The Candid, Everyday Faith of Bestselling Suspense-Thriller Novelist Dean Koontz

The faith of Odd Thomas

^{by Rob Kerby, Senior Editor}

Dean Koontz, author of more than 100 books, known for his bestselling suspense-thriller novels, says faith and his local church are a big part of his life … and of his novels. His latest, Odd Apocalypse, continues the story of Odd Thomas, an eccentric twentyish short-order cook at the Pico Mundo Grill out in the desert who is rapturously in love with the most beautiful girl in the world, Stormy Llewellyn.

As in the four previous novels featuring Odd, the young cook communicates with the dead – whether he likes it or not. “The dead don’t talk. I don’t know why,” he muses in Odd Apocalypse. But, he explains, they do try to communicate and he occasionally finds himself their reluctant confidant.

“The series in my mind is six or seven books,” says Koontz. “Odd is on a spiritual journey. I’ve said from the beginning he’s on a journey towards absolute humility. How I will write that in book seven, I have no idea, not having absolute humility myself. But I always have to be writing something that challenges me or interests me.”

Complete humility

“Odd has interested me more than any other character that I’ve ever written,” reveals Koontz. “Each of the Odd Thomas books deals with a particular virtue and the ultimate virtue that he’s moving toward.”

Odd thinks of himself as an ordinary guy and tries to do his best by the silent souls who seek him out. Sometimes they want justice – and that’s what spins the plots of Koontz’s tales. Odd’s otherworldly tips to the local police chief often solve crimes. Occasionally they prevent one.

However, in Odd Apocalypse, this time it’s different. A mysterious man comes to town with a voracious appetite, a filing cabinet stuffed with information on the world’s worst killers, and a pack of hyena-like demonic spirits – which only Odd can see – following him wherever he goes. Just who the stranger is and what he wants, Odd does not know. But he knows something very bad may happen within 24 hours.

Pico Mundo will awaken to a day of catastrophe. As evil coils under the searing desert sun, Odd travels through the shifting prisms of his bizarre world, struggling to avert the looming cataclysm. His is a full heart that fights back against the darkness.

Listen!

“Even in the darkest moments, light exists if you have faith to see it,” explains Koontz. That’s just one theme within the Odd Thomas series, which Koontz says he enjoys penning. “ His voice comes to me so naturally that it’s a joy to write his stuff.

“It’s as difficult as any writing is, but he makes me laugh and gets emotional reactions out me as if he’s a real person and I’m not actually writing about him, but I’m listening to him.”

Does Koontz ever find himself sitting at the keyboard chuckling or crying as he writes?

“Well, when I leave my office door open which is much of the time, I’m sure people who work here think I might end up in an institution one day. But I’m a softy so when it’s an emotional sequence I can tear up while I’m writing it. And it sounds strange…people ask me do you ever scare yourself? And I say no, that doesn’t happen. But you do make yourself laugh out loud or you can bring yourself to tears and that actually tells me the thing’s working. Because if I’m sitting here knowing it’s a story and knowing the struggle of getting through a page and it still can affect me that way then that’s the best proof you might have something you’re doing right.

Quiet faith

Koontz says he doesn’t think it’s effective to “hit people over the head” with his personal faith. Instead, it just manifests itself in his writing, for example, consider this excerpt from his novel Seize the Night.

“Her beauty is not just – or even primarily – physical. In her face, I see her wisdom, her compassion, her courage, her eternal glory. This other beauty, this spiritual beauty – which is the deepest truth of her – sustains me in times of fear and despair, as other truths might sustain a priest enduring martyrdom at the hands of a tyrant. I see nothing blasphemous in equating her grace with the mercy of God, for the one is a reflection of the other.

“The selfless love that we give to others to the point of being willing to sacrifice our lives for them, is all the proof I need that human beings are not mere animals of self-interest; we carry within us a divine spark, and if we chose to recognize it, our lives have dignity, meaning, hope. In her it is spark is bright, a light that heals rather than wounds me.”

Free will

His style of writing is unique – “It’s just the way God made me,” he says. ”I start with a premise…some sort of situation for the character that’s got something that interests me that really centers around the theme of the book and I just go from there. And rarely do I have any idea where this is going. Once in a great while, I’ll know something about the ending, but usually, I say to young writers and this is difficult for some of them to grasp. And it was difficult for me to grasp in my earlier days before I found my way toward it. I give characters free will just like God gave free will to us. And they’re able to do anything they want. I don’t outline, I just follow them. And they always surprise me. I’ll be writing a scene and a line will come out that obviously sets up some new action or some new twist in the story and it isn’t anything I contemplated in advance. It’s a very mysterious part of the writing process and I think it’s part I love the most. I said it either shows you you’re in touch with something deep inside yourself it goes beyond the unconscious or in to the unconscious, or it means you’re in connection with some higher power of creativity which is what it really feels like to me. When that kind of thing happens it feels almost supernatural in its way.”

The clown in the lounge

“I can remember I was working on a book called Life Expectancy,” says Koontz. “The opening sequence involves a father in an expectant father’s lounge in a hospital. And his son is going to be born that night but his own father is in the other end of the hospital, dying from a stroke.

“He moves back and forth between these two events. I knew there was going to be somebody in this expectant father’s lounge that was going to be a bad piece of work – and that something awful was going to happen. It was going to be the center of the book, but I didn’t know what.

“I got to the point of describing the other men in the room. I’d first described the room – it was in those days when hospital rooms, lounges and things were like five different bold colors because that was supposed to make you feel cheerful. I described the décor and then out of my fingertips came this line, ‘but the chain-smoking clown was the worst of it.’ And when I wrote the word clown, I just stopped at looked at the page and said, ‘Now that’s ridiculous. Putting a clown in this expectant father’s life?” And I went back and I spent quite some time looking at that on the screen and I kept counseling myself that ‘You don’t know where that came from, but it’s going to be worth pursuing, even as silly as it looks at the moment.’

“When the novel was finally finished, it became one of the most popular I’ve done. It would never have worked without the clown, because everything else followed from it.

“You just need to trust those things where there’s an instinct or a grace that’s been given to you.”

Unconvinced clergy

When we were dating, I was impressed that Gerta was so devout. My family was highly dysfunctional. My father was a violent alcoholic. My mother was a wonderful person. She would stand up for me to prevent violence against me, but she couldn’t seem to stand up for herself against my father. And so we were always destitute or on the brink of destitution and never knew we would have a roof over our heads. He had 44 jobs in 34 years and frequently punched out his boss or another employee which isn’t a career advancement technique.

A lot of people think it was a dark childhood. It really wasn’t so much because for some reason I’ve always felt happiness was a choice, and as a kid, I could always find things that made me happy, and things that were good. And partly that was books that really saved me as a child, but as a consequence, the family was so dysfunctional that although my mother made me go to church with her. I grew up in that church, it didn’t have anything to offer a kid. It was something you did on a Sunday, but it didn’t have any reverberations through the week.

When I started dating Gerda, often our dates were visiting family, going from one aunt and uncle to the next. I kept seeing examples of these tightly knit families that were a joy to be around. There was none of the dysfunction I saw in mine. I think a part of me decided maybe this has something to do with their deep faith.

I begin reading G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis as well. I re-read and re-read and I began through Chesterton to feel maybe this was it. If we were going to get married, I should probably take this step. I pretty much surprised Gerda when I told her.

I’m not sure the pastor approved of me – or believed I was sincere. The night of our wedding practice, he kept calling me Dan. I think it was a subtle way of saying, I’m not sure about you. Gerda, I am not so sure about this guy.