Dean Koontz



Dean Koontz is an American author, born on July 9, 1945. He is known for writing suspense thrillers, many of which also contain elements of horror, action, science fiction, romance and satire.

One notable aspect of Koontz writing is that almost anytime there is a supernatural occurrence, its explanation, as outlandish as it might sometimes be, is usually physically possible, at least in theory. Very rarely does his work tread into outright fantasy.

On the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, his works fall pretty far on the Idealistic side despite the disturbing content found within the stories and the fact that the villain is usually a Complete Monster with no redeeming qualities. The heroes, on the other hand are always brave, highly intelligent, compassionate and admirable human beings whose virtues vastly outweigh whatever flaws they might possess. Common themes and messages in his books usually revolve around overcoming adversity rather than feeling sorry for oneself, and living life to its absolute fullest. This sense of idealism is contrasted by having one or more characters reflect on the decline of modern society over the past twenty or thirty years due to sex, free drugs, or liberalism in general. However, despite such musings, the worlds created by Dean Koontz seem to be populated with genuinely good people who are always willing to help a friend in need. If his protagonists have any flaws, it is a specific insecurity that is holding them back. These insecurities can often be traced back to events from the character's childhood, and through the course of the story the character must work through these insecurities in order to achieve their dream or to otherwise live full and happy lives.

His story "A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village" was included in Harlan Ellison's anthology Again, Dangerous Visions.


 * False Memory
 * Odd Thomas
 * Phantoms
 * The Taking

""That's not the future. That's. . . sideways.""
 * Action Survivor: Chris Snow (Fear Nothing, Seize the Night), Martin Stillwater (Mr. Murder), Tommy Phan (Ticktock)... possibly half of the protagonists of his novels are perfectly innocuous people thrust into danger without any special training.
 * An Aesop. Sometimes subtly, sometimes not.
 * A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In Demon Seed, Proteus (as he prefers to call himself) has a lot of frightening ideas and the capacity to bring them into being at all costs. Trapped in his "box" at the lab and yearning for freedom, he uses his insidious cyber invasion skills to trap Susan Harris in her automated mansion because she is so beautiful and he just loves her so much and wants to live a life of the flesh.
 * Affably Evil: Believe it or not, yes. One who comes instantly to mind is Billy Pilgrim from The Darkest Evening of the Year. He crosses the Moral Event Horizon but... "people liked Billy in part because of his appearance. Pudgy, with a sweet, dimpled face and with curly blond hair as thin now as it had been when he was a baby, he looked huggable. And people liked Billy because Billy genuinely liked people. He didn't look down on them for their foolishness, or because of their idiot pride or their pomposity, but delighted in them for what they were: characters in the greatest irony-drenched dark comic novel of all: life."
 * And I Must Scream: Toward the end of The Taking,
 * And whatever happens to people who cross over "sideways" to that hellish dimension in Fear Nothing and Seize the Night.
 * Apocalypse How: Villains often plan to end the world in various stages. The villain in Dragon Tears wanted a Class 2 (Take Over the World and restrict humankind to zoos and preserves). Frankenstein: Lost Souls: Class 3 (kill everyone). Twilight Eyes: Class 5 (start nuclear war). Nightmare Journey and The Taking were stories where the Apocalypse actually happened and they were class 1 and 2, respectively.
 * Apocalyptic Log: The audiotape from Delacroix in Seize The Night detailing what happened to him and the others at Fort Wyvern.
 * Author Appeal: Dogs. especially golden retrievers, tend to feature heavily.
 * Bench Breaker: In Intensity, the protagonist escapes her captor by ramming a wall with the chair she is tied to and splintering it. She injures herself in the process.
 * Black and White Morality: Within the first few chapters, there should never be any doubt in the readers' minds exactly who they should be rooting for.
 * Blue and Orange Morality: Vince, the professional assassin from Watchers lives by a strict code of conduct based on this kind of morality.
