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JULIE WISKIRCHEN: So I'm Julie Wiskirchen.
I'm from the authors team here at Google Los Angeles.
And today I'm very excited to welcome Dean Koontz.
When Dean was a senior in college,
he won an "Atlantic Monthly" fiction competition,
and he's been writing ever since.
He's one of the world's most iconic writers,
with books published in 38 languages,
and has sold over 450 million copies.
14 of his novels have risen to number one
on the "New York Times" hardcover best-seller list,
making him one of only a dozen writers ever
to achieve that milestone.
The "New York Times" has called his writing
psychologically complex, masterly, and satisfying.
"Rolling Stone" has hailed him as America's most popular
suspense novelist.
Dean's new novel is called "Innocence,"
and he's going to discuss it with us today.
So please join me in giving a very warm welcome
to Dean Koontz.
[APPLAUSE]
DEAN KOONTZ: Thank you.
I normally stand at a podium and speak,
so this is a little more relaxed.
I don't have my notes in front of me,
so it'll be more confusing.
But hopefully-- and we'll try to make it more with some question
and answer as we go.
And maybe I can mingle some stories
in about things that have happened to me.
Normally when I speak, I just talk
about stupid things that I've done during my career,
or stupid things that have happened to me.
And I have files and files of stupid stories
of things I've done.
So I usually have no shortage of material.
But I thought today, since this is different,
I'd probably tell you a little about where
I came from, a little bit about where I grew up,
and some things that happened to me that probably
drove me to be a writer.
And by the way, I see golden retrievers here today.
We saw them out in the thing.
And I brought mine, because we were
told we're dog-friendly territory.
So maybe at some point, when people get done eating,
I would release Anna if nobody has a dog allergy
and let her wander around.
She loves people.
So we'll wait until people get through their food,
because she won't be quite so people loving,
she'll be food loving until then.
I grew up in the little town of Bedford, Pennsylvania.
And we lived in what was the next thing to a shack.
It was two stories, but it probably
was a total of 400 or 500 square feet.
It had a tar paper roof.
There's a picture of it I always keep
to remind myself where I came from.
My dad had a serious alcohol problem.
And he was always getting in fights.
And by the time he didn't work anymore,
my wife and I counted how many jobs we could remember he
had had.
And it was 44 jobs in 34 years.
And there were periods where he didn't work.
And the reason there were so many jobs
is he also had a tendency to violence.
And he had a proclivity to punch out
the boss, which isn't a career move,
even at Google, where they're so good with their employees
that you can get away with it.
And so there were periods of this time
he didn't work at all.
He was a gambler and a womanizer.
We never knew whether we were going
to have that roof over our heads the next day or not.
In addition to all that-- and I didn't
talk about my father for a long time after I was successful.
And then one day I was asked to go
speak to a group of Walden bookstore managers.
Walden and Borders, no longer with us.
And I just did my normal speech, telling
stupid things that happened to me.
And the audience was very with me and it was wonderful.
And then we got to the Q and A. And somebody
said, how did your childhood affect your writing career?
Your parents must have encouraged you to read a lot.
And I said, oh, no, books were not really welcome in my house.
And books were considered a waste of time.
And my father was a violent alcoholic
who made my childhood a kind of-- I
had to escape into books.
But I had to hide the fact that I had books,
or that I was getting them out of the library.
And that audience, suddenly, I lost them entirely.
They just went dead.
And they were all looking at me, like-- I
realized, oh, I blew it.
Now they think I've had a terrible childhood.
And it wasn't a terrible childhood.
I always felt happiness is a choice, no matter what
you're going through.
And as a kid, there were things I liked.
One of them was books.
And another was I got a bike that an uncle gave me.
And I could travel 30 miles, 40 miles a day on that bike,
and go all over this little farm town where I was raised.
And I could be away from that house.
My mother was a great person.
But if my father was there, the house
was not place anybody would want to be.
Then I said to them, but you know,
I don't mean to say my childhood was bad.
I told them happiness is a choice.
And I said also my father had a funny side to him.
He was a very good salesman.
He could get people to invest in inventions that he created.
And he could actually raise significant money
for those days to produce the invention
in a number of copies, hundreds of them, thousands of them,
warehouse them.
But they were never anything that he could sell.
You'll see why in just a minute.
But he could get people to raise the money.
And it always amazed me, because we never saw the money.
He gambled it away or spent it.
And he often had investors trying to put him in jail.
And he couldn't hold onto his money.
But he could invent things that I thought were absurd,
but some people thought were good investments.
One of the ones I remember was he had this big exercise
machine.
And this was in the days-- he may
have been correct about this-- he called
it the first electric exercise machine.
And it may have been true, that in those days,
treadmills were actually run by your own power,
and they weren't electric.
But it was about the size of an old console model television.
I'm the only one here old enough to remember those.
They were about this high, and this wide, and that deep--
a huge box.
And this was all it was, was this huge box.
It had a little hole on one side, and a hook.
And you pulled the hook out.
And this rope came on the hook.
And then you were supposed to, into a door frame,
screw a little eye hook, so that the hook could go into it.
Then you turned on the electric jump rope.
And an engine or motor turned it.
And it sounded like this.
[MOTOR NOISES]
And it turned this jump rope.
And I stood there looking at this machine.
He actually got investors to produce 200 of these.
He never sold any.
And I said, but Dad, who wants to buy an electric jump rope?
And he got angry very quickly.
And he said, everybody will want to buy one.
And I said, but when you're exercising with the jump rope,
part of the exercise is the arms, the upper body.
It's not all about the jumping.
And he said, this is for people who want to exercise,
but not too damn much.
[LAUGHTER]
And I had no answer to that.
And then, because he knew that I wasn't really approving
of this, he said, this is also the only exercise machine
that a blind man can use.
And I was really baffled at that.
And then he pointed out to me that every time the rope
hit the apex if its arc, a bell rang.
So a blind man would know when it was starting to come down.
