Dean Koontz interview

Murray Waldren has done a great interview with the master, Dean Koontz.

  

Koontz explains why he writes:

 

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Books saved his sanity as a child, he says, and possibly "saved me from turning to alcohol the way my father did to try to escape". He found diversion in reading, particularly horror and sci-fi paperbacks. At eight he'd begun to write stories, which he sold to relatives for US10c; at 20 he'd married Gerda; by 23 he'd published his first novel, written as part of their five-year plan of Gerda supporting him to see if he could cut it as a writer. "Our goal was to make $US25,000 a year from writing," he says, "so when it grew into something so much larger, it was cause for astonishment." But super sales didn't happen overnight: Koontz wrote about 40 books of varying success before scoring his first bestseller under the name Leigh Nichols in 1979 with The Key to Midnight.

 

Because reading changed his life, he says, "a part of you thinks, 'OK, if books had that effect on me, maybe there's some other person sitting in a room somewhere, not a good life, who will see something in your books that will illuminate a little bit about life for them, or simply transport them for a couple of evenings'." It's a philosophy that's working if the 20,000 letters readers send each year is any indication.

 

"The point is," he iterates, "that that is the whole point of it - it doesn't matter whether critics like my books or not, you do it for that reaching out."

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