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INTERVIEWS
Interviews with Dean Koontz focus on the serious themes of his books, on the details of his difficult childhood, on his work habits and methods, and on his thoughts about the craft and the art of writing. Although FEAR NOTHING is as suspenseful and thoughtful - and as full of emotion - as anything he has written, and although he ranks it as possibly his best book, it is also fun to read.

Frequently, interviewers are not interested in that aspect of the author's work, and the resultant conversations are dry. In the hope of providing an atypical interview for this website, we wrote a series of unconventional questions on slips of paper and tossed them in a box. Then we excerpted questions contained in recent letters from readers - among the 10,000 that the author receives each year - and tossed those in the same box. The following interview was conducted by randomly drawing questions from that receptacle and posing them to the author.

Q: Do you believe in life after death?
A: Yes. To me, it seems as easy to believe in life after death as to believe in life before death. Look around at our world and marvel at its wonderful weirdness. Nothing on the Other Side could be any more amazing or bizarre - or more unlikely - than the glorious world in which we already exist. How can anyone have difficulty believing in eternal spirits but have no trouble at all believing that Richard Simmons and Bobcat Goldthwait and Madonna are real?

Q: How tall are you, what do you weigh, and what is your shoe size?
A: This is from a reader from where? Amarillo, Texas? There must not be much happening in Amarillo if people have time to wonder about things like this. I'm five feet eleven, weigh one hundred fifty-two pounds (plus or minus a lemon-filled chocolate doughnut) and wear an eight-and-a-half narrow shoe. Yes, I have small feet. I could probably stand on point pretty easily and, if writing fails me, launch a career as either a ballet dancer or a bird dog.

Q: For my term paper, I need to know what you think is the difference between "literary" and "popular" fiction and whether you usually write one or the other. Also what living writer do you most admire, and what dead writer do you want to be like?
A: "Literary" and "popular" are bogus distinctions. The best literature - Dickens, Twain, Shakespeare - was also popular, and the best popular fiction has as much style and grace and depth as that of anyone self-consciously writing literary fiction. There's a lot of trash in each form. I admire many living writers but none more than Anne Tyler and Jim Harrison. I don't want to be like any dead writers. They're dead. It's difficult to write when you're dead - and it's impossible to party.

Q: Intensity and Sole Survivor didn't leave much room for the humor that was such a strong element in books like Watchers and Mr. Murder. What about FEAR NOTHING?
A: Suspense always comes first. And an involving story. Sometimes a tale doesn't allow for a smile and sometimes it demands a lot of laughs. Although there's a core of darkness in FEAR NOTHING and, I hope, considerable tension, it was more fun to write than anything I've done since Watchers, primarily because each of the major characters has a distinctive sense of humor and an interesting way of looking at the world. As a reader, I always care about characters more deeply and fear for them more urgently if they have a sense of humor. We are a delightfully foolish species, so both real people and fictional characters are more fun to know if they have a healthy sense of their foolishness.

Q: What do you drive?
A: Myself

Q: Will you ever come to Birmingham, Alabama, for a book signing?
A: The realities and logistics of book promotion and my own current disinclination to travel much by air make it unlikely that I'll get to Birmingham. I have nothing against the place. Been there, liked it. But why am I always being asked whether I'll go one place or the other? This cuts both ways, you know. Why doesn't the city of Birmingham load up a couple of semis with copies of my books and come out here to California? They'd be welcome. It's not only the South that has hospitality. We'd have to meet at the beach for a picnic, because our dining room seats several thousand fewer than the population of Birmingham, not to mention the intolerable wait in line to use our powder room.

Q: What are your hobbies?
A: Simultaneously juggling razor-sharp axes and flaming torches. Communing psychically with alien intelligence's on Saturn and in Washington, D.C. Stalking David Letterman. Boy, I sure wish I could claim a hobby as colorful as any one of those. Unfortunately, I am a laid-back guy in the hobby department. My wife and I collect Art Deco and Chinese furniture and decorative items. We go to the beach. We like to read. We like to go on long fast walks and work out in the gym. Occasionally, we go on a bank-robbing and murder spree, but no more thanonce a decade.