And a friend of mine, years later
when I was telling him this, said,
boy, I could see Ray Charles in the TV commercial
already, singing "Ol' Man River,"
and the jump rope coming around.
These were always a great horrible thing for my mother.
Because my mother knew that when he got people to invent things,
or to finance his inventions and produce them,
that they would be coming after us.
And we wouldn't have the money.
And it would just mean he wasn't working at a job
where he might actually succeed.
And the only thing he really succeeded at
was insurance sales.
He could sell people anything.
But he could never hold onto the money,
even to bring it home for food.
Another one of his was-- this was maybe the most mortifying.
He invented-- we didn't have dogs,
but he invented a dog bed.
Now, it's not the dog bed that you think of,
which we see in any dog supply store or pet supply store.
My father had an elevated dog bed that sat on a metal frame
and was sort of almost like a hammock, strung
kind of tightly.
And I said, well, why do dogs want
to climb up on something like that to sleep?
If they want to climb up, they'll sleep on a sofa
or they'll sleep on the floor.
And he said, no dogs don't want to be
down there where the bugs might be.
And I didn't no dogs had a thing about bugs.
And he said, also, this is the only dog bed that's heated.
And I thought, well, dogs have fur.
And I know some small breeds, maybe,
need to be warm, because they don't have thick coats.
But I said, well, how are you going
to get a dog to sleep on this?
I don't think a dog's going to sleep on this.
And he said, we're making these, and we're going to sell them.
And they made them.
They always made them before they found out
if there was a market.
And he found out he couldn't sell these everywhere
where you would sell dog things.
So then he knew a man who had a series of 14 service stations.
So my father decided that these would be a perfect object
to sell out of a service station.
When you go to a service station to get gas,
and you see this dog bed, and you've
got dogs, well, of course you'll buy one.
Google would be nowhere with my dad as your marketing guy.
So he had all these, but he couldn't sell them.
But he decided on this.
And he talked to this guy who had all these service stations.
And this guy decided he'd look at it.
And so my father set up a demonstration.
This was after my mother had died.
And my father had a string of girlfriends.
And the girlfriend had this little dog.
It was a mutt.
But it was cute.
And dog's name is Fluffy.
And my father-- oh, I almost forgot
one of the most interesting things.
My father had pamphlets printed up.
And the name was also on the thing.
And it was called the Koontz Komfy Kot.
And my father thought it would be clever
if it was spelled ***.
[LAUGHTER]
It never occurred to him that he alienated
98% of the people who saw the bed.
And so the pamphlets had Koontz Komfy Kot,
and the K were bigger than anything else,
so you read it as ***.
And Fluffy was there, and the girlfriend was there,
and my father was there, and I was there.
And they couldn't get Fluffy-- encouraging Fluffy to get up
on the bed, they couldn't encourage him.
Fluffy wanted nothing to do with the bed,
like I sort of suspected.
So my father grabbed hold of Fluffy,
who was a nervous little dog to begin with.
And in front of this guy he's demonstrating
it to, picked Fluffy up, set him on the bed.
And Fluffy did what nervous dogs tend to do.
He urinated.
And that's when they found out the heating pad was not
waterproof.
It was like a Road Runner cartoon.
Fluffy just wanted right off the thing.
He wasn't electrocuted.
But he was a very suspicious dog thereafter.
[LAUGHTER]
And of course, once that was revealed,
the fella with 17 service stations
didn't want to sell it there either.
So then my father didn't only invent,
he also sometimes got business ideas.
And one of them that he got was-- he
thought it would be a great idea--
he bought a used steam cleaning rig.
It was all on wheels, and it was pretty unwieldy.
And it was a thing that generated steam and was
gasoline powered.
And then you had the steam wand, which sent the steam out
under high pressure.
And he was going to start a company to pressure wash truck
engines.
We lived in a town that had a number of depots for roadway
and a number of trucks.
So they had a lot of trucks there at any one time.
Why they wouldn't necessarily feel
it was advantageous to them to have their truck engines
steam cleaned on a regular basis, I have no idea.
And as it turned out, they really
didn't find that very interesting.
But he thought that was going to be a big deal.
And it was over the summer.
And so I used to work at summers when I was in high school.
But that summer, I was not permitted
to go back to the supermarket where I worked other summers.
And I was to work with him.
And because he was the boss, he got the prestige job
with the steam wand.
And my job was to do whatever he told me to do.
But there was one thing that had to be done
and was really essential.
And that was the release valve, pressure valve on this thing.
When the pressure built up so far that it was dangerous,
it was supposed to release.
There was a pressure release valve.
Except it sometimes-- in fact, a lot of times-- would stick.
And what I was supposed to do was when it stuck and started
to whistle, I was supposed to take a hammer
and go up to the generator and smash it
at the side of the thing until it popped loose.
I thought I was going to die that summer.
But I'd go up and hammer it, and it would pop loose.
And the truck thing didn't last very long.
And nobody seemed to want it, except the car crazy people
wanted their car engine to look really clean.
But it wasn't enough to make a business at.
So then he got the idea that supermarkets
would like to have their carts cleaned, because they care
so much about you may be touching germs on your cart.
Well, he did get one supermarket to clean a couple hundred.
But after they looked at them and they couldn't
see that much difference, that was the end of that.
So the big deal he came up with was cemetery.
It was his idea to go in and sell
through the cemetery people a deal.
If you have a relative buried here,
we will come in once a month and clean your tombstone
of your relatives, and it will always looks pristine.
Because, you know, motors throw grass up on the stone,
and birds do their thing, and there's dust.
And so we would steam clean these.
So he did set up another demonstration
for the people who ran the cemetery.
And there were two men and a woman there for this.
And he set up a stone.
And this was back in the days when we were first
beginning to see these-- the medallions that
would have a picture of the dead person on it.
And that was sort of a new thing.
And it was sort of inset.
And it was glued, of course, [INAUDIBLE].
