ean Koontz is one of the most prolific horror writers around. He's churned out well over 50 novels in his writing career, and at 60ish he shows no signs of slowing down his production rate. The quality is another matter. He's not a bad author, and he comes up with some very interesting plots and concepts. Unfortunately, his characters are very cookie cutter from one novel to the next, and the plots of his stories all sort of blur together after you've read any half dozen novels.

He would probably have been better-served if he'd hit upon a great concept for a series of novels, since it's always the set up and concept that's the strong point in his work. It's the characters and formulaic endings that drag it down, and if he had the same Jack Ryan/James Bond type character in every novel, no one would be annoyed that the characters were always the same, once you got to know them.

I'm probably harder on Koontz than I should be, and in all honesty I haven't read anything he's written since the early 90s, when I outgrew his juvenile formulaic output. I will make an effort to check something recent out from the library, just to see if he's changed or grown in over the years.

This page collects various blog entries about Koontz and his work. Check his entry on the Horror Author Overview for some more brief general comments.

July 7, 2003

A note I've had sitting on my notes page for several days reads as follows:

The utterly-forgettable Dean R. Koontz.  20 or so paperbacks, and looking over the covers and titles, I could remember anything about 3 or 4 at most.  

I was going to elaborate on this at some point, but looking at it now... what else is there to say?

To explain the situation a bit more; I'll give some background.

I'm moving in just a few days, and for the last couple of weeks I've been emptying my apartment of various extra things, mostly books and furniture and boxes and such.  It was amazing how much of the stuff I'd accumulated over 5 years turned out to be easily-thrown away without a second thought.

I sorted my books into a big "giveaway" pile, a slightly larger "save but don't take with me" pile, and a small "take with me" stack.  The "save but don't take with me" ones went over to dad's house, along with my big bedroom bookshelf.  The bookshelf was installed in my old room there, displacing a really old bookshelf that he's had since I was like, 2.  It's in a kid's color, orange with stripes and such.

The big one I moved over there was ebony and very tall, and has vastly-greater capacity than the old orange one.  Capacity great enough to store all of my "save but don't take" books, along with all of the books that had been on the bookshelf at dad's, most of which were children's books, ones I warmly or vaguely-remembered reading when I was about 7.  Not that all were kid's books, lots were juvenile novels, adventure and fantasy stories, that sort of thing.  I'm sure Harry Potter would be represented, if I were 10 today.

Besides the books on my bookshelf, I had several large cardboard boxes stuffed into the closet in my old room at his house (which isn't really that old, since he didn't move to San Diego or buy the house until I was like 15) and had no idea what was in any of them.

Well, I remembered that they were old books and some college papers, but I had not looked at any of them in at least 5 years, and probably more like 8 or 9 years, since I'd packed them up and stored them there in some long-ago apartment to apartment move. I needed more cardboard boxes for my upcoming move, and wanted to sort all of the old stuff at dad's and try to get it all into the bookshelf, so I delved into the boxes.  And found nothing too exciting.

There were two boxes entirely full of old college papers, mostly short stories I'd written for various creative writing classes; the gig was that we'd write three stories a semester, and each week 5 or 6 people would submit stories to the class, making a copy for everyone.  Each week everyone was supposed to read the stories and make constructive comments for the writer, who would get back the stories next week and hear their story discussed by the class.  In theory you had all of these critiques you could look over at your leisure.  I always read them and found the feedback interesting, though seldom of much use in improving my story along the lines of how I thought it should be improved.

My reaction upon finding 2 full boxes of old stories, with comments, many years after I last gave any thought to the writing classes, or the stories themselves?  "Dad, the blue one is the recycling bin, right?"

Yep, pitched them all.  Both boxes, without a look at the stories or the comments.  Along with those went a bunch of old college textbooks, mostly ones that were obsolete after the semester and that I couldn't therefore get the usual 5-10% on the dollar by reselling them to the campus bookstore.

There were other boxes full of other junk, old toys and tons of comic books and about 6 years of Thrasher Magazine.  I saved most of the books and the toys, but chucked all of the magazines, and picked out a bunch of other paperbacks I hadn't read or missed in 5+ years to send off to the library.  And here, at last, we reach the point of the above-cited quotation about Dean Koontz, as he is now known. (Did the "R" begin to seem pretentious, or what?)

I remembered reading some of his stories, and how I liked them for a while, but quickly got sick of them, primarily since every story is exactly the same.  Formulas are used by most writers, but his were so tired and so predictable that eventually even the relatively-gripping first 2/3 of his novels wasn't enough to keep me reading them.  Not even from the library.  I'm not going to go into a huge discussion of it here, though I probably should here. I'll quote from there, rather than writing it anew, in honor of the author himself:

There's always a man with a troubled past, always a women he meets who is in danger and needs him to save her, and through their slowly-budding love, he'll be able to overcome his troubled past.  The enemies are always part of a huge conspiracy of some sort, seemingly too powerful to defeat, and there's almost always a sweeping, world-altering ending.  Along for the ride is usually a super-smart and loveable child/animal, who has some sort of psychic powers or was made by government scientists with bionic abilities, etc.

I would have guessed that I'd read maybe 10 or 12 of his novels.  The horror novelist overview page I just quoted says "15."  To my horror, in one of the boxes in dad's closet, I found two dozen Dean R. Koonts paperbacks.  Well, I didn't actually count them, but there were a damn lot, including 3 or 4 hardcovers that I picked up in the late 80's and early 90's, for cheap, used, and mostly at the swap meet.

The thing that I found weirdest once I got over the shock of seeing a whole box full of such cheesy books, an unsettling number of which have unsettlingly-similar titles (Phantoms, Strangers, Watchers, Whispers) was that I did not remember a goddamned thing from any of them.

Well, that's not entirely true, I did remember a few bits and pieces, and I think that if I actually began to read any of them again, I would remember the plot as it unfolded. But I could have passed a lie detector test the day before by swearing I did not own more than half a dozen books by him, and that I had never read more than a dozen of his books.  There was no doubt in my mind of either of those facts.

And not only did I forget ever having read them, I forgot everything about them, or so it would seem.

I know he's not exactly aspiring to timeless prose, but my near-amnesia about his work seemed rather odd, especially as I occasionally pride myself on my memory for writing I've read.  Oh sure, I forget what I wrote an hour after the blog is posted, but I can remember tons of tiny and unusual details from lots of novels I haven't read in a decade.  None by Dean Koontz though, apparently.

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