Q: Why do you write about dogs so often? And will you ever feature a cat in a major role?
A: The bigger question is: Why do other novelists write so little about dogs? John Irving, Danielle Steel, Pat Conroy, Mary Higgins Clark, Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, Marge Piercy...none of these writers has, to the best of my knowledge, ever written a scene from a dog's point of view or used a dog as a major character. I find this particularly strange in light of the fact that dogs are the masters of the universe and have lives infinitely more complex and richer than our own. What are they afraid of, all these writers with such serious cases of dog-avoidance? Are they worried that writing about dogs will draw the attention of the Canine Overlords who decide our fates and that these potentate pooches will look with disfavor on what they've written? Or is it something even darker: anti-canine bigotry? As for a cat - there's one in FEAR NOTHING, and in the book I'm writing now, the same feline reappears. His name is Mungojerrie. What - you think cats have names like Fluffy and Smartie Boots? Please.

Q: You are so prolific - when do you sleep?
A: Every June 14th.

Q: Are you pleased with the upcoming movie version of Phantoms?
A: Pleased enough to let them use my name above the title. If I hadn't liked it so much, I'd have made them call it "Emily Brontë's Phantoms" or some such. It's a tight, fast-paced picture, genuinely creepy, emphasizing suspense and avoiding gore, relying on inventive storytelling rather than mindless special effects - although we also have some mindless special effects for those who like that sort of thing. I wrote the script, served as executive producer, had considerable control - and worked with some very talented people like Joe Chappelle (the director), Joel Soisson (the producer), Bob Weinstein and Andrew Rona and Richard Potter at Miramax/Dimension. And with actors like Peter O'Toole, Joanna Going, Ben Affleck, Liev Schrieber, and Rose McGowan, we're ahead of the game going in.

Q: Have you always wanted to be a writer?
A: As a kid, I wanted to grow up to be the Lord High Executioner at the Tower of London, and I was really disappointed to learn the position had been eliminated in another century. I was 23 when I discovered the job was unavailable, and I don't think I finally put the dream behind me until I was 40.

Q: What advice would you give teenagers today?
A: Don't listen to the doomsayers all around us. They have always existed and they will always exist, predicting one catastrophe or another, and now they get into your head more deeply because the media amplifies their cries of alarm. The future is going to be bright and full of promise, and you are going to have more opportunities before you and a higher quality of life than any prior generation of humanity. Sure, there are problems, big ones, but there have always been problems and we have always triumphed over them. Be hopeful, be kind, be hardworking and you'll be happy. Kids and teachers write all the time asking me to give advice to teenagers. Why am I never asked to give advice to 80-year-old guys? I'd tell them to drive a little faster and to avoid wearing their trousers six inches above the waistline. I am never asked to give advice to 40-year-olds, either. I'd tell them to beware of all those hopeful, kind, hardworking teenagers who are going to grow up and take their jobs.

Q: What's your favorite food, color, flower, song, and hat?
A: Kibby with a Greek salad. Green. Orchid. Currently, "Dancing'" by Chris Isaak. Hat? My favorite hat? Well, berets seem a little pretentious, and those tall fur guardsmen's hats from Buckingham Palace seem warmish for California. So I guess I'd have to go with those colorful little crocheted hats that reggae singers sometimes wear. Hey, did this question come from Amarillo?

Q: Will you ever stop writing?
A: Like it or not, I will probably have to quit working when I stop breathing.

Q: Did people think you were strange when you were growing up?
A: Not just when I was growing up.

Q: You and Gerda have been together since high school. What attracted you to her and her to you?
A: She was pretty. She was smart. But, most important, by far: On our first date, I discovered she had a terrific sense of humor and a very dry wit. I can't speak for her with complete confidence, but I think she was attracted to me because my shoes were neatly polished, there was very little spinach caught between my teeth, and I could play any passage of Beethoven on a nose flute.

Q: Will FEAR NOTHING scare me?
A: If it doesn't, I'd better start practicing the nose flute again.