And he chose to clean one of these.
And when he took the steam wand across the disk
with the picture on it, it popped loose
and flew like a martial arts killing star.
And everyone went, ah!
And it goes across the cemetery and smashes into another stone.
And as that thing is tearing loose and flying,
my father goes, whoa!
And he pulls the wand up like this.
And there's a tree overhanging.
And he blows leaves off the tree.
It's summer.
He kills the tree.
The leaves are blown off the tree.
And birds come exploding out of the tree.
And the demonstration's going very badly, at this point.
Even he knows this.
And at that moment, the valve sticks.
And I grab up the hammer.
And I go over and start hammering on it.
And this is the one time that the hammering on it
isn't working.
And my father has always told me,
if it doesn't come lose in so many times you hit it,
then just run.
[LAUGHTER]
So I'm hitting it and hitting it.
And it's not coming loose.
And so I not only run, I yell, run!
And I turn and run.
And now these people, these two men and this woman
with the cemetery, they start running.
And we're all running away from the generator.
And the woman falls, trips and falls.
And I'm a polite young man.
And I stoop over to to help her up.
And I-- let me help you up.
And I take her by her arm.
And she looks around at me.
And I've got the hammer like this.
And she goes, no!
We didn't get that.
And that was the end of the pressure washing event.
So somehow I survived that childhood.
And there were many nights where-- we had one car.
Not much of a car.
But we'd be called at a quarter to 2:00 in the morning,
because bars closed at two.
But we'd have to walk to the bar,
because he was drunk on the floor.
And there were all those humiliating things.
And so I always felt like an outcast as a kid,
and pretty much was.
I said, my father wasn't the town drunk.
But he was one of them, and widely known for that.
So books saved me.
It was books that I could escape,
and I would know that people live different ways.
And it's kind of funny when you're a kid,
and you're living in that kind of environment.
And you can come to think that everybody
lives this way when the doors closed.
And so books showed me that that wasn't
the case, that there were other ways to live lives.
It also helped me to escape.
My mother was the sweetest person.
And I don't know why she put up with this all those years.
But she also was not much about books.
And she used to say to me, books are a total waste, especially
as I got to be 13, 14.
And I said, well they're not a waste of time to me.
She said you could be spending that time learning
to fix your car.
Well, I didn't have a car.
And she said, one day you're going to have a car.
And nobody in our family is ever going
to be able to afford a mechanic.
So you better learn to repair your car.
And I said well, then I'm just going
to have to be the first one in the family
ever to afford a mechanic.
The irony of me is it was books that
helped me afford a mechanic, and a pretty good car, too.
So I was a happy to get out of that house.
And I worked my way through a teachers college
and taught in the poverty program for a year
when Lyndon Johnson was president.
And that was an eye-opening experience for me.
I was in a program where the teachers
were supposed to pick students in their class that were highly
intelligent, had lots of potential and desire,
but who came from extremely poor families
and would benefit, therefore, from having almost a tutor
program for the day.
So teachers were supposed to pick 16 children out
of all their classes.
They were to come to me for English in small groups.
And I got this job because I hurried my way through college.
I wanted to get married to Gerda,
and so I took extra classes and got through
in three and a half years.
And I was graduating and going into this job
in a school district in late October.
And it never occurred to me to think, well,
wasn't this job filled at the beginning of September?
Yes, it was.
But the fellow who had the job, which
I didn't learn until the day I showed up for work,
had been run off the road by students
and beaten up so badly he was in the hospital for six weeks,
and decided he didn't want to come back to work.
So they filled the job with me.
And I thought, well, that's odd.
It's just teaching English.
It's not like he was-- you know, I
might have wanted to do that to my phys ed teacher,
but never to my English teacher.
And so then I discovered that what happened
was the teachers took this differently
than the program intended.
What they wanted to do was not yet rid
of their most intelligent students,
but their most troublesome students.
So they got rid of the ones who'd been in reform school
or had police records or whatever.
So that was a very interesting year.
And at that, I said, you know, I don't want to do this either.
And I managed to get through the year
without getting beaten up and put in a hospital.
But it was only because I realized
that these kids had huge amounts of energy.
So we would do things like I'd bring a rubber ball to school.
Not a hard one, but not a super soft one, either.
These days, I'd probably be put in jail for this.
But when we were talking doing lessons,
I had the license to ask you a question.
If you couldn't answer it, I could throw the ball at you.
And if I missed, you could throw it at me anytime you wanted.
You could keep it for a half hour and do it.
So we did things like this to keep it energetic.
And by the time they were done at the end of the day,
they didn't want to bother beating me up.
And then I taught regular school.
And then my wife said, I know you want to write.
I was selling short stories in a couple of paperback novels.
And she said, I know you want to write novels,
so I'll support you for five years while you try to do that.
She was working at a credit bureau in those days.
And so I took her up on it.
I tried to bargain her up to seven years.
But she's got Sicilian blood, so she always
wins those arguments.
And it took four and a half years
before she was able to quit her job
and go to work running the business side of mine.
And we've now been married 47 years.
And it's been the greatest relationship of my life.
But that's how I got into writing.
And I wrote paperbacks, a lot of things over the years.
And finally I got to the point where
books started to actually sell, which
was a whole new idea for me.
I mean, I'd sell them, but very few people
would buy them for many years.
And royalties were not great.
But we could live on them.
And then suddenly one day, things started to change.
And people started to find the books.
And I had a publisher then who didn't, let's just say,
have a lot of faith in me.
But when the books started to work a little bit,
then she said, I wonder.
And I had this book called "Strangers."
and it was a big book with 12 leading characters
and lots of different stories.
And it all has to do with these characters
all experience something in the same place
at the same time a few years before.
And they've all been brainwashed to forget it.
But the brainwashing isn't holding.
And different things are happening to all of them.
And they don't understand why these things [INAUDIBLE].
Some are having nightmares.
Some are having moments of fugue.
