Dear Mister Koontz,
You don't know me. That should be obvious right from the start, eh? I'm not an obsessive fan who thinks we should be best buds and go driving off a cliff Thelma and Louise style. I am a concerned reader. And concerned I most assuredly am.
It's been a couple of years since I last read one of your books. Why has it taken me so long to decide on this response? I dunno, maybe I was so disappointed in it I couldn't bring myself to talk about it anymore or maybe it's because I had other things to do and couldn't be bothered putting my thoughts into a blog. Who can tell? Let's not dwell on it.
I've read a lot of your books. By my count it's over fifty, most of which I read over a few years in the mid-nineties and then started getting hardbacks whenever they came out for a few years. The list takes in Night Chills through to Velocity, with a detour into Shattered and Chase*. No one can accuse you of not being prolific. I enjoyed the majority of these books. They were fun, they were weird and they kept me entertained. They are also the novels that shaped me most as a writer, reading them is the inspirational foundation on which I write and they showed me one writer didn't need to be constrained by a single genre.
It was reading Dark Rivers of the Heart when something struck me**. At the time I wasn't sure what niggled at me, but something bothered me about the book. I now realise it was foreshadowing, something that happens often in your fiction – I'm not sure if this bit of literary flourish was intended. Since the novel was mixed in with earlier works I finished it and went onto the next.
Some years later I was reading One Door Away from Heaven and I got that niggle again – a persistent itch I was starting to analyse and get a hold of. It wasn't until The Taking† that I realised what bothered me about the previous books: you were letting preachiness edge into your fiction. At least in The Taking you didn't resort to an epilogue that rather pompously told the reader what to think, but it was preachy nonetheless, telling us hell was coming for all us sinners and we'd better repent or we're all going to be on the receiving end of a Lovecraftian tentacle up the unmentionables. You obviously learned from Dark Rivers of the Heart and One Door Away from Heaven not to use a clumsy annotative epilogue to tell us your message. Instead you went to the tool cupboard and found the biggest sledgehammer you could and started wailing on your poor unsuspecting reader's noggin with it. Not cool, dude. You have some opinions and beliefs I don't agree with, but your religious convictions shouldn't force me away from your stories, they should enrich the experience despite the fact I don't share them.
If that were the only issue I had with your work, this wouldn't be a worry, hey as long as the stories were interesting and seemed fresh...uh, Mister Koontz, we may have another problem.
All writers have little things they add to each story, whether consciously or unconsciously, forming a link through their work that marks it out as theirs. Could be as simple as a particular turn of phrase or they have a character recur. You have tropes. When I read Watchers, the intelligent dog was great and using the dog as a protagonist in Dragon Tears was a cool idea. The ancestors to these interesting characters have become warped, mutated, deus ex machinaed to the nines. Magic dogs...no, wait, it's even more specific than that...magic golden retrievers. What the hell? You write yourself into a narrative corner and instead of thinking, "Hey, maybe this isn't working, I'll see where it went wrong," you think, "I know! The dogs have super powers!" It's amazing what can destroy suspension of disbelief; in a novel with all kinds of scary alien strangeness a dog with super powers shouldn't feel out of place, but because the world your novel is essentially like ours dogs suddenly developing hitherto unobserved fantastical abilities makes you seem a bit desperate. Yes, I am still referring to The Taking. You've done it in other books and that's kind of the problem. I know you love golden retrievers, but using them as crutches to stop rickety narratives falling over isn't fair. Think of the animals, please‡.
And this brings me on to another creeping problem that's wandered into your writing since The Taking. Your stories have felt...incomplete. It's worst in The Taking, of course where I felt like a whole half of the story was missing and kept expecting it to switch to the husband's point of view, anything to stop him being more than a cardboard cut-out of character. You disappointed me and you wrote a literary version of a life-size standee. Velocity and Odd Hours also suffer from ropey stories. They don't seem to go anywhere – there's lots of that foreshadowing, but not a great pay off. The endings fall flat. Since Odd Hours I haven't been able to face another one of your novels again, especially since so many of them sound like they're rehashing the same plot. It feels like you're fatigued with writing, sick of the grind of churning out 120,000+-word thrillers every year§. Maybe you should take a sabatical from the thrillers. You're wealthy enough that not plopping out another hardback doorstop isn't going to break you and you seem to be writing kids books, so you won't be away from writing, just away from the stories that seem to be chomping away at your soul like a particularly ravenous Pac-Man. I do have your welfare at heart, because I want to read and enjoy your books again.
So I'll wrap up on that note. I would hate to see you dip into such a deep writing slump and never return. Perhaps one day you'll find that spark again and I'll be brought back. There's always hope.
* I even bought The Dean Koontz Companion. How's that for going overboard?
** And it wasn't just your sudden weird aversion to swearing. Anything stronger than 'bastard' and 'asshole' suddenly doesn't exist in your novels, which is frankly unsettling. I'm avoiding swearing out of deference, in the laughably astronomical chance you'll read this.
† Oh, man, this book has a lot to answer for. I mean a whole damned lot.
‡ I was going to mention your obsession with frankly dull everymen (and everywomen), but got so depressed thinking about the crimes you've committed in the name of golden retrievers, I couldn't go into it.
§ Some people have speculated you're farming out the work. After seeing the repackaged first two Frankenstein books with the co-authors names swiped off the covers (oh, I have the earlier printings, though) I'm wondering if that's actually the case.
Will
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