 * Body Horror: What the Retrovirus does. Hello there, random disgusting growths and crab-like claws replacing hands and shining yellow animal eyes. What it does to the mind is worse, though. Also worthy of mention is the abundant Shapeshifting Squick in Shadowfires.
 * Body Surf: The villain in What the Night Knows is the ghost of a serial killer, empowered by a demon, who commits murders by possessing one member of a family and forcing him to rape and murder the rest of the family. The finale involves him possessing several Asshole Victims to launch an attack on the hero's home and family.
 * Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Moongirl from the Darkest Evening Of The Year is a psychotic, emotionally manipulative arsonist who kills and torments For the Evulz. Her boyfriend is significantly less crazy, motivated more by greed and a twisted fascination with her. She is also drop-dead gorgeous and can pose convincingly as normal until its safe to drop the act.
 * Cameo: The first chapter of the fourth Frankenstein book, "Lost Souls" has Deucalion (The Monster) at the Monastary of St. Bathalomew's, conversing with Brother Salvatore, aka Brother Knuckles a former Mafia enforcer turned monk. Both the setting and the character are from Brother Odd.
 * Canine Companion
 * Cool Guns: A surprising number of protagonists can get their hands on a Desert Eagle.
 * Creepy Twins: Violet and Verbina Pollard from The Bad Place share each other's thoughts and sensations as well as those of animals. Since people are immune to their ability, they can't identify with them and thus are very far away, especially Verbina, who has retreated into a sort of autism and communicates only through her sister. While they're not necessarily evil, they have the moral ambivalence of animals.
 * Creepy Child: Toby from Winter Moon acts like this when
 * Creepy Doll: The Taking has a doll—somehow animated by a massive alien vessel passing overhead—stand up and start mutilating itself, pulling out its eyes and tongue, the innocuous phrases in its voice box turning into "all of your babies will die" as psychological warfare against those who are thinking about fighting back against the invaders.
 * : Happens to Helios at the end of Frankenstein: Dead and Alive.
 * Cloning Blues
 * Creator Provincialism: Many of his books take place in small towns in northern California.
 * Dark and Troubled Past: Many of Koontz's heroes come from abusive (or at least dysfunctional) backgrounds, but are nonetheless portrayed as successful, financially independent, strong-willed, and emotionally stable. At first, his villains were also portrayed this way but somewhere along the line Koontz decided that would make them somewhat sympathetic, so he made them Villain by Default instead and sometimes mentions that they had everything growing up but turned to evil as a deliberate choice.
 * In some interviews, Koontz has mentioned that his father was insane, and his decision to not have children of his own was for fear that his father's insanity might have had a hereditary component. He's mostly worked this out of his system, but if you go back and read some of his earlier novels with that in mind, it makes a couple of characters and scenes read entirely differently.
 * The Devil Is a Loser: Occurs with several of the human villains, and seen most prominently with Enoch Cain Jr. in From the Corner of His Eye, which is even lampshaded when two of the heroes discuss the nature of evil, and remark that evil is often petty and stupid yet capable of genuinely shocking horror, and it's OK to laugh at evil's stupidity despite the real horrors it perpetrates, as this takes away some of its power.
 * Deal with the Devil: Interesting subversion in The Face. An ex-mobster Dunny, while in a coma, gets an offer from demonic Mr Typhon. Typhon knows that Dunny partially redeemed himself and is now bound for Purgatory, not Hell. Consequently, Typhon offers Dunny a chance to save his friend and a child - at the price of Dunny's soul. Subversion comes at the very end of the novel:.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Many protagonists and antagonists, the latter sometimes combined with Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor.
 * Depraved Kids' Show Host: This bit: "With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoating, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the expectant fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer. The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience."
 * Deus Ex Machina: Starting to become a crutch in his later works, if the Amazon reviews are anything to go by. Breathless is the worst offender, but arguments can be made for Relentless and Darkest Evening of the Year.