Q: What are your favorites of your own books?
A: At this point, FEAR NOTHING, Watchers, Lightning, Mr. Murder, Dark Rivers of the Heart, and Intensity, in that order.

FEAR NOTHING was one of those rare experiences when the joy of writing was equal to the pain, when an instinctive confidence balanced the doubt. A few times I found myself in what psychologists call a "flow state" and what athletes call "being in the zone," when the story seemed to tell itself, flowing through me as electricity flows through a power cable. In this higher state of consciousness, I seemed to be not the creator of the piece but only the conduit between the creator and the page. This is a sublime experience, so exhilarating that if I could write every book in the flow state, I would be happy with an obituary as succinct as this: "Died. Dean Koontz. A good conduit." When I am swept into the flow state, it is inevitably due to the characters, who have magically convinced me that they are real and that I need not write the story so much as listen to them while they tell it to me.

Although FEAR NOTHING contains numerous twists and turns that I hope will fascinate readers, and although I hope they will find it breathlessly paced, the novel did not spring from a plot outline or from a high-concept idea; rather, in the beginning I presented Bantam Books with a few paragraphs about the protagonist, Christopher Snow, and said, "This is what I want to write."

Christopher Snow is twenty-eight years old, athletic, handsome enough, intelligent, romantic, funny - but with a limitation that has affected his entire life. Chris has xeroderma pigmentosum - "XP" for short - a very real but rare genetic disorder that leaves its victims acutely vulnerable to skin and eye cancers if they are exposed even briefly to sunshine or to other ultraviolet light. He is not an albino, for his skin is pigmented, but like virtually all XPers, Chris lives at night, sleeps by day, and keeps the windows in his house covered. He must live largely by candlelight, use reduced-wattage bulbs, apply sunscreen to exposed skin if there's even a risk of standing under a streetlamps for more than a minute or two, often wear sunglasses at night to guard against car headlights. In short, he lives by rituals so strange and complex that they are more deeply fascinating than the details of any exotic culture in the farthest corner of the globe. I have been gathering research on XP for over six years, and I've never found a subject more intriguing, more poignant.

Although Chris is as sophisticated as any man of the world, he has never ventured beyond the limits of Moonlight Bay - and the nearby grounds of the closed military base, Fort Wyvern, which offers a maze of abandoned buildings and subterranean warrens. Although he dares not drive a car (too many oncoming headlights) and must walk or take a bicycle instead, he is adventurous and daring and always on the move. Although one might expect him to be a loner, he is gregarious and outgoing, with many colorful friends, and his romantic life is passionate and deeply felt. Yet a sweet melancholy weaves through his unusual existence, a yearning for what cannot be and what he cannot have; which makes him quite like all of us, for each of us is limited by life in one way or another, if not as severely as Christopher Snow. This is a story about the night world and those who work and live in it. It's a story about the mystery of the night, the beauty of the night, the terror and the solitude and the wonder and the strange silken rhythms of the night.

Christopher Snow knows the night as no one else ever will, ever can; for it is only at night that he is free.

This is a story about winning against overwhelming odds: Many with XP never live to be twenty-eight like Chris, and every year that he survives is a triumph. This is a story about taking the terrible injustices of life and transforming them into blessings. This is a story about being different, about being an outsider but nevertheless finding a way to be part of one's community. About being alone but finding friends. About forsaking self-pity and fear. About opening oneself to the world to build an extended family for shelter against the vicissitudes of life. About leading the fullest possible life of the mind and senses regardless of the limitations imposed by nature. About indomitability and perseverance and commitment.

FEAR NOTHING is also a suspense novel, of course, because I write suspense novels and my publisher and readers would be nonplussed if I delivered a story about teenage angst in nineteenth century Latvia. Nonplussed and worse.

