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…"