“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”—Samuel Johnson

G.K. Chesterton was an avid reader of popular fiction, particularly the so-called “penny dreadfuls,” whose everyday morality and concentration on plot and character made them more wholesome reading than the pretentious productions of modernist literature. Chesterton’s prejudice is shared today by millions of readers who would not beat Donald Barthelme or Norman Mailer with a stick but cannot board an airplane or go to the beach without an 800-page thriller by Dean Koontz or Stephen King. Mr. Koontz’s “paranoid style” of fiction has become increasingly attractive to Americans who have begun to suspect that there is more to government than an honest desire to serve the people. Not coincidentally, he is a Chronicles reader.

I drove away from John Wayne Airport in my rental car and turned onto MacArthur Boulevard. The signs for Irvine, Newport Beach, and Fashion Island are sinister reminders of government projects that engineer monsters and of agents who kill the citizens in order to spare them the unhappiness of ordinary life, but the sun is shining, and the late-November air is warmer in Southern California than in Illinois. Mr. Koontz and dog Trixie greet me at the door, and the two of us—Trixie remains at home—go out to lunch at a good hotel. Drinking a robust but mellow cabernet with my spicy seafood, I ask Mr. Koontz if he is happy to have turned this bustling part of Southern California into a landscape as horrifying as one of Lovecraft’s New England villages.

TF: When I go to Mississippi, I almost expect to see the McCaslins on a deer drive, but when I drive to your corner of the world I am almost afraid to get out of the car, much less sit on the beach, for fear that a government agent might be waiting for me.

DK: I am not anti-government. There is obviously a role for government in our lives, though not the kind of government we have today. The Founders set up a political system that protected the liberties that we’re rapidly trying to give away. After the office building was blown up in Oklahoma City, the New York Times called up to ask if the author of Dark Rivers of the Heart felt any responsibility. I said, “There’s nothing in any of my books that encourages people to blow up buildings or kill people,” and when I asked if he had actually read Dark Rivers, he said no, but he’d been told it was anti-government.

I tried to explain to him that my novel was anti-totalitarian and encouraged individual responsibility, which is the opposite of blowing up buildings.

I tell Koontz that these fine distinctions hardly matter to “journalists” who do not hesitate to brand a writer as an apostle of violence or bigotry without taking the trouble to read anything he has written. (Koontz points out the abuse heaped on Carolyn Chute’s recent novel—”Some of the most savage things I have ever seen directed against a writer.” It is not simply that Mrs. Chute has drawn a sympathetic portrait of a militiaman, but that she is genuinely fond of the simple people she writes about. “Most highbrow writers,” Koontz observes, “do not like ordinary life.”)

The really amazing thing, we agree, is the smug obtuseness of the chattering classes that identify government as the source of all blessings and regard religion and regionalism as the ultimate evils.

“In this bloodiest century of human history, how can anyone doubt that evil can arise from government? Statists always bring up the Spanish Inquisition, which killed a few thousand people, a minor horror compared with what anti-religious governments have done in modem times,” and he ticks off the tens of millions killed by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. “It’s not paranoid to look unflinchingly at the source of so much evil in this century,” he says, wondering why the press is so willing to distort the facts.

Koontz’s latest novel, False Memory, includes not-so-subtle allusions to the false reporting that sold the NATO attack on Yugoslavia as a humanitarian rescue mission.

DK: One of the primary themes of this novel is our society’s increasing inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. It was so Orwellian, the way that war was sold to the country, the way the news was manufactured—and so badly manufactured.

It wasn’t even subtly done. On the one hand were the new Nazis, on the other were the innocent victims. There was no reality base to it. Most people in the media simply wanted this war to happen, and it terrified me to see the press so warmongering, when we had thought of the media as pacifistic. Because I love this country and love this country’s history, I was alarmed by our lawless and astoundingly violent policy in Yugoslavia, but I was even more disturbed to discover that many well-educated people of my acquaintance were indifferent to the lawlessness and oblivious of its Orwellian nature. As far as I am aware, we went to war for the first time against a country that had done nothing to us or to an ally. A stain on this country . . . calculatedly bombing civilian targets. It is difficult to understand the true motivations of the journalists who sold this war, though a large part of it is that these people are fools.

