Dean Koontz - Pseudonyms
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Introduction Deanna Dwyer Leonard Chris |
Part 2: K. R. Dwyer Brian Coffey Anthony North Aaron Wolfe John Hill |
David Axton Leigh Nichols Owen West Richard Paige |
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.
K. R. Dwyer
After reading John D. Mac Donald, Koontz changed his field of action and
moved toward the realm of suspense fiction, already showing his still buddying
nature of cross-genre writer.
"I read 34 of his novels in 30 days," recalls Koontz, "and then
all I wanted to be was a suspense writer." It was on this spur that he consequently adopted the pen name of K.R.
Dwyer to publish his first hardcover, the suspense yarn Chase, for
Random House.
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Chase New York - Random House - 1972
With Chase, he moved into the suspense genre and immediately
proved his talent to a wide audience. We can't forget that the New York
Times labelled it "taut, well-written", and the Saturday
Review wrote: "This superb book is more than a novel of
suspense. It is a brutally realistic portrait of the role of violence in our
society". The San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, moreover, thought
that it was "thoroughly exciting, and the style is firm and
excellent." This is one of the earliest of what would become a torrent of novels
about Vietnam veterans by a consistent group of writers (see Koko by
Peter Straub). Benjamin Chase is a war hero with haunting memories, and even though he's been
awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor
he's refused to accept it. Vietnam left him with a hard drinking
habit, a mental breakdown and the burden of guilt, so when he is confronted
by a psychotic killer who sees him as his next target, he's not even believed
by the police. That's why he has to resort to his aggressive nature, as his
past comes back to challenge him. "When society is sick, the mad are
sane - and persecution is a killer's game." Chase has been reissued in the short
story collection Strange Highways, of which you can find my personal
review here. |
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Shattered New York - Random House - 1973
"Run...or die. He's
got an axe." |
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Dragonfly New York - Random House - 1975 This was the third of the three books published under the "K.R.
Dwyer" alias, and it's a Cold War novel of international intrigue and
conspiracy about an innocent man who has been turned into
a walking time bomb, threatening to kill 100,000 people in four days. The Hartford Times reviewed it in glowing terms: "In the
taut style of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May...a
sparkling novel deep with suspense, agony, and mystery. The characters are so
finely drawn that they take form on the page." |
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Brian Coffey
Brian Coffey was the moniker Koontz made up for some of his earlier
suspence novels. Under this pseudonym he also wrote an episode of the famous TV
series CHIPS. Go to the Movies page for information
about it.
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Blood Risk New York -
Bobbs-Merrill - 1973 This is the first of a three book series featuring Michael Tucker as
the common lead character, an educated, gentlemanly, tough professional thief
who only steals from other criminals.
In this story, Tucker and his cronies hijack a mafia cash shipment. The whole series has been long out of print, but it may be in the
author's intention to reissue them sooner or later, maybe in a single volume. |
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Surrounded New York -
Bobbs-Merrill - 1974 Other than being the second of five novels published under the Coffey
guise, this is the second of three novels featuring the same protagonist,
Michael Tucker. In this case, he's out to steal from merchants who would be
covered by an insurance company. |
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The Wall of Masks New York -
Bobbs-Merrill - 1975
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The Face of Fear New York -
Bobbs-Merrill - 1977
It has been said that this is another significant novel in Koontz's
production, as it gives a clear example of the author's imaginative plots,
and it stands out as one of the first serial-killer novels that would be the
luck of so many famous writers in the following years. It has also been noted that some interesting similarities can be found
between this book and Thomas Harris's well-known Red Dragon (1981)
perhaps indicating common research sources. Different though they are, they
were certainly novels that gave way to a new subgenre in in the fiction
world. In an interview with the Mystery
Guild, to the question "What inspired you to write The Face of
Fear?" he replied: And here's just a hint of the
numerous positive comments on this novel: From the West Coast Review of
books: "This is a real breathtaker [that] should hold you glued to
its pages till the wee small hours." Edwin Corley, in his syndicated column:
"The Face of Fear has the most harrowing chase sequences I've
read in many a moon. The writing is tight, fast-moving and the story races
toward a fear-drenched climax. More than mere entertainment." From the Memphis Commercial Appeal:
"One the most remarkable suspense novels of the year an engrossing and
entertaining read." You can find my personal review of
this book here. |
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The Voice of the Night New York -
Doubleday - 1980 Two best
friends. One is shy, the other is outgoing. They are so different, yet they
spend a lot of time together at school. When the aggressive, outgoing friend
proves to be dominated by some sinister force, their friendship will plunge
them both in a long, dark voyage toward terror. This was the last of the five novels published under the Coffey
pseudonym, to which Koontz resorted when Lippincott refused to publish it
with the byline of David Axton. It is another pivotal work in the author's production, because it is
the first in which he depicts young people with the same strength and insight
that had been typical of his more mature characters. Examples of his
undisputed talent in portraying the world from the peculiar point of view of
a child, or a young teenager, can esily be found in such famous later novels
as Lightning, Midnight, Hideaway, Mr. Murder and From
the Corner of his Eye. Another significant trait of this novel is also the revelation of a
progressive language experimentation, which will hardly ever abandon Koontz
in the years to come, allowing him to maintain a lean but hallucinatorily
vivid prose while he creates complex storylines and wide scenarios with fewer
words than one might expect. When it was reissued in paperback under the author's real name, The
Voice of the Night was a number-one New York Times bestseller. |
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Anthony North
This pseudonym was only used once, as the signature for the
techno-thriller Strike Deep. The curious thing about this pen-name is
that the publisher went so far as to create an entire false biography for the
writer, in order to present Strike Deep as a major first novel by a new
talent in suspense. The biographical lines on the jacket flap read:
"Anthony North lived in Washington for years and is intimately acquainted
with the workings of the Pentagon. He now lives in Jamaica with his wife and
four children."