Others are having all kinds of different problems.
And gradually they find their ways to each other.
But in the beginning of the book,
there is the one lead character who
keeps waking up from nightmares and finds
he's been sleepwalking.
And he wakes up at the back of closets.
He wakes up in different places where
it's clear he's hiding from something.
But he can never remember the dreams.
And he doesn't know what he was hiding from.
In the first part of the book, he wakes up at one point.
He mentions that he wakes up behind the furnace
in the garage.
And it so happened when I delivered
"Strangers," my publisher said, I
think you should not have a commercial editor.
I think you should have a literary editor.
And I'm going to give you a literary editor.
And I though, this is going to be great.
It's like Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway.
I wonder what a literary editor would be like.
This is going to be fun.
And so I really liked this fella.
He was a great guy.
His name was Alan.
And I delivered this book.
And it was 940 manuscript pages.
And my publisher came back, said, I love this book.
But you're going to have to cut in half.
It's too big.
And I could see no way to cut in half.
If any of you've read my stuff, I
tend to write pretty tightly structured books.
And I said, I don't see how I can do that.
And she said, Alan is going to show you how to do this.
So I thought, well, this is going to be amazing,
because I don't think it's possible to cut 400.
She said, just cut 430 pages.
You don't have to go halfway.
So Alan said, I'm going through it.
I've read it.
I love it.
But I can show you how to cut it and everything.
And he said that the way it's probably going to happen
is, you've got 12 lead characters,
and we'll just cut them down to nine.
And I thought, yeah, but all the stories kind of move like this.
And what happens if he pulled this thread?
Isn't this going to unravel over here?
He's going to show me.
He's a famous literary editor.
So OK, I'll bite my tongue and we'll see what happens here.
But then he said, you know, there's
something that really bothers me in this book.
You know that moment early on when the lead character wakes
up behind the furnace?
And I said, yes.
He said, the furnace is in the garage.
What would the furnace be doing in the garage?
And I said this is Southern California where where he's
living, and most furnaces are in the garage.
Some are in the attic.
But they're mostly in the garage.
Well, why aren't they in the basement?
I said, see, in Southern California,
very, very few houses have a basement.
They're built on slabs of concrete.
Oh, still, people, when they're reading it,
who don't know that, are going to say,
what's the furnace doing in the garage?
And they're going to lose track of the story right away.
And I said, I don't think so.
If the story isn't gripping enough
to get past the furnace--
And he says, well, I don't know.
I'm going to have to think about this.
But he said, meanwhile, I'm going
to show you how to cut these pages.
Which I said, OK, we'll see how this goes.
So about six weeks go by.
And the manuscript lands for me.
And it comes with a letter.
And the letter said, Dear Dean, I have redlined some things
I think we can cut.
And you'll see that I have redlined
10 pages worth of cuts.
Now all you need to do is find the rest of them.
He was joking a little bit, because he
was trying to tell me, without dissing the publisher,
that this wasn't going to be possible.
But then it was around that time that my publisher learned this.
She said, OK, I guess Alan knows what he's talking about.
But if you ever write a book again
like this with all these characters,
please write it so that some of them
can be pulled out without hurting the story.
And I tried to imagine doing that.
Yeah, I'm going to spend an extra three or four
months on the book, writing all this stuff in,
so they can pull it out and it won't
affect the rest of the book.
But I didn't say anything.
So Alan also when he called me to say he knew I had it
and he called me and said, yeah, find how many pages you can.
But you're never going to find what is wanted.
Just do the best you can and see what I've done.
I said, OK.
He said, but I'm still really upset that furnace
in the garage.
And you know, I just realized, there's
another moment where there's a furnace in a garage later
in the novel.
And I said, well, Alan, I can't do anything about it.
Because it is Southern California.
And that's the way it is here in California.
And a few days go by.
And I'm working on the script.
And I get a overnight messenger thing from him.
And it's a high-end real estate magazine.
And there's a post-it on one page.
And it's a post-it for a big mansion in San Francisco.
And it's like on *** Hill or somewhere like that.
And he's undermining the description
about it having an 11,000 square foot basement.
And I said, yes.
But see, that's a mansion in San Francisco.
This is a tract home in Southern California.
It still bothers me, he said.
And then when I ended up cutting 30 pages out of the text,
out of 940.
And we sent it off to them.
And it went to typesetting.
And when the typesetting came, he said,
Dean I'm sending you the typesetting tomorrow.
And you'll proofread the typesetting.
And you just please understand there's still
time to fix that furnace problem.
So at that point, and I hated to dis an editor,
so I tried to do it with humor.
I wrote him back, and I said, Alan,
I've written a paragraph I hope will fix the furnace problem.
And this is the paragraph I sent him.
"In the garage was a furnace, but not just any furnace.
An immense furnace, a huge *** of a furnace,
so enormous that natural gas needed
to operate it could have heated the homes of 1,236 families.
A furnace of such flagrant excess and ungodly
dimensions that no room was left in the garage for cars.
A furnace so complex in its engineering
and so formidable in its mechanisms
that while performing routine maintenance,
three repairmen had been killed.
A furnace into which a clever murderer
could jam the body of his editor,
with every confidence that no speck of evidence
would survive the flames."
[LAUGHTER]
And he came back to me and said, point taken.
And the furnace stayed in it.
That book went on to be my first hardcover best seller.
And the next book was "Watchers,"
which had a golden retriever in it in a major way.
And that book did much, much better.
And the next book, "Lightning," almost went to number one.
And I could see this progression.
And it was very exciting, because I
had been working for 20 or more years, trying to get here.
And very next book after that was a book called "Midnight."
And it was my first number one best seller.
And this is absolutely true.
My publisher, Phyllis Grann, she was a very good publisher
for a certain kind of thing.
I always irritated her, because I
didn't do the same book every time.
And she really liked publishing writers
who did the same book every time, because it was a product
and she knew how to sell it.
So we already were at odds with each other.