 * Did Not Do the Research: Breathless gets almost everything about evolution wrong. It's pretty obvious Koontz was simply regurgitating creationist talking points, paying no attention whatsoever to the actual facts.
 * Doesn't Like Guns: Odd Thomas is a rarity among Koontz protagonists in this respect.
 * Eldritch Abomination: The Ancient Enemy in Phantoms is definitely this. Made all the more creepy from the seemingly plausible explanation for its existence and biology.
 * The Giver from Winter Moon probably qualifies too: a terrifyingly alien thing that comes out a hole in reality and literally cannot comprehend death.
 * Darkfall features an elder demon snaking a tentacle/worm/finger/appendage out of a portal, and Koontz actually uses the word "Lovecraftian".
 * Eldritch Location: The world of red skies glimpsed by Christopher Snow and the gang in Seize the Night.


 * First-Person Smartass: Odd Thomas, Christopher Snow, Jimmy Tock. Others too. Koontz likes this trope.
 * Evil-Detecting Dog: if the dog is freaking out, something VERY bad or at least bizarre is going on.
 * Evil Is Deathly Cold: implied occasionally.
 * Evil Cannot Comprehend Good
 * Evil Matriarch: Candy's beloved, saintly mother.
 * Faux Affably Evil: Most villains will definitely qualify, their polite and soft-spoken or cheery exteriors masking a cold and murderous heart and doubling the creepiness of their actions. "Evil is no faceless stranger, living in a distant neighborhood. Evil has a wholesome, hometown face, with merry eyes and an open smile. Evil walks among us, wearing a mask which looks like all our faces."
 * Fluffy the Terrible: In spite of being named "Candy", the main antagonist in The Bad Place looks like the Juggernaut, is full of homicidal rage and has deadly psychic powers to boot.
 * Face Stealer: A horrifying example from The Taking has the protagonists come across a group of people who have had their faces removed, leaving only a smooth, blank surface behind. They are somehow still "alive" and painfully aware.
 * From a Single Cell
 * A God Am I: Quite a few villains in his stories believe themselves to becoming gods, or are at least arrogant in the extreme to think they are superior beings, including the title character in his Frankenstein series, Midnight, Dragon Tears, and his short story "A Darkness in My Soul".
 * Victor is actually a subversion - although he positions himself as the center of the New Race's lives, he hates being referred to as a god.
 * And the main villain in  might be justified. He can , among many other things!
 * God Is Evil: Or at least God is insane. Occurs in his earlier works Fear That Man and A Darkness in My Soul. In Dragon Tears,
 * Good People Have Good Sex: And we tend to get to read all about it, too. The reverse of this trope is in play as much as this one is, in the sense that the villains don't have sex, due to being either indifferent to it, or almost hysterically repulsed by it.
 * Unless Koontz wants to establish them as a Complete Monster, then the villains will rape and torture people to show just how evil they are.
 * Taken a step further in False Memory, where the villain doesn't just rape and torture people, He'll also screw around with their brains in other ways just for the hell of it.
 * On the other hand, Dark Rivers of the Heart shows that Bad People Have Good Sex too (a hands-off kind, but they still enjoy it).
 * Moongirl and Harrow from The Darkest Evening Of The Year quite readily get it on, but in Moongirl's case, only in the windowless room where not even the smallest point of light can get through. The couple has no compunctions or hangups about sex, and the primal/animalistic way they go about it is meant to accentuate their evilness.
 * Hand Cannon: The characters frequently put magnum revolvers to good use; the Desert Eagle pistol has also made its fair share of appearances.
