Genre is a subjective marketing category that often misleads rather than informs. Some books defy classification, especially books by Dean Koontz. How do you pin down stories that fit at least a dozen marketing labels, including: Action, Adventure, Crime, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Philosophical, Science Fiction, Speculative, Thriller, Urban, and, yes, Visionary Fiction? No one could…
Dean Koontz prefers to avoid genre labels. By his own admission, he writes “cross-genre novels in a mainstream style, with elements of comedy and social commentary and philosophical speculation.” That said, I hold firm to my conviction that much of Dean Koontz’s work contains elements of visionary fiction as detailed in the Wikipedia article written by our…
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what about ugliness? How do we define ugly? What repulses us? And why? In his latest novel, INNOCENCE, Dean Koontz shows us ugly. Little by little, step by step, he immerses us in ugly; until we are in ugly’s head. And then he holds up a…
I didn’t choose to write visionary fiction; it chose me. This may sound strange to you and what I’m about to share even stranger, but I can think of no better way to explain how I ended up writing in a genre that parallels the new neural sciences and has yet to find a receptive audience. A word from…
Editor’s Note: This post appears courtesy Margaret Duarte’s site (slightly edited). By Margaret Duarte I’ve been blogging for over two years now , and lately I’ve been doing some serious soul-searching about the value of working so hard. Then today (16 October), I received an email from Dean Koontz concerning the post I wrote about him…
By Margaret Duarte Dean Koontz is generally categorized as a writer of horror, and I’m not a fan of horror, so I’m not sure what possessed me to read one of his novels. Maybe someone gave it to me. Maybe I picked it up in a bargain bin somewhere. What I do remember is that the…