I ask if a novelist with strong opinions is ever tempted to preach. He occasionally may cross the line, he concedes, but he always remembers that preaching does not persuade. A good story can, however, change people’s minds, as the volume of his mail attests. Koontz receives about 10,000 letters a year, most of them to a post office box whose number is printed in all his recent hooks. Including the box number did not increase the flow of mail, but it did guarantee that no publishers secretary would neglect to forward the letters.

His most popular book to date, measured by letters as well as sales, may be Watchers, probably because of its emotional impact. Koontz says he is not at all afraid of sentiment, which is not the same thing as sentimentality, “except, of course, in romance novels where sentimentality may be wanted.” In recent film, as in fiction, there is a striking lack of strong characters and emotional content, though Koontz professes himself an eternal optimist not just about life but about the arts.

DK: That is part of our obligation as Christians, and I do see signs of a change for the better. The Sixth Sense—an uplifting movie with an amazing performance by Bruce Willis—is a reminder of how poorly most scripts these days are written, how full of holes the plots are, and how cheap the tricks are they play on audiences. This is an emotionally powerful film, one that plays fair with the audience. It says, ultimately, that life has meaning, which is rarely a belief expressed in Hollywood’s current cesspool of cynicism.

Speaking of messages in fiction, Koontz says that his favorite writers have always been didactic novelists but that didacticism has to be kept under control. Asked to name his favorite novelists, Koontz begins to discuss Dickens, but digresses.

DK: In college I was in rebellion, and I was reading people they didn’t want me to read—James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler—what a pair of moralists those two are . . . Cain writes about people who make all the mistakes, but boy do they pay for them. They don’t just walk away into the sunset. Double Indemnity, by the way, has one of the best last lines in English-language fiction . . . The guilty couple is on a cruise, and the man—coming home to arrest and imprisonment—now realizes that he’s sacrificed everything for a woman who is mentally and morally sick. She comes into the cabin wearing a red dress, and, after some small talk, he turns to the portal, looks up, and thinks, The Moon. Of course, those final two words refer to lunacy, but also to the gravitational pull exerted in each of us by the dark side of human nature, to the fact that we are fallen. Yet there is, in addition, an ineffable mystery in the effect of those two words. They resonate down on that deep level where language knots with instinct.

It’s this quality of fiction that makes me think that it has more truth than nonfiction. It reaches you in mysterious ways that go beyond analysis, beyond what even the author can explain, though I’m not a deconstructionist. I know that if I’m sitting with the author, nine times out often he’s going to help me understand why something worked.

I ask him how he plans his books, because I have the impression that his complex structures must require elaborate outlines, character summaries, and all the usual paraphernalia taught in the Write-by-Numbers fiction courses. In fact, he says, he does not do any planning, not even an outline.

DK: I start with a premise, though a premise by itself is not enough to interest me in a book. In False Memory, I ran across “autophobia,” which is an interesting idea, that someone could become afraid of himself. The next step is to figure out the sort of character who would have this problem. . . . At that point I start writing, and I have no idea of where I am going. I have to do many drafts of a page—I finish a page before I move to the next one. Before I got a computer, my wife kept track of the typing paper I used, and she discovered that I reworked every page, on average, 30 times. Now, with a computer, I’m more obsessive still.

I build a book the way marine polyps build a coral reef. They sacrifice themselves in the millions and gradually build it up. I am gradually building it up out of all these dead hours of work that are behind every page. Your subconscious works ahead in ways that you are unaware of. You’ve been thinking there’s a terrible problem 100 pages ahead; wondering how are you going to handle this, but when von get there—if you go slowly—you realize that it has already been solved. . . . In fact, the characters seize control of the book and take it wherever they want to go.

TF: If a work doesn’t escape from the artist’s control, it will never be fully successful. A poem or novel is like a baby that must have the umbilical cord cut and begin to have a life of its own.

DK: That is exactly what happens, and it is the strangest thing about writing fiction. It becomes so real to you that when characters are having amusing dialogue, I find myself laughing out loud. Or I can be moved to tears when something terrible happens to characters that I have not been anticipating.