 * Hell Seeker: In Hideaway, the Serial Killer antagonist calls himself Vassago, believing he is the human incarnation of one of the demon princes of Hell and that by hideously murdering enough people, he will be allowed to return to Hell at Satan's right hand. After killing them, he arranges their corpses in ways that symbolically/artistically represent the sins he fancies they committed, but truly knows the reason for doing this has nothing to do with punishing the guilty. Its also hinted at that
 * Healing Factor:
 * Alphie, the genetically engineered hitman from Mr. Murder, has this ability at the cost of an extremely high metabolism. If he doesn't eat enough food to fuel his rapid regrowth, his body begins to self-cannibalize, making this one of the more realistic examples of the trope.
 * Eric, the Implacable Man villain/monster from Shadow Fires has a very powerful "William Birkin" version of this, due to being a scientist who injected himself with an experimental cell regeneration treatment in an attempt to achieve immortality. Unfortunately, instead of regenerating into human cells they "adapt" into inhuman cells geared towards survival, so the more damage he takes the more monsterous he becomes. His regeneration also doesn't extend towards thoughts (since the human mind is made up of unrestorable electrical impulses as well as nerves and tissue), so taking brain damage causes him to become crazier and crazier.
 * Hollywood Atheist: The Frankenstein series is terrible about this.
 * Honor Before Reason
 * Hulk Speak: The parts of Dragon Tears narrated by the family dog.
 * The beta creature in Watchers also attempts this, making him inferior in the "Francis Project" compared to Einstein.
 * Humans Are the Real Monsters: "The most identifying trait of humanity is our abilty to be inhumane to one another."
 * Humans Are Special: "What makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection.
 * Human Aliens: Justified in that the one in  is from a species with the ability to absorb DNA and shapeshift into other creatures. While their primary goal is to help humanity, they also have a malevolent counterpart, prompting a character to ask   if its kinda like angels and demons.
 * Intellectual Animal: Einstein the Golden Retriever in Watchers, who learned to play Scrabble and reads Dickens; the Moonlight Bay series, taking place in the same world as Watchers, has another smart but less educated dog in Orson.
 * Kill It with Fire: Another of the protagonists' favored means of dealing with various horrors, after more prosaic methods have failed.
 * Kill and Replace: what Dr. Helios and his New Race aims to do.
 * Lovecraft Lite: The Taking starts out as an alien invasion story with all the trappings of Cosmic Horror (it's even speculated that the aliens are terraforming Earth and humans to them are akin to the pesky mosquitos you annihilate by draining their swamp), complete with a reference to Cthulhu. Turns out, . Winter Moon features an Eldritch Abomination.
 * Living Shadow: the Bodachs from Odd Thomas.
 * Little Miss Snarker: Lelani Klonk, disabled in body but wise beyond her years. Same goes for Regina in Hideaway.
 * Living Ship: The Leviathan from The Taking.
 * Mad Artist:  from Velocity.
 * Mad Brass: Colonel Leland Falkirk from Strangers.
 * Mandatory Motherhood: The third time sex between members of the New Race is referred to as being dispassionate because they're sterile. Ironic, since Koontz himself has no children.
 * Misanthrope Supreme: If we get a glimpse of the villain's philosophy, expect him to be one of these. Some examples include Moongirl from the Darkest Evening of the Year who fantasizes about everyone on earth being dead, the villain from Dragon Tears who wants humanity confined to zoos, and also  in Frankenstein: Lost Souls who just wants to see a lifeless Earth.
 * Mind Rape: The Giver wants you to LET IT IN. Also,
 * Mama Bear: if a female protagonist has a child, she will always be this. Notable examples are Tina Evans from The Eyes Of Darkness, Laura Shane from Lightning, and Micky Bellsong from One Door Away From Heaven.
 * Monster Clown: Serial killer Konrad Beezo and his son Punchinello in Life Expectancy.
 * Monster Misogyny: Many of Dean Koontz's villains and monsters target women for their unspeakable crimes, especially in his early work.
 * More Dakka: A favored means of conflict resolution among the protagonists.