But I had a lot of respect for her.
And she called me up.
And you learn about the best seller list-- your first week,
you learn about it 10 days before it appears in the "New
York Times," because the book review comes out,
they have to print that earlier.
And they do the calculation.
So you find out early.
And she called me up and said, I have very wonderful news
for you.
You're going to debut with this book at number
on in the "New York Times."
And before I could say a thing, she
said, I just want you to understand,
this will never happen for you again.
You do not write the kind of books
that can go to number one.
We had five number ones in a row.
And every time I had a number one,
she told me the same thing.
And I'm a little slow, but not that slow.
I said, you know what, I need a different publisher.
And I moved on from there.
So that's been some of my career.
And we want to leave time in this for-- I can babble on--
but for some question and answers.
I assume you have some questions.
AUDIENCE: So basically, I've been
reading your books for years.
I've really enjoyed them.
And it's exciting when a new one comes out.
But one of the things I like to do
when I go to talks by authors that I really like
is ask them who they're reading.
So do you have any people, especially up-and-coming people
who you think are writing really good and exciting books
right now that I might use to expand my reading list?
DEAN KOONTZ: I like this-- now I'm going to draw a blank.
Michael Michael Koryta is a very good suspense writer, young,
starting up.
I don't have a lot of time at this point in my life
to read fiction like I used to.
If you've read my books, you know
there's a lot of research in them,
because I learned early that if you screw up a detail,
there are people reading you who will know that.
And then they'll write you.
And then you'll feel like an idiot.
Especially if it's a gun detail.
Oh my, you will get mail.
So I make sure all detail in it is right.
And I just tend to be writing subjects.
When I was a kid in college and high school
and I had to go to the library to research something,
I hated that.
I hated research.
This is mortifying to admit now, but it's true.
So in high school, I would always
just-- when I had to do a paper on something,
I would make up the titles of the books that I referenced.
And I would make up the authors.
And I'd assigned the book to Doubleday or somebody else.
And I'd cite the page and chapter number.
And nobody ever caught me at it.
And I got good grades.
And so I could have gone into a life of crime.
But when I went to college, I fell in love
with pinochle in my first year in college.
And it turned out I was pretty good at it.
And I met this other guy who was good at it.
And we became the two to beat.
So we'd have all-night pinochle things.
And I wouldn't often go to class.
And so I took up the habit of faking my research papers.
And I never got caught at it in college either.
You should never bring your own children to one of my--
And then when I was a junior, at the end of my junior year,
a professor of mine had submitted a short story
I'd written to the "Atlantic Monthly,"
for the college writing competition they did.
And it won the short story prize.
And after that, I really became a slacker in college,
because my final year was nothing but English classes
and literature classes.
And I was the first person at the university
ever to win one of these.
And I could do no wrong.
It was just fabulous.
So I played more pinochle and made up more papers.
But when I became a novelist and I had to get it right,
I found out I loved research.
And so now I do so much of it, outside of Michael,
I love this-- she writes kids books,
but adults will love them-- Kate DiCamillo.
And she has this book called "The Tale of Despereaux,"
and another one.
Adults will laugh their heads off at these books.
Kids do love them, but there's humor in them
that only adults will get.
For instance, she has this one "The Incredible Journey
of Edward--" I can't remember the second name.
But Edwards is a ceramic rabbit that's
clothed and has bendable ears and is an antique doll.
And he's not animated like other kids.
He thinks, but he can't talk and he can't move.
So Edward is simply the victim of what
happens to him in his journeys.
And it's hilarious and moving.
And I just think she's great.
And she writes books, "The Magician's Elephant," a little
short book.
And it's a wonderful, absolutely wonderful book
about how our life-- and I wrote a really long book called
"From the Corner of His Eye," which
takes quantum mechanics, spooky effect at a distance,
and says that that not only works on the subatomic level,
it works in human relationships.
Everything we do has spooky effects at a distance.
When we do something good in our lives or something bad,
it affects other people.
It changes what they might do to somebody else that day.
And it ricochets through everybody's lives.
And years later, if you are able to see it,
you would see, if you were able to pull back and look over
the years, how what you did had this effect.
You did it in Pittsburgh, it had this effect
in San Diego three years later.
I took like 800 pages of this.
Kate DiCamillo does it in this little kids' book
that any adult will love it as well.
So those are people.
But mainly I read research and philosophy these days.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
DEAN KOONTZ: Sorry, that's a long answer.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
First I just wanted to thank you,
because I had isolating childhood.
And at age 13, I read "Whispers."
And I escaped through your books.
And so I just wanted to thank you for that.
Also my question is, you are one of if not the most prolific
author I've ever heard of.
And it brings your readers great joy
to be able to keep reading stories,
like you said, like your publisher pointed out, that
aren't all the same.
So I was wondering a little bit about your process.
I know everybody, when they're falling asleep
has a million ideas.
And I can't even imagine someone who has so many ideas
they have the book that you have.
Do you have stuff just come at you all the time,
and you have to process it in a way?
Or do you just sit down?
DEAN KOONTZ: Each book is different to some extent.
Some I can tell you where the book came from.
And it was a struggle, or it wasn't.
I was coming home from a meeting at a studio in LA
on a film development project with a bunch
of studio executives.
And you always come out of those meetings
in a psychopathic frame of mind.
And I had driven my wife's SUV.
And so the deck was filled with Simon & Garfunkel,
Because she likes that, or Paul Simon on his own.
And I was coming home, and a song came up, "Patterns."
And there's a line in it. "My life
is made of patterns that can scarcely be controlled."
And at that moment I thought, there's a novel in that.
Somebody knows that there's a pattern of things going
to happen in his life, and he has no control over them.
What would that mean in his life?
And in about 15 minutes, I had the idea
for this guy who's an ordinary baker.
And he comes from a family of bakers.
And they're proud of their expertise as bakers.
And the book would open the night he was born.
