Friday, August 07, 2009

About Dean Koontz

John Schoenfelder is an editor at St. Martin's. We've been exchanging e mails dealing with different topics. He made a very interesting point about the work of Dean Koontz as well as the state of the art of reviews in general.

"Far beyond the ever present scope of (Dean's) huge sales, the more I’ve looked at Koontz’ work, the more it becomes apparent to me just how much he’s accomplished in terms of adding to the canon of what I term “ultimate suspense”. Maybe it’s just me but I often lament the fact that the “auteur theory” of film criticism often seems to have missed any sort of echo across in terms of criticism across large segments of the book world. Of course, the classic pulps- Willeford and Thomson, Cain et al have been canonized by the NY Times crowd at this point, but I’m just not sure that the world at large really gets how much an author like Koontz has just for instance, really taken the “Hitchcock” baton and run with it.

"And of course, in a broader sense, Hitchcock’s engine was fired by Woolrich, Highsmith, Hunter et al so always a bit disappointed by the fact that there are an ever growing number of college courses where people write essays on the minutia of sequences of The Birds, while the book pages behind, and beyond that kind of storytelling continually don’t seem to get the same level of critical care…"

7 comments:

Christopher said...

Did Mr. Koontz rewrite the first two books of the Frankenstein series or did the publisher just decide to remove the co-author names.

Ed Gorman said...

I always said those books were Dean's. As he has explained, collaboration just isn't for him. They are his and his alone. He wrote them.

Christopher said...

I think it would be one of the hardest things in the world to do (write with someone else).

I admire people who can do it. I don't think I could.

I was just confused on weather I had to reread the first two books or if I could just go right for the third one.

Ed Gorman said...

Thanks for writing, Christopher. A lot of people have asked that question.

Ed Gorman said...

Thanks for writing, Christopher. A lot of people have asked that question.

Julia Simpson Urrutia said...

Mr. Gorman, why does City of Night say it is by you and Dean Koontz if you did not write any of it?

Ed Gorman said...

Ed Gorman said...
I always said those books were Dean's. As he has explained, collaboration just isn't for him. They are his and his alone. He wrote them.