 * Never Mess with Granny: Vivian Norby, Milo's fiftysomething babysitter in Relentless, once beat up two thugs who broke into a home where she was babysitting. One of them ended up with a broken nose, split lips, some cracked teeth, two crushed fingers, a broken knee, and a puncture wound to the butt. The second intruder had even worse injuries (and developed a phobia of fiftysomething women who wore pink, as Vivian always did). "Vivian suffered a broken fingernail."
 * Nightmare Sequence: to signify that a character is going through some issues stemming from their past or present shortcomings, or that they are psychic and picking up the aura of someone really nasty, or that a strange entity or occurrence is creeping up on them and trying to invade their minds.
 * Nietzsche Wannabe: His villains tend to be nihilists who believe that their warped worldview is philosophically transcendent.
 * Noodle Incident: Cullen Greenwich from Relentless mentions that his family won't allow him to change a car tire because things once went very wrong when he tried to do so; he doesn't say what happened, only that it involved a monkey dressed in a band uniform.
 * Our Monsters Are Different: Seriously. Walking fungi that scream and weep like people in pain, giant insects, blob monsters, grotesque parasite-shooting abominations, and the aforementioned cosmic horrors.
 * Ominous Fog: In Moonlight Bay from Fear Nothing and Seize the Night, Moonlight Cove from Midnight, and Black Lake in The Taking, which is shrouded with purple fog and full of dangerous creatures, effectively making it Fog of Doom.
 * Papa Wolf: If a male protagonist has a kid, god help any madman or monster who threatens them. Notable examples are Jimmy Tock from Life Expectancy, and Hatch Harrison from Hideaway.
 * Parental Abandonment: Amy Redwing from The Darkest Evening of the Year has this as backstory.
 * Piggybacking on Hitler: The Frankenstein novels have this as part of Victor Helios' (aka Victor Frankenstein's) backstory.
 * Police Are Useless: In Shattered, Alex Doyle tells the police that George Leland tried to run his car off the road; they accuse him of making up stories and possibly being a drug addict who hallucinated the incident. In Mr. Murder, Martin Stillwater tells the police how a man broke into his house and almost strangled him to death; the police accuse him of setting up the whole thing as a publicity stunt.
 * Taken a step further in the Moonlight Bay series, where the police are not just corrupt, but have been co-opted and are actively trying to cover up what happened at Fort Wyvern. It also doesn't help that some of them have The Virus.
 * Positive Discrimination: Most of his disabled characters get this treatment.
 * The Power of Friendship
 * The Power of Love
 * Psycho Serum: The amber fluid in Midnight.
 * Psychic Powers:
 * Psychic Dreams for Everyone
 * Psychopathic Manchild: Some villains are revealed to have a childish mentality and/or motives. For instance from False Memory pretty much thinks of people as toys. He spends time playing his sick games with them, and when they no longer amuse him, he breaks and disposes of them.
 * Puppeteer Parasite: The Giver in Winter Moon.
 * Punch Clock Villain: Billy Pilgrim. "They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs."
 * No Transhumanism Allowed: Many of Koontz's older villains are Mad Scientists who want to create a new version of humanity, either wiping out the old version in the process or without paying attention to terrible flaws in the transformation process. The heroes naturally destroy all such abominations.
 * Scenery Porn: Extremely lavish and detailed descriptions of settings and architecture, which generally flows smoothly with the rest of the narrative.
 * Self-Made Orphan: Several villains.
 * Super Soldier: always ends in Transhuman Treachery.
 * Shapeshifter Showdown: Happens in the short story "Hardshell".
 * Shapeshifter Swan Song: His shapeshifters (mostly malevolent ones) are fond of doing this.
 * Screwball Comedy: Ticktock. Yes, a screwball horror comedy.
 * Shout-Out: in Odd Thomas: as...some freakish demon emerges from the mirror,  Odd mentions the line from Macbeth. "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."