And his father would be in the hospital to witness his birth,
but was also in the hospital because his father's father is
dying after a stroke.
And he's going back and forth from death the birth
in the hospital.
And in the fathers lounge, expectant fathers lounge,
which in those days would have done it a different way.
Our lead's father is waiting to be told he's been born.
And the only other person in there
is this angry, chain-smoking-- and when I was writing it,
I wrote clown.
And I stopped.
I never do outlines.
So I just take a premise and go with it.
And I stopped and said, clown.
That's too ridiculous.
And then I wrote him as what an Emmett Kelly clown is.
Not somebody with the giant shoes, but a sad sack.
Might have a funny nose on, but he's
a different kind of clown than that.
And it turned out that if I hadn't written clown,
that novel would never have been the novel
it was, because it became everything.
Because it became a psychopathic family of clowns.
And it's a comic novel that's also a suspense novel.
That wrote almost itself, because I
was having so much fun.
Certain other books are harder, maybe because you're not
having as much fun.
And then every great once in a while,
you write one in a flow state.
The reason prolific is because I get up at quarter of 6:00
in the morning.
I shower, walk the dog.
I eat breakfast at the desk, and I'm at the desk by, 7:00, 7:15.
And I work through until dinner.
And I do that at least six days a week.
If I'm on a deadline, it goes to seven.
And so there's a lot of time put in.
But if you get into a flow state, which athletes
call being in the zone, I do, like, 20 drafts a page or more.
But I don't go on to page two until I've
done that many on page one.
I just refine it until I feel that-- I
have a lot of self-doubt.
So I have to feel that the page is
really good before I can move on.
And I go through a book that way.
It's sort of like coral reefs are
built with all these dead little calcareous skeletons.
And mine are done with all these dead little abandoned sentences
that I've piled up until the book is right.
But there's some times that I'll still do those drafts.
But they fly by, because you're in this place
that you can't make yourself go to.
And "Innocence" was a book like that.
"Innocence" just flew. "Watchers"
was a book that had a lot of that in it.
So you're not in control.
I say to young writers, the best thing you can do--
and I have a lot of problem with writers understanding, even
writers I know and respect.
I say, I never planned the character.
I know a little bit about him.
I know what his central problem will be.
And then I give him free will.
God gave us free will to do the right thing, wrong thing,
screw up, not.
And I give the character free will.
But people say, but no you don't.
You're creating the character.
And I say, the strangest thing happens.
If you don't think it ahead, and I don't think ahead
what's coming.
I just let the characters interact with each other.
When I'm writing, if it's comic element in the novel,
I'm often laughing out loud in my office.
At other times, I can be moved to tears,
and be sitting there crying at the typewriter.
My assistant is here today.
I think people who work in the house who
pass my office door think I should be in an institution.
And there's many other good arguments
for that, but not just this.
But that's how I work.
And it all gets done.
And I'm always amazed that there's a new book done.
But it does.
And I think you have to love it to be
able to stay at it all these years.
And I do love it.
I love the process.
AUDIENCE: Well, we love that you love it.
We're always amazed by the end product.
And I'm halfway through "Innocence."
I preordered it.
I was like, yeah!
So thank you, so much.
DEAN KOONTZ: No, thank you.
You buy my shoes.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming, and thank you
for telling us about your writing process.
I was interested in what you had said
about your very early research process.
I'm just wondering if you could maybe say a little bit more
about how you research now.
I mean, it must be very disruptive
compared to your regular writing style.
So can you tell us a little bit more about how you research,
and how it's changed over the years?
DEAN KOONTZ: Well, in many ways, it hasn't changed for me.
From the day I could start to afford to buy hardcover books,
I went completely nuts.
And if I was in a bookstore and I saw a book
on a very bizarre subject, you know, like-- I can't even
think of a bizarre subject right now.
But if I saw a reference book that I thought,
I'll never see that subject again, I would buy it,
until we got a library that probably
has something like 70,000 books in it.
And I built this library that almost anything
I want to know about I've got a number of books about it.
Then this other thing happened as books
became more and more successful.
I would get letters from readers in the mail.
And some of them would be people who say-- well, one example
I can give, this fellow wrote me,
and he was in the Marine Corps.
And he taught actually not just marines,
but helicopter pilots in all the services.
And he ran all the simulators for them.
And he said to me, if you ever need a military helicopter
in this and you want to know what
it's like, I can give you details.
And also you can come and run through the simulator.
So at that point, I realized there's
some value in keeping a drawer in my office
where I just keep all these people with specialized
knowledge.
And there's nothing better than calling somebody like that
and asking him, or going and being
put through the simulator, which I crashed over and over again.
And it's why I don't fly.
I think even as a passenger I'm going to crash the plane.
But I don't go online to do the research.
Because you'd be amazed at what computer I'm working on.
I'm on DOS yet.
And the reason is I have to first Windows.
Isn't that Windows?
First Windows.
And I didn't like Windows.
I liked the word processing enormously.
That's all I do on it, is write letters or text.
I didn't want to be going through Windows.
And Linda, my assistant, took Windows out of it.
Well, in later versions, you couldn't take the Windows out
of it.
So now I'm still working-- I still
have that logic unit, as they called them.
I still have one of those towers.
We have a spare in the other room.
I have a new keyboard, but new keyboards
won't work with my antique arrangement.
So we have one that will, if that one breaks down,
and a printer that will work, and another one to back it up.
And I'm so stick in the mud, I don't
want to learn new software, which will slow down
my writing more than the research would.
So I just want to stay with it.
And when someday it all explodes,
then my career is over.
Or I have to learn a new software.
I did an interview with Anthony Mason for CBS "Sunday Morning."
And he's a wonderful interviewer.
And they were there for a couple of days.
And the second day, we walked into my office.
And they hadn't seen it.
And he looked, and he said, what the hell is that?
And I said to him, it's amazing it isn't steam driven,
given how anti-technology-- not anti-technology, but how slow
I am to pick up technology.
