Welcome the weekly installment of My Favorite Authors/Books! For those who are not familiar with us, this is a new series where one of us Kossacks takes the opportunity to tell us why they love a certain author or book. Is there an author whose books you never miss? A particular book that you love so much you want to tell random people on the street about? This is the place for you.
This series celebrates authors and books that have a special place in our hearts. But what do you do when an author you love gradually stops producing works that you absolutely love, when it even becomes a chore to read some of his novels? I have been reading Dean Koontz when he had both a mustache and the middle initial of R in his name, and while I am going to celebrate what I first loved about reading his books I would not be fair if I did not mention what I see as the fading of his works.
As far as I can remember, I have always been reading. I will read anything but my penchant is for the otherworldly aspect – Wrinkle in Time and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are my earliest books. So I guess it would be natural that I would lean toward the horror genre when I discovered it through the works of Stephen King. His were the horror works I generally read, in addition to occasional cheesy paperback I would see at my local Mr. Paperback. I never even knew Dean Koontz existed until I went to college.
My second semester freshman year at Tufts. I was wondering the college bookstore, just seeing what was there, when I came across Watchers on the bestseller display. Say what you want about not judging a book by its cover, that is what drew me to it. Read the inside flap about a genetic experiment went wrong, two intriguing human characters, a super smart dog, and a hideous monster and I was suitably impressed. And then I put it back on the shelf. It was in hardcover, which I could not afford, and I had college life stuff to occupy my time.
But it hung around in my mind and once summer vacation was over I put a request in for it at the library. It was available soon enough and started reading it one night after picking it up after work. As luck would have it, I had the day off the next day so I began reading it around 10 p.m. and after an hour I decided that I would head to bed and continue reading until about 11:30 before turning off the lights.
The next time I looked at the clock, it was 12:45 a.m.
I needed to make a decision and I realized that if I tried to sleep now, the scary part at which I was would invade my dreams. And it did not seem as if there would be any let up in the tension so I did something I had never done before (or since); I stayed up all night to finish reading it and the experience was completely worth it. I loved the characters of Travis and Nora. I loved the humor and central conceit of Einstein, the dog with human-level intelligence. I love how even though the monster was truly relentless and scary, Koontz did not put it in black and white but allowed us to feel empathy for the creature at the end. Watchers opened up a whole new venue in terms of horror for me and I was determined to read his other novels, hoping this was not a one-shot deal.
I was not disappointed. I spent the rest of the summer gathering up Koontz’s previous works in paperback and discovered some of the best horror I have ever read. Phantoms is still close to the scariest book I have come across – a small group of people attempt to discover exactly why and how their small town suddenly became completely deserted has relentless tension and terror. Darkfall, with the protagonists being hunted by rat-like voodoo constructs, still creeps me out to this day. Twilight Eyes was, for the longest time, the only novel he wrote in the first person and is still the only one that does not take in the present day. The story of Slim, working as a carny during the 1960’s and hunting down the murderous and horrific creatures that pass for human and want to destroy our world, still haunts me when I think about and is the obvious progenitor of other novels I have read recently (S. M. Stirling’s Shadowspawn series comes to mind). Here was the good stuff.
I think one of the main aspects that drew me so strongly to Koontz’s work was the hopefulness of the characters. Yes, there were the amazing plots and as befitting a horror novel, the scary aspects were truly frightening. And while the essential plots were seemingly supernatural in nature more often than not they could be considered science fiction in nature, a grounding in reality that made them more frightening. The novel Midnight was written years before the Internet exploded and reading it now gives it more power, making it seem like a serious cautionary tale.
This all would have been typical horror fare if it were not for the aspects of the characters, which as much as it feels dorky to say it, are uplifting. I love darkness in my books and movies and such and will always say that Stephen King is tops in my estimation. There is, however, a joy in reading these stories without that element of grimness. The characters do not always have easy lives; the whole point of the majority of these stories are the circumstances they need to overcome and how they need to put their past traumas behind them. By the end of the books, there is a general affirmation in the resilience of the human spirit and a sense of balance of how the universe is supposed to work. To connect that with a damn good story satisfied many reading needs in me and Koontz was an author on my must-buy the first second a new book comes out list.
I wish I could leave it at that. All authors reach a point when the freshness leaves them, when it seems there is a sense of repeating themselves or that original spark fades out. Part of it on my end was increasingly high expectations that could not be met but I think things began to crumble for me when he wrote Dark Rivers of the Heart. That was the first of his serial-killer/ non-supernatural novels. It’s not bad, certainly readable, but began the downhill trend. Maybe it was the effort of attempting two novels a year, one straight thriller and one supernatural, but Koontz’s humor began to seem increasingly forced and he kept inserting some very odd sociopolitical views into his works. False Memory was the first time I actually didn’t want to finish one of his novels and From the Corner of His Eye is one of the worst things I have ever read. There were still plenty of novels of his that were worth reading – Tick Tock as well as the two Christopher Snow novels are worth reading. And I have even enjoyed novels as recent as The Taking, though that was the first of his insertion a weird religious bent that made me want to throw Breathless across the room after I finished it. I will always take a look when I see a new novel from Koontz but must read is no longer the case.
I still have hopes that he will return to form. And even if he never does, I still have his older titles to comfort me. They still remain among my favorite reads and even if he never publishes another novel I like, the first two decades of his output ensure that Koontz will remain one of my top authors.