Bookreporter.com interviews Dean Koontz (1998)

Interviewed by Joe Hartlaub


Having written over 70 books and countless short stories, Dean Koontz keeps getting better and better with every novel he pens. His latest thriller, SEIZE THE NIGHT --- a sequel to FEAR NOTHING --- is a novel that can just as easily stand alone. The following interview, brilliantly engineered by TBR's Joe Hartlaub, is amazingly candid and consistently clever. Koontz will dazzle you --- and maybe even frazzle you --- with his pun-filled monologues and witty word play. Discover how this prolific author keeps his writing from getting stale (preview: it has to do with toaster ovens), where his influences come from --- the dead ones anyway --- and how he learned all the fascinating surfer lingo found in SEIZE THE NIGHT. So seize this opportunity to learn more about this truly amazing writer.

TBR: SEIZE THE NIGHT hits the bookstores December 29th. It has been out for a while in the UK. Any reason why was it released there first?

DK: British hardcover sales can be tremendously boosted by being in the Christmas market, more so than here, and my U.S. publisher, who wants to land in stores after Christmas, is gracious enough to allow the British to go first in their market. I wish I had a more exciting answer, but that's all there is to it. I wish I could say it's all part of a plot by evil extraterrestrials, but it's not. I wish I could say that my British publication date was predicted by Nostradamus as a precursor to Doomsday, but that would be a lie. I wish I could say that Big Foot was involved in this somehow, because I really don't trust Mr. Foot, I really don't, but as far as I know, he's not had a role in the discontinuity of my British and American publication dates, though I'm dead-solid sure that he had something to do with the cheese missing from my refrigerator.

TBR: There are a number of things I wanted to ask you about SEIZE THE NIGHT. While it is a sequel to FEAR NOTHING, it stands well on its own, and in fact contained several subplots that could easily have spun --- or be spun --- off into other novels. Will we be visiting Christopher Snow and Moonlight Bay again in the near future?

DK: When I started to write SEIZE THE NIGHT, I set two goals for myself in addition to those I always have when embarking on a new novel. First, I wanted it to stand entirely alone, so you could read it without first reading FEAR NOTHING and nevertheless find it entirely self-contained and satisfying. In, say, a detective-novel series, it's easy to make every book stand alone, because each involves a new case, and there's no complex story and character arc spanning multiple novels; but in a trilogy like this, there are plot, character, and theme arcs, so making every volume a complete experience is tough. My editor and I think SEIZE THE NIGHT is essentially a hundred percent successful at this, and advance reviews seem to agree. Second, I wanted anyone who read SEIZE THE NIGHT to be able then to read FEAR NOTHING without having it spoiled for them. I think I was about 90% successful with this one, protecting most of the story line of the first book, although inevitably the central premise of book one must be revealed early in book two. These goals, in addition to the usual challenge of writing a story as well as I possibly can, made SEIZE THE NIGHT the hardest thing I've done in a while. During the writing, I found myself wallowing in deep, murky pools of angst, wading through an endless sludge of self-doubt, through a slough of despond, through an oily murk of despair. But at last I finished the manuscript, burned my writing clothes, took a long hot shower, immersed myself in a vat of antiseptics, drank a bottle of cologne, and made myself fairly presentable again.

TBR: Christopher Snow is an incredibly unique character. He is unable to tolerate light due to a condition called xeroderma pigmentosum (XP). He could easily be sitting around all day feeling sorry for himself. Instead he switches his days and nights around, leads a full life, has many friends --- and when one of them needs help, he doesn't hesitate for a second, he jumps into the situation with both feet and gets the job done. He reminded me, in a very remote way, of the pulp hero Doc Savage. Snow's friends also to some extent reminded me of the cast Doc assembled around himself.Were you drawing on Doc as a prototype or is Snow a combination of divergent elements?

DK: I've never read Doc Savage, so I can't claim it's an influence. For more than a decade, however, Gerda and I have worked with charities for the disabled, especially with Canine Companions for Independence, and I've found that many of even the most severely disabled tend to be more in love with life, more optimistic, and lese self-pitying than one hell of a lot of people who have the full use of all limbs and senses. That's why I created the eleven-year-old disabled girl, Regina, as the linchpin of HIDEAWAY, and Thomas --- the Down's syndrome boy--- as the thematic focal point of THE BAD PLACE. In my experience, their indomitability is not merely a nice conceit for a piece of fiction; It's the truth, it's the way so many disabled people really are, and it's inspiring. They serve as a symbol of all humanity's courage in the face of death. But the primary reason I like to write about the disabled is because I'm always looking for characters who are absent from other fiction, people who rarely if ever get written about in either popular or literary novels. That's one reason I tackled a Vietnamese American character in TICKTOCK and a grief-shattered suicidal man as the lead in SOLE SURVIVOR. Getting inside the head of a character unlike those who usually inhabit novels is both a challenge and a thrill.