So if I want to use the internet now for research,
I go to Linda over there and say Linda,
here's what I need to know.
And it's amazing to me how quickly she gets it to me.
So I know it must be an amazing world out there,
but my world is inner.
Fiction is a very internal thing,
and you have to get lost in yourself to write it.
And yes, you also have to love people and the world.
But when you're writing it, you have
to separate yourself from that.
And I have to turn off the world when I'm doing it.
And as Linda will testify, it gets
so bad toward the last few weeks of it
that I'll get up in the morning, and I'll forget.
For like three days, I won't shave.
I won't shower.
I'll think I showered yesterday, but I haven't.
I pull on a baseball cap.
And I go down.
And what does everybody in the house call it?
LINDA: I call it troll mode.
DEAN KOONTZ: Troll mode is what she calls it.
And I probably pretty much look like a troll
by the end of that.
But I get so caught up in it, I just want to get back to it
with no interruption when I'm right at the end.
That's as much as I can tell you.
Although I will say there's one other change.
A lot of what I do now with research
is not researching anything.
More and more, I've been reading all kind of philosophy,
because philosophy can drive different kind of ideas,
then you get other ways.
And it can drive the sort of subtext of books
in ways you wouldn't otherwise think about.
So there was this sociologist but philosopher
called Phillip "Reef" or Rieff.
He was out of Princeton.
I've never heard his name pronounced.
And he's written a number of books.
Died not too long ago.
And they're cultural criticism, but they're also philosophy.
I have gotten numerous ideas out of just reading those books.
They're very difficult, but they're also very illuminating.
So that's it.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
DEAN KOONTZ: We probably have some time for a few more
questions.
We don't want to--
AUDIENCE: Hey, Dean.
How you doing?
Thanks for coming out and seeing us.
But seeing around here all the golden retrievers,
I think this is going to be a very relevant question.
The first book I actually ever read in my life was "Watchers."
|t was given to be my mother.
And I think I was around 10 years old.
And I think my question I have for that
is-- this is more particular.
Where did the idea for the antagonist, a creature,
as well as the other antagonist, like Vince Nasco,
where did that stuff come from?
And I'm assuming since you're a dog lover, that
fueled the Einstein portions of the book.
But my main question is where did that book in its entirety
come from?
DEAN KOONTZ: That goes back such a long way now.
People assume I had golden retrievers, or I had dogs.
I didn't.
I'd never had.
When I was a kid, my father got a dog
for a very short period of time.
He was going to teach to be a hunting dog.
He kept it on a chain in the yard.
It's the worst thing you could do
for a dog is tie it up outside.
They're pack animals.
And the dog only lasted a week, because I went out
to play with it, and it was so enthusiastic it
wrapped its chain around my neck.
And if my mother hadn't looked out,
it probably would have strangled me.
Because when she came out and managed to get it off,
for days, I had the imprints of chain lengths around my throat.
And then we had a little dog for a week or so that somebody
gave us because they couldn't take care of it.
And it died shortly thereafter.
So I'd never had a dog.
But I loved golden retrievers.
And I had an aunt who didn't have a retriever,
but a dog I loved.
And I just loved dogs.
And where the idea came from that I would write
a novel about genetic experiments and enhanced
intelligence, and they would be working on a dog,
and it would be a golden retriever,
I can't tell you where that came from.
But I do know that because you have
to have conflict in any work of fiction,
it came to me pretty quickly that this same outfit might
have been doing experiments on a new kind of soldier
for the battlefield.
It would be a genetically-engineered creature
it would be completely obedient, just a killing machine.
And then that these two would be too smart for the people who
built them and made them, this very intelligent
golden retriever with human-level intelligence
and this creature would both escape.
And the creature hates the golden,
because everybody loved the golden and everybody was
fearful of the creature.
And then the idea that the creature-- you know,
this Frankenstein monster is pretty pathetic
when you actually look, especially in the movies.
There's this pathos in it.
And I thought this should be this very frightening monster,
but it should also be something that when
you get to the end of it, you have such pity for it,
you almost hate to see it be killed.
And then when it comes to my human bad people--
the question or the thing-- my wife
used to go to book signings a lot.
And I never knew why she would put up
with this, because sometimes there
will be 2,000 people in line, and it would
take seven hours or eight hours.
And she would stand beside me and open the book
to the right page, or fold it to me.
And at one point, I said to her, I know what it is.
You think if one of them turns out to have a gun,
you want to be there to take it away from them.
Because you know I'm not capable of it.
And she said, that's part of it.
My wife's 5 foot 2", but you'll agree she could probably do it.
But people at those books signings
would say to her-- the one question most often
was, his villains-- how do you sleep at night?
Because they think all this is actually part of who I am.
And maybe it is, but so far I haven't acted on it.
Having grown up in a house-- my dad
lived-- he drank a fifth a day, plus beers.
He smoked three to four packs of cigarettes a day.
He ate a very high-fat diet.
He did everything wrong you can imagine in a life.
My mother died at 53.
My father died at 83.
And he was healthy up until the last couple years.
But he began to develop degenerative alcohol syndrome,
which is the hollow spaces in your brain
that are filled with fluid and serve a purpose in your brain
begin to enlarge.
People with this begin to lose brain tissue.
And my father later in life was diagnosed as a sociopath.
He'd been diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic
with tendencies to violence, complicated by alcoholism,
which is a very bad thing.
That he didn't get diagnosed until he was in his mid
to late 70s.
Then one day a friend of my father's called.
I'm a little off the subject, but not.
I'll get back to it.
A fishing buddy of my father's called me up.
We had moved to California.
And finally we didn't have to worry
that there would be a pounding on our door at 2:00
in the morning and it would my father, drunk.
But we were out here less than a year.
Then a friend of his called up and said, he's destitute.
Which he always was.
And you could send him money, and he
wouldn't have it the next day, because he'd go to a bar
and buy drinks for everybody.