In The Bad Place, there is a boy with Down Syndrome. It got to the point in the story where he had to die, but I couldn’t kill him off, I had become so deeply attached to him, and the book came to a grinding halt. I tried to move forward and had to tear up pages. I had never seen that he was going to die, and I simply couldn’t handle it. Yet I knew that every major character in the book was an analogue for a particular Christian figure and that on a subtextual level, certain Christian themes were playing out. This boy was an innocent, pure of heart, who brings a revealed faith to the other characters. He was Christ, in an archetypal sense, and therefore had to die to advance the story. When I let him fulfill his destiny, let him die, the story went smoothly thereafter.

TF: When Trollope decided to kill off Mrs. Proudie, many of his readers were outraged, even though she was a dreadful lady. According to biographers, Trollope never had an entirely rational plan for his writing but daydreamed his way into novels. As an “intellectual,” Trollope was entirely conventional, and he was far wiser in his heart than in his more rational calculations.

DK: Fiction is not primarily intellectual. When it is successful, it speaks to the heart before it speaks to the mind. If it is really successful, it speaks to both, as it does in the case of Dickens. I hadn’t read Dickens seriously until after college, because I had this stupid idea that I would find him boring. Then I picked up A Tale of Two Cities and read it over the course of a weekend, and at one o’clock Sunday morning, reaching that magnificent final sentence, I sat in bed with tears streaming down my face.

Dickens was a very popular novelist, as, in fact, are all the writers who survive from earlier centuries in literature: Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain. Popularity is not the only thing; otherwise Jackie Collins would have been long ago enshrined by the Nobel Committee.

An enduring literature has to speak to eternal human values—although that sentence may be in itself a thoughtcrime. At this point an academic critic would ask: If popularity, achieved by addressing the values of ordinary people, is required for literature to last, what about Henry James? In the first place, James obviously wanted to attract a large audience, otherwise why did he publish 100 books? But secondly, a lot of James has not in fact lasted, because it was too dry and earnestly intellectual.

TF: James engaged in a sort of exchange with H.C. Wells. Wells insisted on the importance of compelling stories with broad social purpose, while James emphasized serious psychological analysis. Frankly, though it is heresy to say so, I think Wells’ best work—The History of Mr. Polly, Tono-Bungay, The Time Machine—will outlast most of James’.

DK: The irony of James is that his most enduring book is—

DK and TF simultaneously: The Turn of the Screw.

DK: Is the business of literature really academic analysis, or is it the recreation of human experience? I got in a number of whacks, you’ll notice, against the academy in False Memory.

When did the idea get established that, if a book is popular, it can’t be good? . . . If you go back to the 1940’s, you find people like John P. Marquand who won the Pulitzer Prize but also wrote the Mr. Moto mysteries under his own name. . . . Graham Greene may have been the last popular writer who was taken seriously by the elitist critics.

The problem began with the boom in higher education following World War II, when college rolls doubled and tripled, and there were not enough capable philosophers and literary historians to handle the influx of veterans going to school on the G.I. Bill. As a result, colleges had to hire all those second- and third-rate professors who eventually became tenured—and trained the current generation of hack professors. By now, we are suffering from several generations of educators who are not themselves well educated, people who don’t know much about anything, whose knowledge of literature is abysmal. These are the snobs who enhance their own social position by inventing critical theories and erecting artificial criteria.

This is the background for the creation of “classism” in literature. Dissertations had already been done on most of the really good books, so these people in their drive to be published in academic journals, had to move to the empty, quasi-literary books.

TF: What they like, in fact, is academic fiction, which is only written to be analyzed by some graduate student writing a dissertation.

DK: “Academic” is a better word than literary, because most of these books are not literary at all.

TF: Academic writers cannot handle the basics of plot and character, much less describe the world that any of us has seen or experienced. . . . I suppose it would be bad taste for us to name names? What about the middlebrow writers, who try for a big audience while pretending to be serious—all those writers who became TV celebrities in the 60’s—Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, William Buckley, Norman Mailer . . .