TBR: Speaking of influences --- and SEIZE THE NIGHT is so much fun that I don't want to give anything away here --- I detected a subtle Lovecraftian influence in SEIZE THE NIGHT. You mention Lovecraft directly in the book. You sneak a mention of Brian Lumley in it as well. My favorite subtle reference of yours, however, was to William Hope Hodgson. His book HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND was actually the first book in that genre that I read, even before Lovecraft. He regrettably isn't as well known as Lovecraft. Was Hodgson an early influence on you or someone you've discovered recently?

DK: Oh, yeah, I had a Lovecraft period big time, in my teens, just as did Chris Snow and Bobby Halloway in FEAR NOTHING and SEIZE THE NIGHT. These books are peppered with allusions to different streams of American culture. There are webs of quiet references to 20th-century poetry, most of which only hard-core poetry fanatics are going to notice (all four of you); lines and images and philosophies that are distilled out of almost fifty years of rock-and-roll; an obvious matrix of surfer lore and lingo, but also a less obvious stew of allusions to the mythical underpinnings of the surfer culture, and then lots and lots of allusions to the --- oh, let's call it the --- dark suspense genre. I'm not surprised that the reference to Brian Lumley was noticed, but I'm knocked out that you picked up on the fact that Bill Hodgson is a reference to William Hope Hodgson! You know your stuff! The inside of your head must be a musty, crammed-to-the-rafters, attic storehouse of the weird, like mine! THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND is my favorite haunted house story of all time and unquestionably the creepiest. I read it when I was about nineteen or twenty, and it scared the kidney fluid out of me. It's also a parallel-world story, in a way, a door-to-otherwhere yarn, and we know why that makes Hodgson the perfect name for the character in SEIZE THE NIGHT. Although I've said a million times that I'm not a horror writer, and although I would argue to the death (a cruel and hideous death) that I am not a horror writer, I do like horror and have always hoped one day to write a sort of modern version of THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND that would capture the total whacked-out eeriness of Hodgson's generally --- and undeservedly --- obscure masterpiece.

TBR: If it's okay with you, I'd like to touch on another subject. You have created an incredible body of work, both in terms of quality and quantity. Over a 30 year period you have averaged better than two novels per year. This, of course, does not take into account your short fiction and your nonfiction books. I have two questions relating to this. First of all, what sort of writing discipline, or schedule, have you created for yourself?

DK: I sit down at my keyboard at 7:30 in the morning, and I work until dinner, with no lunch break. Indeed, my protracted absences from the kitchen allow the aforementioned nefarious Mr. B. Foot to steal the cheese and other treats with little fear of being caught in the act. I find that long sessions allow me to settle more deeply into character and setting, to see and feel the fictional world more fully. Strangely, ten- or eleven- hour sessions don't tire me; in fact, they energize me, and I'm often more excited about a scene at the end of a long day than I was when I sat down to it in the morning, I love the possibilities of language, the gracefulness and suppleness of English, so while storytelling is - make no mistake! --- hard work, it is also a form of play.

TBR: Secondly, how have you managed to avoid becoming "stale" or "burned-out?"

DK: I have avoided becoming stale by putting a little water on the plate, lying on the plate, and having myself "refreshed" in a toaster oven for twenty-three minutes once every month. Twenty-one minutes is too little, and you risk staleness; twenty-four minutes is too long, and you risk becoming too crisp, thereafter given to writing only minimalist short-short stories and haiku. Other than that, I find it helps to give myself new challenges with every book. If I do things I've never done before, if I raise the bar higher book by book, if I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored. Plus I sprinkle myself with just a little cinnamon from time to time.

TBR: I find one thing incredibly interesting. When your story MOUSE IN THE WALLS OF THE GLOBAL VILLAGE was published in Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison in his introduction to your story predicted --- and this was in 1972 --- that if you continued as you had, in the next five to seven years you would rise to the pinnacle of "One-Mansmanship" --- the perch were you would be the only man doing Dean Koontz stories, where you had the corner on a market demanding Koontz fiction. And he was pretty much dead-on with his prediction. Besides Harlan, did you have anyone else who was prescient enough at that time to predict how far you would go?

DK: Harlan is a visionary, a seer, a superprescient prognosticator, a prophet with honor, a soothsayer seething with soothe to say, a foreteller with formidable forelocks, a geomancer (who once sold Geos on television!), an haruspex who can see more in an animal's entrails than the rest of us might learn from reading every volume in the Library of Congress, and just a total know-it-all. In truth, considering that I wasn't a very good writer in my early days, I'm not sure what Harlan saw that no one else --- including me ---saw, but he turned out to be right. I hate telling Harlan he's right. He's spent his life being right about too many things. His head's already so large he has trouble getting through doorways. I don't want to be responsible for additional enlargement of his cranium, because he'll probably send me a bill for all his new hats.

