He writes graphically about terrifying situations - the battle between good and pure evil. He's been slotted as a "horror" writer, but he knows he doesn't fit a particular niche.
And best-selling author Dean Koontz considers himself an optimist."I am relentlessly optimistic as a person and writer," he said during a teleconference interview to promote his latest book, "Intensity," published by Knopf Books. "And I don't think of my writing as horror."
He believes in an afterlife, he said, and that shapes his writing. "Those writers who do somewhere in their personal philosophy of life make room for the belief that there is something more to this world, this universe that we can see and touch and feel, those people do produce very optimistic, very hopeful books and books that are particularly emotionally gripping."
Even publishers have tried to slot the author into a genre, which he resists. Over the years, he's written under diverse pen names at the behest of publishers. The names changed as the character of his books changed, from psychological suspense to supernatural thriller to more recent stories that spring out of the news. Now even the old stories are being re-released under his own name.
His books, while vastly different from each other, contain two common threads: a sense of responsibility for actions and strong women.
In "Intensity," his heroine must rely solely on her own skills and daring to save the life of a stranger and stay alive in the face of an evil man who has killed a co-worker and her family. She finds strength she didn't believe existed. The evil she faces is so pervasive that, unlike other Koontz novels, she doesn't even have time for romance.
"A lot of what I hear and see in the world these days bothers me and one of the things that bothers me is the way our culture, our law, everything in this century has been saturated with Freudian psychology, which I happen to think is mostly bunkem," Koontz said. "Freudian psychology tells you that, No. 1, nobody is really responsible for what he does because parents, society, culture, other people have influenced us as children or twisted us as children and made us what we are. And No. 2, that there is no such thing as heroism because we all act in self-interest and if there is an act of heroism at any point then it is, under the rules of Freudianism, essentially an act of psychological instability.
"I wanted to write a story that disputed that and said I think our world is saturated with heroism and that people put themselves on the line for other people all the time. And I specifically wanted to do that through a female character because my own life has been filled with very strong women, starting with my mother who protected me from a dangerous and violent father."
He's not just tired of Freud, he said, but of the sympathetic portrayals in books, movies and magazines of people who do dreadful things.
"Freudian theory has led us to believe that virtually anybody can be understood and rehabilitated. But this isn't true. And we put ourselves at risk when we accept that there is no such thing as real evil in the world - that it's really one degree or another of dysfunction and that it can all be treated. I think there is real evil in the world."
Koontz said fiction should have a moral purpose, something he finds in the writers he's loved through the years: John D. McDonald, Robert Heinlein, Charles Dickens, Jim Harrison, Anne Tyler.
"They teach you lessons in the book. And they don't get on soapboxes and they don't speechify. And neither do I. But they have a moral point of view. . . . The purpose of fiction is to make us feel good about the human experience, one way or the other. We may get very bleak in some of these books because the human experience, in part, is bleak. But the end purpose of it should be to say, there is a way through all the problems of the human condition. And this is a pretty amazing world and human beings are a pretty amazing species and that, in the end, there is hope. . . ."
An optimist.