Author Dean Koontz is known for scaring the crap out of people, and freaking them out.
But he can also be a weirdly humorous guy, something that’s evident in his new comic suspense novel Going Home In The Dark (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook) — and in the following email interview he and I did about it.
Photo Credit: Douglas Sonders
Let’s start with the basics: What is Going Home In The Dark about, and when and where does it take place?
It’s a comic novel with suspense.
Boiling it down to a stupid pitch paragraph: It’s about four friends who were all geeks in high school, came from dysfunctional families, and survived their teen years by banding together as the “four amigos.” It’s 20 years later, and they’ve become successful against all odds, each famous in his or her field. Three have left Maple Grove, but the one who stayed behind, Ernie, has recently fallen into a coma. The other three have a dim, strange memory of people in Maple Grove falling into comas back in the day, and they share an urgent need to go to Maple Grove to aid Ernie. Chaos ensues to an extent that the author sometimes has to break the fourth wall to help guide the reader.
Where did you get the idea for Going Home In The Dark and how different is the finished story from what you originally conceived?
I love writing comic suspense novels that move you to the edge of your seat but also make you frequently laugh out loud. Readers have responded strongly to [his comic suspense novels] Life Expectancy and the Bad Weather Friend, which gave me the courage to write Going Home In The Dark. Also, I think I’ve been yearning to do something like this for decades, ever since I read William Goldman’s screwball epic, The Princess Bride.
The book turned out pretty much as I envisioned. Best of all, the explanation for the frightening thing lurking in Maple Grove came together so elegantly that it stunned me, as I didn’t know what it would be when I started or even at the halfway point.
I guess for some other writers books often do turn out to be different than they intended. I heard that Dickens set out to write a book of bathroom jokes, but it turned into A Tale Of Two Cities. Go figure.
So, is there a significance to the group of friends being a foursome as opposed to a trio or whatever five friends are called? Or that only one of that foursome is a woman? Or that the one who goes into a coma would be one of the boys, and specifically Ernie?
Why, why, why. Must you always know why, Paul? Aren’t there some things in life and in fiction that are good and natural that you just accept without your interminable why, why, why? Not everything in life can be explained, Paul. We just have to accept some things. If you drop an object, it falls down, not up. We don’t need to know why. Just knowing it happens is enough for us to be cautious when walking the ledges of tall buildings or performing a juggling routine while capering on the wing of an airplane.
Four gives me just enough unique personalities to make the interplay among them funny and interesting. If it’s two women and two men, everyone thinks they’re going to pair off as couples, and that expectation makes them think they’ve read this before. I guarantee they haven’t read anything like this before.
There are scores of reasons why things happen to one character instead of another, but even if I answered a thousand of your “why” questions, your life wouldn’t be changed, and by tomorrow you would forget most of the answers I provided. Just relax, Paul. Learn to be comfortable with the many mysteries of this world. Otherwise, you’ll end up in a madhouse.
Similarly, is there a reason you set it in an idyllic town like Maple Grove as opposed to a big city like New York or a port city like Innsmouth or somewhere else?
No. There’s no reason. I could have set the entire novel in a room without windows if I wanted. Who’s going to stop me? I could set the entire novel in the intestinal track of a giant worm.
My friend Michael Koryta lives on a street named Maple Grove Road. Michael is a fine writer and a nice person, and yet any time that I try to think of something strange — a place, a person — Michael comes first to mind. I don’t know why. I was going to call the town in the novel Michael Korytaville, but that didn’t sound quite right, so I called it Maple Grove.
As you said earlier, Going Home In The Dark is a comic suspense novel. But it sounds like it might also be a horror story…
It’s a suspense novel and comic novel, with a science fiction element and a dollop of horror, sprinkled with observations about filmmakers, song writers, artists, and novelists in our confused time. There’s no dog. I wish there were a dog, but there isn’t, so I can’t claim it’s a dog novel.
In the interview we did about your 2023 novel The House At The End Of The World, you said your stories were influenced by “…your entire life experience, by literally hundreds if not thousands of influences.” What were the big influences on Going Home In The Dark, both literary and not?
Movies and TV shows and music influenced moments in the book. Not any particular movies or TV shows or songs, just the trends and biases and clichés of those forms of entertainment as they have been screwed up in our time.
And how about your dog Elsa [pictured above]? What influence did she have on Going Home In The Dark?
She makes me laugh. If you’re going to write a comic novel, you better be able to laugh. If you can’t laugh, you won’t know what is funny and what is not. If you can’t laugh, you’ll always be in a grim mood. You might become suicidal. If you’re dead, you can’t write. Well, now that I think of it, Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy and V.C. Andrews have published numerous novels since they died. So if you’re dead, go ahead and write; there is a market.
You’ve had a number of your novels turned into movies. Would Going Home In The Dark make a good movie?
It would make a great movie in the hands of a young Mel Brooks or Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock was funnier than a lot of people realize.
And if someone asked you to play the casting game with Dark…
I don’t play casting games. [Deadpool‘s] Ryan Reynolds as Bobby. [The Devil Wears Prada‘s] Emily Blunt as Rebecca. I’m open on the other roles.
So, is there anything else you think potential readers need to know about Going Home In The Dark?
No giraffes were hurt in the production of this novel. I’m very sorry about what happened to the squirrel.
Finally, if someone enjoys Going Home In The Dark, what horror novel or novella by someone else would you recommend?
When I was in my late teens, all our favorite forms of fiction were disrespected niche markets. And because I’ve always been a contrarian, I was influenced by what I was supposed to dislike. The stories that left a lasting effect on me were from the early pulp period when legendary writers were shaping the science fiction, modern fantasy, and horror genres. I’ve never been able to get Theodore Sturgeon’s novella It out of my mind since I read it more than sixty years ago. The story is a marvel of compression, and it has an emotional impact more effective than I can explain.
John Campbell’s Who Goes There? is not as elegant as Sturgeon’s tale, but it is so effective that there’s no surprise it’s been filmed twice as The Thing. It established the conventions of what I think of as a haunted house story without a ghost or a house. In such stories, the protagonists are trapped in a remote facility (in this case an Antarctic research station) from which there is no easy escape. Something real, not a spirit, is stalking them and seems as elusive and powerful as any supernatural entity. Who Goes There?set the table for Alien and so much else that we love.