Years ago, however, I began to bridge genres in the hope of finding new, exciting ways to tell stories Consequently, FEAR NOTHING is a thriller but also a novel about friendship; a tale of adventure but also a mystery story; scary yet sometimes humorous; a novel about personal courage and a cautionary tale à la Michael Crichton - but also a dog story. As my most faithful readers know, dogs have had important roles in several of my novels, beginning with Einstein in Watchers and continuing with Woofer in Dragon Tears, Rocky in Dark Rivers of the Heart, and Scootie in TickTock. Through the character of a dog, I can say things about the human condition that are simple and true yet palatable, even if sometimes harsh, because the dog's perception is colored by an endearing innocence. Dogs didn't fall from grace, after all; they accompanied us out of Eden because, I suspect, they thought we were so amusing that it was worth giving up Paradise just to see what foolish things we might do next. In FEAR NOTHING, the dog is named Orson, and I love him as much as any real dog that I have ever known. He is a creature of mysterious depths, capable of much lighthearted fun yet occasionally melancholy, courageous and clever and loving and strange. I so enjoy writing about dogs that sometimes I think I must have been one in another life; if I'm really lucky, maybe I'll be a dog again someday. One of the most peculiar things about me- oh, it's a long list - is that I can develop genuine feelings for many of the fictional characters I write about, not just the dogs. I can laugh out loud when they're funny and even sometimes be moved to tears when they suffer loneliness and anguish. I fear for them - though I know, better than anyone, that their fate is in my hands.

When they come alive on the page, I feel their longing, their dread, their joy, their despair. This could mean that I am flat-out crazy, of course, though I believe I am reasonably sane. I don't keep a collection of severed heads in my refrigerator (there'd be no room for pickles), don't ascribe to the theory that Elvis Presley was an extraterrestrial (but don't ask me about Garth Brooks), and long ago realized that I was wrong to accuse Martha Stewart of being the secret evil master of the universe. I am able to identify so strongly with my characters because I like real people so much, and the finest characters on the page are those that are pure distillations of the most admirable and/or interesting qualities of people I meet in daily life. Furthermore, I find the human condition to be both enormously hopeful and terrifying, and when my characters truly come alive, I'm moved by their plight because it is, in essence, my plight as well - and the plight of all of us who pass this way.

The characters in FEAR NOTHING appealed to me so strongly that I didn't want to let them go at the end of the book. I have felt this way as I've completed other novels - but never before have I decided to write future books with the same cast. As FEAR NOTHING drew to a close, my mind spun with new stories in the same milieu, and I knew that I couldn't deny myself the pleasure of visiting these people again and following them as they cope with the triumphs and the tragedies and the joys and - it's a Koontz novel, after all - the fears and terrible dangers of life in our time.

I won't be writing only novels featuring Christopher Snow, because I have many other stories to tell that don't fit into this world, but I'll be doing three in a row and perhaps more to follow. Indeed, I've already taken the imp of self-doubt from the freezer and put him on the kitchen drainboard to thaw. Even now he's mumbling something about my shirt clashing with my blue jeans. If he performs his job well and keeps me honest, I think that these stories of Chris Snow and Orson and their friends might eventually prove to be the best work that I will ever have done.

As a lonely child growing up in poverty, in the shadow of a violent and alcoholic father who repeatedly threatened to kill my mother and me (and was later diagnosed as psychotic), I found relief from fear and deprivation only in books. Storytellers became my heroes because they provided me with temporary escapes from that dark world, because through their characters they made me feel less isolated and more connected to the human experience, and because they brought joy and wonder into my life at a time when I would otherwise have known little of either. All I have ever wanted to do is give that same gift to others. Can a thriller keep the reader turning the pages urgently - yet also engage the mind, profoundly touch the heart, and lift the spirit? I've spent a major portion of my adult life trying to do just that, and my entire career has been an effort to acquire the craft and art to write FEAR NOTHING and the books to follow it.

My work isn't as important as finding a cure for cancer, not as important as the efforts of any parent who raises a child well, not as important as the work of the dedicated cops who put their lives on the line for all of us, not as important as the work of teachers who truly inspire their students - but I would feel that my life had been well spent if, by the end, I had touched the lives of even a handful of people in the way and to the same degree that the authors of my youth touched and improved my own life. Besides, writing keeps me safely occupied, with plenty of room in my refrigerator for pickles.