And he said, he's destitute.
And he's in terrible health.
He's not going to last a year.
So my wife and I sat down and had to figure out what to do.
And it was the hardest decision of my life,
but we decided we couldn't.
He was never there for me and my mother.
And my wife was a saint for this.
She knew what she was getting into.
We moved him west, got him an apartment, paid his bills.
But we said, this is only for a year.
He lived 14 years.
And it was 14 very bad years.
But my wife dealt with it in a fabulous way.
But I grew up with this example of evil in their life.
I mean, my father was a pathological liar.
He would lie to you sitting across the table
from you, knowing you know he's lying.
And he'd get this smile on his face,
just to see how long you'd put up with this.
And there was no reason not to put up with it,
because all he'd do if you called him on it was explode.
And he'd cause a scene.
And when we'd take him out on Father's Day for dinner,
we'd go to a restaurant and we'd be sitting across from him.
And he'd start things like telling
Gerda about my uncle Ned.
Now, I don't have an uncle Ned.
And Gerda, the first time this happened, she kind of
looked at me.
And she said, I didn't know you had an uncle Ned.
And I though, oh, just wait.
My father would go into all these stories about him.
And they'd be colorful stories.
And at some point, Gerda would start to get it.
And I could see when she'd start.
Oh, no.
None of this is true.
Well, when you grew up with all that and saw it,
I just have an understanding of people
who are that way, who'd rather lie than tell the truth,
even if telling the truth would be better for them.
And when he was diagnosed as a sociopath,
it was after he made an attempt on my life
in front of a bunch of witnesses with a knife.
And you had to go into a psychiatric ward.
And he later ended up-- we got him
on anti-psychotic medication.
And they were able to take him into a retirement home
setting which had nurses, so that he would
get the anti-psychotics every day.
And he was there a year.
And there was a trouble, but he was
the best behaved he'd ever been.
But when they called me up-- the doctor in the psych ward
called me up after he'd been in there.
And he said, are you able to talk about your father?
And I said, sure.
And he said, would this be painful to you.
And I said, not talking about.
Living through it was painful.
And he said, tell me about your father.
And I said, well, what you want me to--?
He said, no, let me tell you some things about your father.
When you were young, he threatened
to kill you and your mother, didn't he?
And I said, oh yeah, all the time.
And he said, and you believed he would do that sooner or later.
And I said, oh yeah.
I'm amazed he never did.
And he said, your father was never a religious man.
No.
And he said, but when things went really bad for him,
he'd go buy a Bible, and he'd sit reading it by the hour.
And he'd make you read it with him.
It was like this man had been in our home.
And he went through behavior after behavior like this.
And they were all things that my father had done.
And I said, you're about to tell me something.
You know what my father is.
And I've been told he's a borderline schizophrenic
with tendencies to violence, complicated by alcoholism.
And he said, no, your father is a sociopath.
He has no ordinary feelings, as we,
but he's very good at faking them.
And it was one of the most-- it may
be the most amazing moment of my life.
All of this stuff clicked.
All of the things you wondered about,
you couldn't understand why these things happened,
why somebody would be that way.
It just suddenly clicked.
You're living with Hannibal Lecter, except he never
went that far.
He was always in fights.
He ended up in jail a number of times.
And he was very violent.
But it never went that extra step.
And so we were very fortunate.
But that's where I have this affinity, which people tell me
I do, to write really bad, bad characters.
And I do research on that, too.
The character and the intensity is actually
based on a genuine serial killer.
And I had to tame it down.
Because if I had written what this guy really did,
nobody would want to read about it.
So it's life experience, but also research again.
So did that answer your question?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, it's interesting because the worse that
character does, the stronger he gets, presumably.
He perceives himself.
We don't know.
You write it in such a way where you don't know if he's just
crazy, or he's got some supernatural ability to absorb
people's--
DEAN KOONTZ: I'm trying to lead you along that.
But he's not.
He just thinks he's supernatural.
AUDIENCE: But you could interpret it both ways.
But I always thought it was just him being a psychopath.
And the worse I do, the more innocent the victim,
the stronger I get.
DEAN KOONTZ: I'll tell you one funny thing about that.
Well, I think it's funny.
He's a particularly nasty character.
And there's a point in the book where he kills a scientist.
He's assigned to kill these people who's
been involved in this.
And he kills this woman scientist with a hammer.
And I do not write gore.
I just don't.
I never have.
And I would have people come up in book signings to me
and say, oh, I love your books.
But when it gets to the gory scenes,
sometimes I just I can't.
And I'd say, the gory scenes?
Tell me one.
I heard this awhile.
And often, when I would start to ask where,
I found out it was the same scene, often.
And it was this hammer scene in "Watchers."
And I'd say to them, how long do you think that is?
How long is it from the moment he picks up the hammer
until she's dead.
How many words?
How many paragraphs?
And the answer would always be, oh, it's
like two or four pages, or something like that.
And I said, no, he tells her what he's going to do.
And then he undresses because he doesn't
want to get blood on his clothes.
And we know he's crazy.
But from the moment he picks up hammer until he's killed her,
it says, "The first blow struck her kneecap.
80 blows later, she dead."
That's all.
But in your mind, you're seeing the other 80 blows
to some extent, that's how the mind works.
You imagine it.
And so you don't have to do the gore.
You just have to set the situation up and let
the imagination of the reader take it.
But it's interesting you brought that up,
because that's the one that often people
find that just too chilling.
AUDIENCE: It's a chilling book, but if you are dog lover,
it's something very special about friendship and connection
to an animal or to, particularly, dogs.
That's why I connect with it so much, because I love animals.
I love animals and dogs.
DEAN KOONTZ: The book is ultimately about love,
and love for each other and for the animals.
You have to go through hell to get to the love part.
AUDIENCE: I just wanted to give the golden retrievers
a shout out for that.
DEAN KOONTZ: Thank you.
You were great.
[APPLAUSE]