaak. It works for me. It pushes the concerns of the world from my head and brings forward the story that I’m writing.

One of the major characters in The Darkest Evening of the Year is a dog, and no one writes dogs like Dean Koontz.
One of the most popular novels I’ve written is a book called Watchers. It’s a big dog story. Over the years, people have never stopped asking me to write a sequel. Darkest Evening isn’t a sequel to Watchers, but it is another big dog story all these years later. It’s truly a story about how we save ourselves by saving others; in this book, the “others” happen to be dogs.

Not only does your success as an author seem completely secure, but you’ve also been married for forty-one years. What’s the secret to a happy marriage?
You have to share a sense of the absurdity of life and be able to laugh at things together. But it’s also very important to remember you married your spouse because of something deep inside of them — deeper than looks or anything — that resonates for you. If you marry them for their soul, then you will always have respect for them, and that appreciation and respect will get you through even the tough times.

More specifically about my wife, Gerda, and me — we came from similar backgrounds. We both love books, we love architecture, we love art. With art we have a rule: If we both love it, we buy it. If only one of us loves it, we don’t buy it. We’ve learned that if we don’t both love it, then in a few years the one who did love it will go, “Why did I like that?” [Laughs.] By making these choices as a team, everything works in the long term.

 

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J. Rentilly writes about film, music, literature, and pop culture. He lives in Los Angeles.