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Strike Deep New York - Dial Press - 1974 This was an early, if not the
first, novel about computer terrorism by hackers, though the term
"hackers" was not yet in use. Disaffected veterans of Vietnam, one
of them the son of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cooperate in a
plot to steal the nation's most sensitive defense secrets and sell them to a
foreign power. In the end, the lead finds himself incapable of treason and at
odds with the other conspirators. The book is well-paced and involving. In
considering the issue of computer security and the vulnerability of electronically
stored information, Strike Deep was years ahead of its time - although
much of the computer detail is now dated. It doesn’t seem to be in
Koontz's intention to revise this book, updating the technical details for
reissuing. |
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Aaron Wolfe
This byline was only used once, for the science-fiction novel Invasion.
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Invasion Ontario -
Laser Books - 1975 The original title of this book, which was the last pure sci-fi novel
that Koontz wrote, should have been Cold Terror. As previously said,
it was reissued as Winter Moon in 1994, even though the revision was
so thorough that Winter Moon is actually a different novel, only
slightly based on the original. In an interview for Publisher Weekly, Barry Malzberg, a writer
and editor who had contracted to edit a series of "first" novels
for Laser Books, gave his account of the genesis of Invasion. When a
few would-be first novelists failed to give him anything worth printing, he
turned to Dean asking him for "anything from your trunk". "I'd
like you to do this, you'd be saving me a mess", he asked Koontz back
then. Malzberg goes on in the interview: "He said he had a week open
and that he could do it, and he did it. I remember sitting with the
manuscript and a pencil, intending to edit and copyedit as it went along. On
page 176, I took out a comma. It was flawless, a sensational piece of work.
He wrote that book in a week for $1500." "He could have been a great science fiction writer," says
Malzberg. "He quit at just the time when his work was veering into true
darkness and originality." As for the book, Invasion
is considered a first-rate science fiction thriller, which is now out of
print and lost except to the fortunate few who have retained or collected a
copy. On a curious note, it later gained some notoriety because of rumors
that it had been written by Stephen King. |
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John Hill
Another one-time pseudonym, John Hill was used for the novel The Long
Sleep. Just to be accurate, you should
be aware that the "John Hill" who wrote the novelization of the movie
Heartbeeps was not Dean Koontz.
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The Long Sleep New York - Popular Library - 1975 The Long Sleep was written
in 1972, but it is the expansion of a novella, Grayworld, written that
same year and published in 1973 for the first time in the short-story collection Infinity Five, edited
by Robert Hoskins and published by Lancer. This novel certainly fits in the "occult mystery" subgenre,
as far as the atmophere is concerned, even though there are some futuristic
elements that brand it as another of the sci-fi works of Koontz's early
career. Koontz might revise this book
for eventual reissue under his own name. About the plot: He woke up in
a metal cylinder, naked, and discovered that somehow, somewhere, his mind had
been ravished, his memory erased, and his only clue to his identity was his
name: Joel. But he was not alone. Around him the omnipresent computers typed
out undecipherable messages while beeping mysterious signals. Was it a starship,
a prison, a lab, or maybe a dream? So he started
looking for clues…and everything became clear. Embracing him was a beautiful
woman. Reassuring him was a kindly, white-haired man who told him one lie
after another. And pursuing him was a figure without a face who called
himself the Sandman. Was Joel the only sane human in a world gone mad? Or was
he a hopeless maniac living out hid fearful fantasies? Joel's long sleep was
over - and his nightmare had just begun. |
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