by Dean Koontz
But I digress.
Leigh Nichols is not the only pen name under which I hid my light. I wrote one book, Strike Deep, as Anthony North, and on the jacket flap, the about-the-author paragraph claimed, “Anthony North lived in Washington for years and is intimately acquainted with the workings of the Pentagon. He now lives in Jamaica with his wife and two children. This is his first novel.” That biography, of course, was a fabrication. Some might call it a lie. My publisher called it smart marketing.
I wrote one novel, Prison of Ice, as David Axton, which is now in print (in a revised form) as Icebound, under my name. The first edition about-the-author paragraph admitted that Axton was a pen name. I don’t know why. The company must have been run at the time by nuns or something.
When I was thirty-four, I had a single science fiction novel, Invasion, released under the name Aaron Wolfe (now in print in a revised version as Winter Moon, under my name). It was published by a new imprint in that genre. A freelance editor had promised to deliver them a few first novels but had not found any that were publishable; he knew about this old manuscript in my trunk, and in something of a panic, he asked to have it under a pen name. Since he was a good guy whose sense of humor I valued, I agreed. The publisher’s introduction claimed that Invasion was the first novel by a young man “successful in another artistic field,” who was only now turning his hand to writing. I guess I was supposed to be a painter or a sculptor, or perhaps a ballet dancer. This introduction also claimed that I was married (true) with one child (not true) and lived in the Midwest (also not true). I didn’t have the slightest suspicion that this publishing house was run by nuns.
At various times in my extreme youth—not as far back as when I was in diapers but not long after I graduated from short pants—I hid my light under bushels named K. R. Dwyer (three times), Brian Coffey (five times), Deanna Dwyer (five times), and John Hill (once). The reasons for pen names are many. When you grow up dirt poor and have no resources on which to fall back, you sometimes write hurriedly to pay the bills. On other occasions, the work is done well enough but is so different from what you publish under your real name that your agent insists you use a pseudonym in order not to confuse readers. If you’re young and gullible, you agree; and back then I was even more gullible than I was young. If in those days there had been a TV show like American Idol except that, instead of wannabe singers, all the contestants were knuckleheads competing to see who was the most gullible, I would have been the Justin Bieber of gullibility.
But this isn’t an article about my gullibility. If it were, it would have to be of book length. This is an afterword to The Servants of Twilight, and I intend sooner or later to give you an anecdote or two about—and maybe even an insight into the meaning of—that novel.
One of my problems is that in the afterword to Shadowfires , another Leigh Nichols novel reissued under my name by Berkley Books, I already told the best story about The Servants of Twilight, and I’m loath to repeat it. This predicament reminds me of another old folk saying: “The bard who earns his dinner by telling stories should pay them out with prudence lest he starve tomorrow.” I can’t claim to be starving until I am scrawny enough to hide under a single bushel of whatever, but I feel highly vulnerable being halfway through an afterword to Servants without having said a damn thing about it.
Fortunately, yet again Hollywood comes to my rescue when I need an anecdote about the absurdity of the writing life. A talented young writer-director took an option on Servants and came up with a script that was acceptable and had moments of genuine suspense. He was about to make a deal with a low-rent production company that primarily made direct-to-video films—but at the same time, a more major company expressed a keen interest to my agent. My agent felt that a deal could be struck quickly with the big guys to make the film with the same script and the same young director. Perhaps understandably, the director felt that a scrawny and molting and diseased canary in the hand was preferable to a healthy, plump pheasant just a single inch out of arm’s reach, probably because there’s a wise old folk saying to that effect. He went with the direct-to-video deal.
Fast-forward a year or so. The film was finished on a budget smaller than the aforementioned Orson Welles’s monthly bill for cupcakes. Even a director as young and talented as this one could not create a dazzling spectacle with pocket change. Nevertheless, one of the owners of the production company—perhaps the only owner, but it is difficult to tell in the shadowy world of down-market entertainment (let’s call him Slick)—called me to say the finished film was so dazzling, so riveting, so lavish in its production values that it deserved a theatrical release just like any real movie instead of being dumped direct to video. I said that sounded swell, and he said all they needed to get it into theaters in a prominent way was an endorsement from me proclaiming it a work of genius, gripping and scary and edge-of-your-seat fabulous. The only hiccup was that he wanted me to give him that endorsement without seeing the film.
Like many film-world sharks, Slick could talk the peel off a ripe orange without spilling a drop of juice. At fifty yards. While tying a knot in a cherry stem with his tongue. Nevertheless, I could not be charmed into endorsing a film I’d never seen. When I expressed the suspicion that he hadn’t sent the movie to me on video for review because it might not in fact be the supernatural-suspense equivalent of Citizen Kane, Slick claimed to be dismayed, distressed, and profoundly anguished that I would doubt his judgment or motives. He insisted that the only reason he needed my endorsement so quickly was that an opportunity for theatrical distribution had arisen a mere hour earlier, the window to accept it would close by five o’clock, the distributor insisted on knowing whether I approved of the film and could be quoted, but there was no time to show it to me, this was now or never, a fabulous opportunity, only a dimbulb negativist would turn it down. Slick’s breathless urgency made it seem as if the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland were a film distributor, making deals as he raced for the rabbit hole to keep a dinner engagement with the Mad Hatter, and if we didn’t accept his terms, at 5:01 agents of the Red Queen would chop off our heads.
I continued to decline to blurb the film unseen. (I can be a stinking, ungrateful, difficult piece of work sometimes. Besides, the Red Queen doesn’t scare me.) After putting me on hold, Slick quickly discovered that we didn’t have to meet the five o’clock deadline after all, and agreed to send me a video of the film by messenger, for delivery the following day.