DK: You call them middlebrow, though many would think of them as highbrow, but they are not, after all, writing for pure art. Norman Mailer—does anyone read him anymore? He always seems bombastic, scarcely human. Some of these writers—Philip Roth, for example—begin well, but eventually they write for the critics, endlessly repeating the things for which they were originally acclaimed.

On a lower level, there are people like Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janawitz, Jay McInerney. Fortunately, most of this stuff washes out in five years, partly because it’s anti-human: They do not like people very much. Why become a novelist if you dislike people, who are the stuff of fiction?

TF: You must have met these people in college, who spent the day in a corner of the cafeteria, smoking cigarettes and cackling over how stupid everyone else was, while everyone else was having a much better time. Those are the people who now control the literary business.

DK: In Intensity, I used the phrase “reckless caring” to describe what I think life is ultimately all about. When that novel came out, I knew that I would get flak because the heroine risks her life for someone she doesn’t know. Some reviewers said it was impossible, despite the fact that it happens all the time in war. Then came the news story of the actor Mark Harmon who, when he saw an automobile accident, leaped out and rescued kids from a burning car—this was a Hollywood actor who put his own life at risk. Ordinary people do such things thousands of times a day, and yet we hardly ever hear of it in this media-saturated world.

TF: It doesn’t fit the media’s view of human nature. They would like us to believe that people are only able to do good if they are controlled by the superior forces of government or a group of experts. Many of your most heroic characters, on the other hand, have had unhappy childhoods.

DK: I’ve talked about my father a number of times in interviews but never to complain about “poor me, the victim.” In fact, there were two primary influences in my childhood: my father—a dangerous alcoholic who was later diagnosed as a sociopath—and my mother, who was wonderful and kind. She gave me strength, but no journalist ever writes about my mother, though I talk about her as much as about my father. They are fascinated only by the negative. The fact is that without the childhood I had, I might never have become a writer or have been as successful as 1 am. I have nothing to complain about.

This century has produced many great evils, but there is no greater evil than Freudianism. At some point in my career, I made the conscious decision to write anti-Freudian novels. I started writing about people who were not what you would expect, considering what their childhoods were like.

You’d be surprised how reviewers can’t understand what I am doing. They want what they call “deep characterization”; in other words, tracing motivation to some heinous thing a character’s grandmother did.

TF: What they don’t understand is the Christian conception of human character, that we can succeed sometimes in spite of our backgrounds, so long as there is a spark of faith; that we can forever be turning our misery into something usable for ourselves. That is what I see in your best characters, the will to survive no matter how weak they think they are or how terrified, even if, when they see the words “fear no evil,” they experience a shudder of terror, because they fear everything every day.

DK: You don’t become popular today by admitting to being a Christian.

TF: The culture is not non-Christian but anti-Christian . . .

DK: . . . while priding itself on being the most tolerant culture in history . . .

TF: . . . because ever since Voltaire, tolerance has been defined as hating all things Christian.

In Dark Rivers of the Heart, you have portrayed perhaps the ultimate bad father, though this psychotic killer who tortures and dismembers women is far from being the most evil character in the novel. That distinction belongs to Roy Miro, the government agent with a heart of gold.

DK: The hero’s father actually represents my worst fears of my own father. And then I begin to wonder: If government can be a father, what happens when government becomes deranged as nry real father was? Roy Miro is my father elevated to the organizational level. I lis motivations are just wonderful: He saves people from dieir unhappiness—although by killing them.

TF: At least the homicidal maniac father does what he does for pure pleasure, like the Marquis de Sade. I’d rather have Sade running our government than the Roy Miros who only want what is best for us.

Speaking of villains. Fake Memory has a memorable villain in the ominously named Dr. Mark Ahriman, the self-centered psychotherapist who plants false memories and induces psychosis, murder, and suicide. You obviously don’t think that all psychologists are dangerous, but are you suggesting there is a potential danger when counselors and therapists hold such psychic power over their patients? You obviously know about the real problem of therapists taking advantage of their female patients . . .

DK: We shouldn’t be surprised if only ten percent of psychiatrists are serious about—or capable of—doing good, while the other 90 percent are destructive or ineffective. You’d find the same ratio with plumbers or teachers.

