Dean Koontz - Pseudonyms

 

Part 1:

Introduction

Deanna Dwyer

Leonard Chris

Part 2:

K. R. Dwyer

Brian Coffey

Anthony North

Aaron Wolfe

John Hill

Part 3:

David Axton

Leigh Nichols

Owen West

Richard Paige

 


Introduction

 

As Joan G. Kotker pointed out in the resourceful Dean Koontz: A Critical Companion:

"It is one of the realities of the publishing world that publishers are resistant to having popular writers write under the same name in more than one genre. The general belief is that audiences identify a particular author with a particular type of book, and they will be very disappointed if they buy a book written by author X, who has in the past written only adventure stories, and discover that what they have bought this time is not an adventure story but instead is a historical romance. It is also much easier to market a writer who writes only one kind of book; all the publisher has to do is say something like "Another tale of high adventure from X!" Readers know exactly what to expect and even where to find the book in a bookstore."

 

That's why, in The Dean Koontz Companion, it is stated that "Koontz experimented with several different genres in his early writing career. He wrote under a dozen different pseudonyms, each identified with a particular genre, on the advice from his agent and publisher that the public would not accept an author who wrote in different genres. Many of Koontz's pre-1980 works were in the science-fiction genre, dealing with supernatural or alien beings invading the earth. However, after 1980 he began writing cross-genre works which tended to be more realistic and psychological."

 

Koontz himself has been obviously asked multiple times about his relationship with pseudonyms in the earliest years of his career, and one of his typical replies can be found in  an interview for the Mystery Guild:

 

Q) Why did you write under a different name for some books?

A) Many reasons. One primary reason was that I always had the desire to write in multiple genres, while my publishers wanted me to always write the same thing. They felt that writing in more than one genre would confuse book buyers, so for marketing purposes they pushed me into multiple names.

 

In another interview we find a more articulated answer:

 

"There are many reasons for using pen names, but I resorted to them largely because, early in my career, agents and editors insisted that I use a pen name every time I wrote something different from what I had written before. They said that readers always wanted pretty much the same book from an author every time, and because I refused to write to formula, they wanted me at least to group books of similar narrative style under the same pen name. Brian Coffey was for shorter novels with a brisk style - The Face of Fear, The Voice of the Night. Nichols was for larger novels of suspense and intrigue that sometimes had elements of the horror story in them -The Servants of Twilight, Shadowfires, The Key to Midnight, The House of Thunder."

 

Each of the pen names employed a distinctive writing style and was published by a different house, sometimes by more than one house - by Lancer and Random, Bobbs-Merrill, Ace, Popular Library, Lippincott, Dial, Laser, Avon, New American Library and Jove. Between 1968 and 1975 Koontz also published 24 novels under his own name, with a variety of houses.

 

In many interviews, what certainly comes out as an utterly distinctive trait of his approach to storytelling, is a painstaking pursuit of excellence, due to what Koontz himself likes to refer to as his "being obsessive compulsive" to the point that he's "mortified if there's a comma error". An obvious evidence of this is clearly his approach tho the reissuing of his huge pseudonymous backlist. Back in 1985, in fact, Berkley started a reprinting of his books with Shattered, which had been previously published by Random House in 1973 with the byline K. R. Dwyer. From that point on, Koontz "became convinced that readers would be pleased by diversity as long as the books grabbed and held them", so he decided to progressively reissue under his own name his better pseudonymous books, allowing all the others, the ones he judged less valuable, to just fall out of print.

 

This process went on until 1994, when he set to revising one of his older titles before it was reprinted by Ballantine as Winter Moon. The book was Invasion, originally published in 1975 under the writing mask of Aaron Wolfe. The revision started slowly but suddenly got the upper hand, since before he even got to the first chapter of the original novel - which was only 55,000 words long - he had written 80,000 new words. And by the time he finished this "revision," he had written 135,000 words. The outcome was a new novel, which is only roughly based on its ancestor. In an interview for Publishers Weekly, Koontz explained that:

 

"I did not intend to rewrite it to the extent that I did", but in the end "I ended up not using a single line. But it's still, in a way, the same book, which fascinates me."

 

Always through PW, we get to know that even though not always with that kind of innovative approach, the same thing has happened since 1995 to each pseudonymous backlist title that's been reissued under his own name. The primary motive is basically that Koontz felt that the originals were "not quite adequate, and if readers are paying eight bucks for the paperback, it's not right, it's not right." For good measure, bearing in mind that reworking on his past novels is not part of his contract (he gets no money out of this process) it can't be left untold that one other reason  for his extra-revisions, well…"is ego, no question."

 

~ ~ ~

 

All the cover scans are courtesy of Stu Weaver. Visit his amazing website to know everything about American first editions of Koontz books. A must-visit for every collector.


Deanna Dwyer


Even though the earliest productions of his career were basically SF stories (and the influence is admittedly crystal clear, since in college sci-fi was nearly all that he read) in the early seventies Koontz indulged into gothics. Hence it was with this first pseudonym that he released a series of five gothic-romance novels, in order to "stave off starvation and buy a little time to write what I really cared about." These books were produced at a fairly quick pace, following the publisher's guidelines, and the money Koontz earned out of them allowed him to spend more time on other projects that certainly interested him most. Though undeniably formulaic, they were good examples of their genre, but Koontz is probably not too proud of them, since his intention is to keep them out of print at least for the following couple of eons.

 

Legacy of Terror

New York - Lancer - 1971

 

 

Demon Child

New York - Lancer - 1971

Children of the Storm

New York - Lancer - 1972

The Dark of Summer

New York - Lancer - 1972

Dance with the Devil

New York - Lancer - 1972

 

Cover image refers to the 1972 Magnum edition. It is a reprint, not a first edition.

 


Leonard Chris

 

I'm listing this pseudonym in here, too, even though there's no official knowledge that this is actually one of Koontz's many monikers. Nonetheless, according to what Stu Weaver points out in his website, it stands to reason that this might actually be the mysterious secret pseudonym that Koontz refuses to acknowledge, probably because of the liberties the  publisher took with the book.

I put it here with the benefit of doubt.

 

Hung!

Cameo Press - 1970

 

Reprinted in 1989 by American Art Enterprises (see cover image), this novel is characterized by marked sexual contents.