I watched ninety-six minutes of a tragedy. The young writer-director was indeed talented, but his eagerness to make the movie at any budget had led to a terrible fall. Scene by scene, the painfully apparent cheapness of the production undid all his solid storytelling and undermined every attempt at style and momentum. I replied to Slick, regretfully declining to endorse the film, pinning the blame not on the director but on Slick’s own miserly budget.
In a sane business, that would have been the last I heard from Slick, but he called me five more times over the next two days. He wanted me to drive into L.A. to meet him for lunch. Intuition told me it would be a lunch at which my knees would be broken, so I declined. He wanted to drive out to Orange County to meet me for lunch, “Just the two of us, someplace quiet, so we can hash this out.” Again, I declined—and purchased a handgun. He called at ten o’clock at night and then at six o’clock in the morning. I expected him to call me just to breathe heavily and menacingly into the phone, but his fondness for the sound of his own voice made that unlikely. Finally, I asked him not to call me again.
The next day, while I was getting a haircut and shopping for a bazooka, a famous writer called our house, having gotten my number from Slick, and he spoke to my wife, Gerda, about the film. Let’s call him X. X said Slick wanted him to give it a blurb, and he was somewhat inclined to do so, but he didn’t want to endorse the movie until he learned if I liked it as much as Slick said that I did. Gerda told him that I had declined to endorse the picture and that I would be most grateful if h
e declined, as well. We didn’t know what to make of that phone call, because X had on several occasions—in interviews, in his own writings, and in a letter to my British publisher—taken rather mean shots at me, and some of his closest friends had likewise been snarky about me in print, seemingly to please him. Although I admired much of his work, I had long ago decided to keep a safe distance. So was his consideration genuine or was it a head fake? Had he done the right thing, or had he gone over to the Slick side? I half expected to see an endorsement of the film bearing his name, in which he would say, “I love this movie as much as Dean does, and he loves it so much he can’t talk about it without weeping in gratitude that it has been made.” Instead, happily, he honored the request that Gerda had made of him, so I will always owe him that one.
The next day, I received a phone call from a member of the cast who pleaded professional desperation. All right, this person said, the film was a disappointment, but then everything in life sooner or later proves to be a disappointment, and yes the budget was so low that it didn’t look like a theatrical motion picture, but consider all the crappy motion pictures that looked great but were incoherent trash next to this comparative gem, and anyway for a week or ten days people would pay to see the movie, not knowing it was made for nine dollars, and by the time word got around, the thing would have turned a handsome profit. Yes, yes, yes, this person said, Slick wanted to put my name above the title with a possessory credit, as if I had made the movie, when in fact I had nothing to do with it, and so, yes, Slick was a shit, everybody knew he was a shit, but he was not the only shit in the business, there were thousands of them, and he was by far not one of the worst. All right, sure, this person said, maybe Slick was one of the worst in the business, maybe he was even Satan—who knew?—but he got a lot of product filmed, and had a lot of roles to offer actors, and for some actors (like this one), there were never enough roles, not when you had a family to support and an elderly mother with cancer and no health insurance, not to mention a beloved dog in need of spleen surgery. Just endorse the film, this cast member said, and let’s get it into a few hundred theaters, and a year from now, two years, no one would remember the movie or that Dean Koontz had endorsed it, and as a bonus Slick would buy the rights to another of my novels at a higher price, and this time he would give it an adequate budget, it would be an epic to rival the best of Spielberg, pleeeaaassseee.
The movie went straight to video. I never could understand what Slick was really conspiring to do when he called me. A novelist’s endorsement of a movie based on his book carries little weight with film distributors and perhaps even less with the movie-going public, which will attribute the endorsement to self-interest. A couple of weeks after all those phone calls, I received a thank-you card from Slick’s personal assistant, who wrote:Mr. Slick wanted me to thank you for being so very generous with your valuable time and for being willing to consider his heartfelt proposal. He also appreciated the pears from Harry & David, which are the best he’s ever tasted.
I never sent him pears or any other fruit from Harry & David or from anyone else. If he made me a heartfelt proposal, I don’t remember it, and there was no diamond ring involved. I have always thought the reference to pears was a threat of some kind, and I am reminded of that wise old folk saying: “Watch your back.”
Anyway, here is The Servants of Twilight in a handsome new edition, from my friends at Berkley Books. They have always done a superb publishing job for me—except that they have not even once made a harassing phone call to me or tried to manipulate me with stories of spleen-challenged dogs, and they have therefore supplied me with precious few amusing anecdotes to use in an afterword like this.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
DEAN KOONTZ
NEW EDITIONS
WITH NEW AFTERWORDS BY THE AUTHOR
THE EYES OF DARKNESS
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
MR. MURDER
DRAGON TEARS
SHADOWFIRES
HIDEAWAY
COLD FIRE
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
THE BAD PLACE
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
MIDNIGHT
LIGHTNING
WATCHERS
TWILIGHT EYES
STRANGERS
DEMON SEED
PHANTOMS
WHISPERS
DARKFALL
NOW AVAILABLE
penguin.com
M153AS0511
Berkley titles by Dean Koontz
THE EYES OF DARKNESS
THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT
MR. MURDER
THE FUNHOUSE
DRAGON TEARS
SHADOWFIRES
HIDEAWAY
COLD FIRE
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT
THE BAD PLACE
THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT
MIDNIGHT
LIGHTNING
THE MASK
WATCHERS
TWILIGHT EYES
STRANGERS
DEMON SEED
PHANTOMS
WHISPERS
NIGHT CHILLS
DARKFALL
SHATTERED
THE VISION
THE FACE OF FEAR