E-mail a friendDean Koontz
airdate August 25, 2009
Mega-successful novelist Dean Koontz has sold more than 400 million books, in 38 languages. More than 20 of them rose to #1 on The New York Times best-seller list and several have been adapted as features or TV movies. Koontz won an Atlantic Monthly fiction competition as a college senior and, after graduation, worked with the Appalachian Poverty Program and as an English teacher, writing nights and weekends. His nonfiction debut, A Big Little Life, is about his life with a retired Canine Companions for Independence service dog.
Web Exclusive - Novelist discusses the role of books in his life and what they can do for people. (3:01)
Full interview. (12:13)
Dean Koontz
Tavis: There are best-selling authors, and then there is Dean Koontz. During his 40-year career as a novelist his books have sold more than 400 million copies around the world, translated now into 38 languages. And so it's no surprise that the prolific writer has a few projects out now, including two novels and a work of nonfiction called "A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog." Dean Koontz, an honor to have you on the program, sir.
Dean Koontz: Pleasure to be here.
Tavis: I know you don't do much of this, so I'm glad to have you sit in this chair for a few minutes.
Koontz: Well, see if I'm coherent. (Laughter) Then you may have a different opinion.
Tavis: You're always coherent. Let me start by asking a question I have asked of myself so many times, and maybe it's because I am not a dog owner. If I become a dog owner, I may understand this better. What is it about dogs that make for such good subject matter? Of course, you're at the top of the list, but every other week you look up on "The New York Times" best-seller list and you got 15 or 16 books that are listed, and sometimes three or four of them are about dogs. Why is that the case?
Koontz: I think there's a number of reasons. One would be that when you think about it, is there any other species on the face of the Earth that would risk its life to save a human being? No. Cows don't do that, horses don't do it.
Tavis: Some humans don't do that. (Laughter)
Koontz: Some humans don't do it. But dogs do it and frequently have done it. There's something special about the human-dog bond. Dogs think very highly of us. Maybe they shouldn't, but they really do.
There's also the thing when we lost Trixie, somebody said to me, "Oh, I hate to admit this but when I lost my dog that I loved for a long time, it was harder for me than losing my parents, a sibling, or a friend." And I said, "There's no mystery about that. No matter how much we love our parents or our friends or our siblings, it's still human relationships. They're imperfect."
But a relationship with a good dog is perfect. That dog never betrays you, never says a mean word to you. It might if it could speak sometimes. But it's that ideal relationship and it's a glorious, wonderful thing, and I think that's why people love to read about dogs.
Tavis: This might be politically incorrect, but since you went there let me follow you there. Some might take your latter comment as cultural. For example, in this whole Michael Vick saga, and nobody, including Michael Vick, is in any way condoning what he did.
But there was, as you recall, this national conversation about the cultural divide, certainly between African Americans and White Americans. This is not true of every Black person, so you ain't got to send me a bunch of emails about this. I'm not trying to speak for all Black people.
I am trying to make this cultural point that I have - it's hard for me to imagine talking to an African American in this chair who could sit and say to me that he or she understands how losing a dog could compare with losing a mother, a father, or a child. Is there a cultural disconnect here?
Koontz: I don't think it's a cultural disconnect. I think, really, it depends on your - I'm not saying it doesn't compare. Of course those are terrible losses. But a loss of a human relationship, as terrible as it is, it can be the same thing with a dog if you are connected with the dog. I say in this book, and I think a lot of people feel this way, there's something so special about the human-dog bond that I said this dog changed my life so much, changed me as a person.
Tavis: Trixie?
Koontz: Yes. I came to feel that this dog - this may sound very full of myself - I thought this dog was what I would call in our faith a theophany. It was a manifestation of God in my life. It was God showing me, look at this animal. Look at this animal's joy and wonder in life. I was losing my own wonder in life. She restored it to me. She changed what kind of book I wrote, and in the strangest sort of way she brought me back to a faith that I was drifting from.
And I think that there can be that kind of miraculous thing between a dog and a person because there is the theory that when the supernatural enters the natural world, it doesn't do it through big, elaborate presentations. It enters the world through a mundane event or a mundane thing, like a dog. And I certainly ended up feeling this dog was so miraculous that there was something special about her, and I was meant to learn from her, and I did.
Tavis: I understand that point, and I accept the explanation. You're very coherent - I got that. (Laughter) How did you discover Trixie? How did Trixie come into your life?
Koontz: Well, we'd for years said we'd needed to have a dog, we wanted a dog. But I was too busy; it was always too busy, too busy. We work with this organization called Canine Companions for Independence, which provides service dogs for people with severe disabilities - paraplegic, quadriplegic. And these dogs mainstream them. The person without the dog often can't live on their own. With the dog, they can. The dogs do about 89 different tasks or 89 different commands can be combined in many different tasks.
And because we'd worked with them so many years, they kept saying, "Let us give you a release dog," one that either was in service or had to be taken out or never made it into service because couldn't quite finish the training. And we kept saying no, and then I said to my wife one day, "Well, if we keep seeing no we're going to be 90 saying we're too busy, so let's just say yes, let's take the dog." It was the right time and the right dog for our lives.
Tavis: You mention your wife and I want to go back to her because it's quite a remarkable relationship the two of you had over these many years. You've been together how many years now?
Koontz: We've been married 43 years in October.