TBR: You also wrote an introduction to MOUSE, stating that you were beginning, in 1972, to branch out into mainstream novels and suspense novels. You also indicated that you wanted to see some of your suspense and mainstream work on film. As we sit here some 26 years later, it appears that you have accomplished everything that you set out back then to accomplish. Are there any of your books that haven't been made into movies that you would like to see made into screenplays?

DK: I sure haven't accomplished what I wanted to in film. Most of the adaptations have been trash, reels of suppurating celluloid, and in some cases (notably HIDEAWAY), I've spent more agony in legal fees trying to get my name off the picture than I was paid for the rights in the first place. But the miniseries of INTENSITY was a terrific piece of work, and the miniseries of MR. MURDER (on ABC in April) is also exceptionally good. SOLE SURVIVOR is shaping up in development right now, and we're negotiating a deal on a one-hour series and a series of related two-hour movies that promise to be exciting and well-made if they happen. My problem was selling rights to people who didn't understand the material. I'm not making that mistake any longer, and perhaps I'll have a second chance in Hollywood.

TBR: What can we look forward to in the way of television or film adaptations of your books within the next year? Any plans for a screenplay of FEAR NOTHING or SEIZE THE NIGHT?

DK: The aforementioned MR. MURDER is the only thing finished at the moment. We're not putting the Snow trilogy out to the film market until the third book is done --- and even then, if there's interest, I'm going to be wary about entrusting it to anyone. Aside from whatever price a producer might pay, I expect a mortgage on his soul. These characters are too important to me to see happen to them what happened to WATCHERS in the Hormel-fisted care of Mr. Roger Corman.

TBR: In FEAR NOTHING and SEIZE THE NIGHT you incorporate quite a bit of surfer lingo into the narrative, have you picked this up by osmosis, by research, or are you surfing twelve hours a day?

DK: Because Gerda and I had been working such long hours for so many years, we found it difficult --- impossible! --- to take time off, We worked straight through the weekends. Finally, three years ago, we decided to buy a house on the water, a smaller getaway place only twenty minutes from where we live during the week, a house in which work would never be allowed. No computers. No reference tomes. A phone with a number unknown to anyone but us. No clothes except Hawaiian shirts and hula skirts. No books except light reading. No serious food. No sharp instruments. This house just happened to be near one of the most famous surfing spots along the California coast, and soon I found myself listening to the richest and most fascinating lingo I'd ever heard. I knew this was golden material, and as Chris Snow was in the development stage, suddenly it seemed exactly right that he would be a surfer, albeit a night surfer.

TBR: I have to ask this, though it is an unfair question --- of your entire body of work, what is your favorite book? And what, if any, is the book you wish you had never written?

DK: I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written --- and I've kept them all out of print for the past twenty years. My personal favorites? That's tough, and I might alter the list somewhat a month from now. But probably WATCHERS, LIGHTNING, INTENSITY, THE BAD PLACE, MR. MURDER, DARK RIVERS OF THE HEART, COLD FIRE, and the first two books of the Snow trilogy, FEAR NOTHING and SEIZE THE NIGHT. That's more than five, but I'm shameless.

TBR: What writers have influenced you the most?

DK: The only fair thing in answering this question is to limit the list to the dead: Charles Dickens, John D. MacDonald, James M. Cain, Robert Heinlein, Raymond Chandler, Kenneth Grahame (THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS).

TBR: What books are you reading now?

DK: A history of string cheese. I forget the author. And Jim Harrison's THE ROAD HOME.

TBR: Are you working on anything new right now, and if so can you tell us about it?

DK: I am always working on something, even if just darning holes in my socks. Fortunately, all my socks are currently mended, and I'm able to concentrate on fiction. I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it. I guard my current story the way Rumpelstiltskin guarded his name, as if revealing it before I've finished working on it might give you some magic power over me. You're an astute and clever interviewer, so I suspect I would be at mortal risk if I gave you the chance to possess a magic power over me. Next thing you know, I'd be transformed into a frog, a slug, a mad hyena, a gherkin marinating eternally in a Heinz bottle with a bunch of other damn gherkins.

TBR: Do you give books as gifts during the holidays? If you could receive a book as a gift this season, what would you want?

DK: Yes, I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari. What book would I like to receive? Anything well written. Any genre. Fiction or nonfiction. Just so it grips, contains truth, and lifts me up.