Dean Koontz - Pseudonyms
Part 1: Introduction Deanna Dwyer Leonard Chris |
K. R. Dwyer Brian Coffey Anthony North Aaron Wolfe John Hill |
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 |
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Demon Child New York - Lancer - 1971 |
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Children of the Storm New York - Lancer - 1972 |
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The Dark of Summer New York - Lancer - 1972 |
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Dance with the Devil New York - Lancer - 1972 Cover image refers to the 1972 Magnum edition. It is a reprint, not a
first edition. |
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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. |
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