Birthdays: Two writers who get inside people's heads

Dean Koontz (1945-  )

Author

The Writer’s Almanac sums up: “It’s the 70th birthday of Dean Koontz born in Everett, Pennsylvania. His family was poor; they didn’t have an indoor toilet until he was 11. His father was an abusive alcoholic that couldn’t keep a job. Koontz went to stay with neighbors for six months when he was four years old, because his mother was in the hospital. The neighbor read him stories every night and he says he came to associate storytelling with a peaceful feeling.

“He won a fiction contest sponsored by Atlantic Monthly when he was in college, which made him think writing was a pretty good gig. After he left college, he kept writing, whenever he could find time after his day job as a counselor for underprivileged kids and, later, as a high school English teacher. Finally, his wife, Gerda, told him she’d support him for five years so he could really give this writing thing his best shot. By the end of the five years, she had quit her job to run his business affairs. His books have now sold more than 400 million copies, in 38 languages. He’s most often associated with horror and suspense novels, but he’s also written a memoir about his golden retriever, Trixie, called A Big Little Life (2009).”

Koontz has seen fourteen hardcover, and sixteen softcover, books reach #1 on The New York Times best-seller list, and is listed, annually, among the highest-earning authors in the world. While many writers settle for becoming a factory, or a franchise, stoking a publishing machine to keep it spitting out royalty checks, Koontz’s career is one of tackling serious, often religious, issues in the context of the fantastic, the supernatural, the paranormal. It is not a stretch to compare his work, at its best, to that of the English writer Charles Williams.

His books are texts in characterization, dialogue, and pacing. The Good Guy features an apparently average Joe approached by two men in a bar. Both- mistaking him for their real contact- hire, and pay, separately- him to kill a woman. He determines he’d best try to stop this from happening; meeting the woman, he must win her confidence and then extricate both from an escalating series of minute to minute threats by a truly remorseless killer. A wise-cracking, Nick and Nora relationship develops between the two as they fight their way toward an unexpected, but highly satisfying, conclusion.

Velocity finds a man whose life revolves around his work and his coma-stricken love suddenly receiving messages giving him a series of impossible choices. No matter which he picks, someone will die, unless he can both thread the needle to prevent both outcomes, and find and stop the madman. The Taking imagines Noah’s Flood played out as an apparent alien attack on Earth; 77 Shadow Street traps its residents in a house traveling back and forth between the present and an apocalyptic, constantly shifting, future. Life Expectancy presents an average joe with a series of dates in his future on which he may die. By The Light of The Moon casts up an unrelated group of people in an isolated motel, all having had the same dream but otherwise clueless why they are there or what to do about it. Dragon Tears is a masterpiece for its inclusion, the cast of characters, of a dog, whose internal dialogue is a rollercoaster ride between human reasoning and all the distractions of a canine in a world full of interesting scents.

In this century Koontz has won new fame for his Odd Thomas series, which centers on a twenty-something fry cook (his parents insist them told the hospital, “Todd”) who finds himself called to act to prevent a series of catastrophes of ever-increasing scale and violence, all the while realizing- as becomes clear to the reader over time- he is, himself, moving toward an inevitable end. Among the masters of mass-market popular fiction, Dean Koontz is a one-off.

Related sites:

“Dean Koontz: Angels, Demons and Our Mysterious World,” Beliefnet.com, October 2008

Dean Koontz.com (official author site)

Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE (1933-  )

Neurologist, Author

Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1996

Honorary Fellow, The Queen’s College, Oxford, 1999

Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2002

Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 2008

Born in London, evacuated to a Dickensian school during The Blitz, Sacks took three degrees at Oxford before moving to Canada (he sent his parents a postcard bearing the word “Staying”), then made his way to San Francisco for post-doctoral work and a thorough grounding in sex, drugs and rock and roll in the early 1960s. He took up bodybuilding, motorcycles and various recreational drugs, then moved to New York City in 1965 to pursue  a career in clinical neurology.

Stumbling across a ward of patients afflicted by a zombie-like sleeping sickness, Sacks realized some remarkable, if transient, results, with drug therapy, and turned his experience into a best-selling book and film, Awakenings. Most of his dozen later books have dealt with the lives and experiences of people afflicted by odd and rare neurological malfunctions.

While his books made Sacks famous, they have consistently attracted criticism from the medical community for popularizing difficult medical and ethical issues, and by disability activists for trading in freakery. One British disability campaigner, Tom Shakespeare, parodied a Sacks bestseller by denouncing him as “The man who mistook his patients for a literary career.” The actor Bill Murray parodied Sacks in the Wes Anderson film, The Royal Tenenbaums.

Famously reticent, Sacks revealed his struggles with shyness, which complicated his developing long-term relationships as a gay man, in his 2015 autobiography. He also revealed that, after decades of various eye problems, he has developed a fatal, ocular form of cancer that bids fair to make this, his 82nd birthday, his last. In articles and interviews, however, he has maintained he is pressing ahead on his next book.

Related sites:

Oliver Sacks.com (Official author site)