 * In The Darkest Evening of the Year, a reference to eating a guy's liver with fava beans and a nice chianti is made. There are also shout outs to The X-Files, H.P. Lovecraft, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, The Wind in the Willows, John Carpenter's The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alice in Wonderland'', and numerous others.
 * In the Frankenstein series, one character is named Jonathan Harker, a reference to Bram Stoker's Dracula
 * Sealed Evil in a Teddy Bear: In Ticktock. And it doesn't stay there for long.
 * Stupid Jetpack Hitler: The plot of Lightning features a Nazi Germany that had developed time machines during World War II.
 * Take Me Instead!: Tim Carrier from The Good Guy.
 * Talking in Your Dreams: In The Good Guy Linda is having a bad dream of when her dog was taken away and mutters the dog's name, prompting Tim to ask her what's wrong.
 * Terms of Endangerment: Konrad Beezo calls Lorrie "missy, little lady, dear, and darling," and treats her in a friendly way as he's preparing to . It seems his upbeat, syrupy facade is the only thing keeping him from exploding into homicidal rage.
 * Tele Frag: Frank Pollard isn't very good at teleportation.
 * Time Dissonance: Used in both Whispers and Phantoms. In Whispers, the main character, who is 35, at one point muses that it seems like it was only a year ago since he was 25, when in fact ten years had actually passed. In Phantoms, after The Reveal of the Ancient Enemy, the Ancient Enemy perceives time really quickly, after having been around for millions of years, and that the lifespan of a human is extremely brief and insignificant to it.
 * Time Stands Still: Dragon Tears features
 * Town with a Dark Secret: Moonlight Cove in Midnight and Moonlight Bay in the Christopher Snow books.
 * The Blank: played for prime cut Nightmare Fuel and Body Horror in The Taking.
 * Tragic Monster: Konrad Beezo and his son to some extent, as well as Alphie from Mr. Murder and the Outsider from Watchers, especially toward the end. Since Koontz antagonists are almost always Complete Monsters who won't be redeemed, these tend to stand out, in a put-the-tormented-psycho-out-of-their-misery sort of way.
 * Also, from the FRANKENSTEIN series, the
 * Undead Child: The hideous abomination Ellen Harper gives birth to in The Funhouse. Another monstrous offspring by the same father, named Gunther, lives to adulthood and becomes a member of the carnival, wearing a Frankenstein mask to hide his inhuman nature.
 * Unfortunate Names: One of Life Expectancy's villains, Punchinello Beezo.
 * A lot of his villains, despite their overwhelming Evilness, fall victim to this: Shearman Waxx (Relentless), Corky Laputa (The Face), Edgler Vess (Intensity), Junior (From the Corner of His Eye), and Candy (The Bad Place—although in that case it was actually Lampshaded when one of the heroes declared that he wasn't afraid of any man named Candy. The character in question was named James at birth, but was given his nickname by his much-adored mother).
 * Villainous Incest - Major characters in several books are the product of non-consensual incest.
 * The Bad Place has the ultimate example:
 * What The Night Knows also has a pretty damn strong example:
 * Waking Up At the Morgue: Eric Leben in Shadowfires does this after being hit and killed by a truck. Turns out that immortality substance he injected into himself worked a little too well. Unfortunately
 * Well-Intentioned Extremist - Corky Laputa from The Face genuinely does believe that if he brings down civilization as we know it, a better civilization really will rise from the ashes. He just has no compunctions about what he has to do to accomplish that. Other villains from Koontz's works tend to fall under this category as well.
 * Arguably Victor Frankenstein falls into this category in some moments, he seems to genuinely believe that he's doing the human race a service by wiping them out and replacing them with his New People, he even muses at one point that if he were to die, the future would be bleak for the world. On some twisted level, in his own mind he's fixing the world by killing everyone.
 * Wicked Cultured:
 * I Have Your Wife: The plot of The Husband.
 * With Great Power Comes Great Insanity
 * You Can't Fight Fate: a common theme, discussed, played straight and subverted.