Tavis: Married 43 years in October, and earlier in your career you were teaching school. The way Dean Koontz, if you know this story, the way he became a writer was that his wife one day said to him, after his having sold a few short stories, "Dean, you're really a good writer and I think you ought to write full-time, and I think we ought to have an arrangement here."
"For five years," his wife says to him, "For five years, I'm going to support us. My work will support us for five years, and in that five years I think you have the capacity to become a great writer. If you're not a great writer in five years, then you'll go back to work and we'll continue on."
Obviously, something happened in that five-year period, but speaking of love - that story got me when I read the story of what your wife did to help you to become a great writer.
Koontz: It humbles me when I look back at that time how she saw that it was even possible, because I wasn't the writer then that I was now. There was a lot of learning to take place. I don't think I was as good a person at that time to have done the same with her if our roles had been reversed, so it was quite an amazing thing.
I sometimes say I tried to bargain her up to seven years. (Laughter) She was swifter than I was and always has been. And it took almost the five years before I was earning enough that she could actually quit her work and go to work running the business side of my writing career, which is what she's done ever since.
Tavis: But you, in that five-year period, have become successful enough for her to quit her job and to go working full-time with you.
Koontz: And at that point our goal was, we said if we could just be sure that every year we could make $25,000 from my writing that would be huge success. So that's where we were at that time. That's what we thought was huge success. We never imagined that anything like what happened would happen.
Tavis: Because I'm in the business, I have some sense of the kind of money that Dean Koontz makes now, and I won't even tell you. It's a long way from $25,000 a year, (laughter) for the kind of best-selling books that he writes.
This book is fascinating because it is a memoir. Obviously, Trixie is an integral part of the book. But I was fascinated by your father and the kind of - tell me about your father.
Koontz: My dad was a - I didn't know when I was a kid how - I knew he was very strange and I knew he was a very troubled person. He was an alcoholic, he was given to violence. He held 44 jobs in 34 years, so we were very poor. We had an outhouse until I was 12 and we never knew if we had a roof over our heads or not from day to day, basically.
My mother was a very good person but very ill much of the time, so he sort of ran our lives and always was, in his drunken moments, threatening to kill us all, which meant the two of us and then himself, and it was a difficult childhood. But when I say that, I was a very happy kid. I always realized as a kid you could be happy or not, depending on what you've got, and you make what you've got.
So my happiness came out of books at a very young age, which got me out of that house, or just in attitude a lot. But my dad eventually - I'm writing about my dad now in a memoir and he had a strange side where he invented things, and he was such a good salesman if he would have been able to hold a job he could have done very well. But he couldn't hold a job because he'd punch out the boss frequently, which is a very bad career move.
Tavis: Yeah, not a good career move. (Laughter)
Koontz: So eventually later in life my father was diagnosed first as borderline schizophrenic-paranoid with tendencies to violence, complicated by alcoholism. And a few years later that was changed to sociopathic, a diagnosis of sociopathy, and that made a lot of sense to me and it explained my whole childhood.
I sometimes say the odd part about that is my dad made our live so difficult and made his own life so difficult that I always said the one thing I have to know is I'll never be like my father. And in a strange way I think he gave me a career. He gave me the drive, because I didn't want to be what he was. He kept me away from alcohol, because I saw what it did to him, and in many, many ways, without that maybe I wouldn't be where I am now. So you can look at even that sometimes I think as a blessing.
Tavis: I hear that, and it is a blessing, and I receive that, but it's also fascinating for me that having endured all of that - it's easy in retrospect to write about this, to look back on it and to see what your father was. It's another thing I think altogether to have come through that so well-adjusted.
Koontz: Well, talk to my wife. (Laughter)
Tavis: Maybe you're not so well-adjusted.
Koontz: The public face is well-adjusted, yeah. I didn't talk about - I've never talked about it that much but I talked about it once, briefly, earlier in my career after I'd had a few best sellers, and it's surprised me how much mail I got from people who'd gone through maybe not as bad a childhood; some of them worse.
Many of them, though, knew exactly what it was like, and the overriding question was, "How did you get over that? I'm still seeing a therapist about it; I'm still struggling with my own problems over it." But if you believe that life has meaning and purpose and that somebody of a higher power is looking after you, it makes a big, big difference.
And I think my mother gave me that, and that helped a great deal. So that was one way of getting through it. And then in a just more blunt sort of way, I've said to people, "Look, I've always thought if I didn't go on and have success in my life - not this much success, never thought of that, but some success - and if I didn't go on and get over all that and put it behind me and be happy, then he won, and that's what he wanted."
He wanted me to be unhappy, and I said, "Don't let the bastards win." (Laughter) And that resonates with people. They never thought of it that way, and it's true.
Tavis: I can talk to you for hours; I'm out of time for our conversation now. I do want to say to the audience, though, I'm about to ask Dean Koontz a question now that you will see exclusively on our website, go to PBS.org/TavisSmiley and you will get the answer to the question I'm going to ask him now that he will answer online.
I'm curious to end our conversation about the power of books. You referenced earlier in this conversation how books was a way of escape for you, and I want to get your thoughts on the role of books in your life and the power that rests in books, but let me now thank Dean Koontz. Number one "New York Times," a perennial best seller.
His new book is a "Memoir of a Joyful Dog." It's called "A Big Little Life," and there, a gorgeous picture of the author and Trixie. Dean, nice to have you on the program.
Koontz: Nice to be here.
Tavis: All the best to you.
Back to August 25, 2009