TF: In False Memory, the highbrow characters arc entirely despicable, and the hero has consciously turned away from intellectuals, rejecting the world of theory for the real world of everyday life. The other psychologist in the book, the hero’s stepfather, is also (like his ambitious wife) an egocentric jerk.

DK: I had fun working with these two psychologists who had written books. A reader told me “You really gave it to pop psychology,” but in fact virtually all psychology is pop psychology. It certainly isn’t science.

As a Christian and a lifelong reader in all the sciences, I don’t see the great gap between religion and science that is supposed to exist. Gertrude Himmelfarb, for example, seems to be opposed to science per se, especially viewing the work of geneticists as a force for moral chaos. But no knowledge is inherently evil. The issue is how, with our free will, we use that knowledge. I don’t see many places where science disproves anything we believe. God gave us the ability to learn, the desire to understand creation, and in applying that ability, we are in His service as long as we do not become arrogant.

TF: One of your best lines comes at the beginning of False Memory: It is a quotation from your mythical “Book of Counted Sorrows,” namely, “God is in the details, too.” This line seems to sum up your position that goodness—God, even—can be discovered in the little textures of everyday life. You seem to be telling people to find moral courage and tragedy and beauty in the ordinary round of things, to “Brighten the corner where you are.”

DK: Atheists are always dissatisfied with everything, and you know there is no more evangelical group than atheists. In interviews and conversations, if the subject of faith comes up, they give the usual line, “How can you believe in a god who allows terrible things to happen?” Both Scripture and science tell us that for every force there is an opposing force, throughout nature. It is out of this dynamic tension that we develop our love of beauty and our passion for truth. Without risk, we have no journey, no meaning. An atheist, setting material comfort as his primary goal, thinks I am an idiot when I talk about this.

TF: A holy fool perhaps? Life is both too beautiful and too evil to be explicable by some mechanical theory. We experience both gratuitous good and gratuitous evil. Acknowledging my own inclination toward evil was my first step toward conversion.

DK: I have experienced within myself a kind of tug toward things that are despicable. I distrust anyone who says they don’t have these feelings, because they are precisely the people who want to tell you how to live. We are aware of a struggle between good and evil within ourselves that reflects the larger struggle within creation. When you become attuned to that, you see it everywhere.

If you don’t have faith you worn, unreasonably about everything—like Gertrude Himmelfarb—worry about imposing restrictions on everyone. Sometime I would like to discuss quantum physics, particularly string theory, with such people. Most quantum physicists don’t talk this way publicly, but some say that they cannot escape the conclusion that what they are looking at is not just an ordered but a created universe.

Quantum physics tells us that past, present, and future exist simultaneously, that the flow of time is an illusion, that reality consists of infinite and largely unseen dimensions, that everything in the universe is intimately related. To me, this is perfectly consistent with my belief that the universe is a creation, that it exists within the mind of God. Creating a novel is a humble reflection of God’s creativity, because I hold the fictional world in my mind, in vast detail. Using my creativity, I feel connected to that greater creative spirit. I feel its reality. When my characters seize the story, I know some small measure of the joy and sorrow that our Creator must feel at the consequences of our free will.

TF: Letting his characters live is the novelist’s imitation of the Christian God who made us free even to rebel against him. In an ideal society, not everyone is an artist, but everyone creates something.

DK: The people I know who are happy refuse to blame their misery on others, and they are almost always in the business of creating things. Many of my friends are in the building trades and are as creative as most writers. Ironically, they are happier than most writers, because the act of creation satisfies them, and they are not plagued by the inflated egos and competitiveness of many writers who live not for the chance to create, but for the aftermath of creation: Celebrity.

TF: Some people want to be “writers” without actually having to write an’thing.

DK: When I got my first multimillion-dollar contract, many writers called up to say, “Wonderful! After these three books, you’ll never have to write again.” I was astonished.

Though I’ve done well by writing, I don’t write for money. My friends are not rich or consciously intellectual; they are mostly skilled craftsmen, who have the same sensibility about life as I do—and they are mostly conservative. They work hard, and they know what life is about. Like them, I love what I do, and after many years I have done well.

TF: In Samuel Johnson’s terms, I suppose, you could be called a rich blockhead.