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Author Details

Author Details

Koontz, Dean

Dean Koontz grew up in desperate poverty under the tyranny of a violent alcoholic father (Koontz's father served time in prison for trying to murder him). Despite his traumatic childhood, Koontz put himself through Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania (then known as Shippensburg State College), and in 1967 went to work as an English teacher at Mechanicsburg High School. In his spare time he wrote his first novel, Star Quest, which was published in 1968. From there he went on to write over a dozen more science fiction novels.

In the 1970s, Koontz began publishing mainstream suspense and horror fiction, under his own name as well as under several pseudonyms; Koontz has stated he used pen names after several editors convinced him that authors who switched genre fell victim to "negative crossover": alienating established fans, while simultaneously not picking up any new fans. Known pseudonyms include Deanna Dwyer, K. R. Dwyer, Aaron Wolfe, David Axton, Brian Coffey, John Hill, Leigh Nichols, Owen West, and Richard Paige. Currently some of those novels are sold under Koontz's real name.

Koontz's breakthrough novel was Whispers (1980). Several of his books have reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Koontz is renowned for his skill at writing suspenseful page-turners. His strengths also include memorable characters, original ideas, and ability to blend horror, fantasy and humour. Koontz has been criticized for his tendency to include too many similes and therefore to drag out descriptions, his frequent use of similar plotting structures, and a tendency to moralize heavily.

Koontz's protagonists,with the exception of Odd Thomas,arm theirselves with guns to do combat against the various monsters and madmen,and Koontz gets all the technical details right.There are no mistakes(functions and capabilities of different types of guns.)

Arguably, most of Koontz's work can still be classified as science fiction, as he tries to create plausible, consistent explanations for the unusual, fantastic events featured in most of his novels.

Koontz also has a very interesting way of adding his own little quirks to his novels, such as adding simple quotes from a book by the name of The Book of Counted Sorrows. Counted Sorrows was originally a hoax, like the nonexistent Keener's Manual Richard Condon cited for epigraphs he wrote himself. Eventually Koontz put together a poetry collection of that name, using all the epigraphs; it was printed as a limited edition in 2003 by Charnel House and as an eBook by Barnes & Noble. His more recent novels, starting with The Taking, have no verse by Koontz; rather, they have quotes by other authors (in particular, The Taking uses quotes from T. S. Eliot, whose works figure in the plot of the novel).

Koontz has long been a fan of Art Bell's radio program, Coast to Coast AM. He appeared as a guest after a fan reported to Bell that one of Koontz's novels featured a character describing a paranormal event as an "Art Bell moment."

Koontz currently resides in Newport Beach, a city in Southern California (as such, most of his novels are set in Southern California) with his wife Gerda and their dog Trixie Koontz, under whose name he published the book, Life is Good: Lessons in Joyful Living, in 2004. Trixie is also often referenced in his official newsletter "Useless News".

Dogs often figure heavily in Koontz's novels, as he is an avid dog lover. Watchers, Dark Rivers of the Heart, and One Door Away from Heaven are prime examples. However, lately he has seen fit to include cats as characters, most notably the smart cat Mungojerrie in the Christopher Snow novels.

Anderson, Kevin J.

"In the last five years, 27 of Kevin J. Anderson's novels have appeared on national bestseller lists; he has more than 11 million books in print worldwide. His works have been translated into German, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, French, Romanian, Greek, Russian, Portugese, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Hungarian, Chinese, Indonesian, Hebrew, Korean, Slovenian, Estonian, Turkish, Croatian, and Polish.

Anderson recently signed the largest science fiction contract in publishing history, to write a prequel trilogy to Frank Herbert's classic SF novel DUNE, coauthored with Herbert's son Brian. Bantam Books paid more than seven figures per book in this trilogy. For a book signing during the promotional tour for his comedy/adventure novel AI! PEDRITO!, Anderson broke the Guinness World Record for ""Largest Single-Author Signing,"" passing the previous records set by Gen. Colin Powell and Howard Stern.

His STAR WARS JEDI ACADEMY trilogy became the three top-selling science fiction novels of 1994. He has also completed numerous other projects for Lucasfilm, including the 14 volumes in the New York Times bestselling YOUNG JEDI KNIGHTS series (cowritten with his wife, Rebecca Moesta). His three original STAR WARS anthologies are the bestselling SF anthologies of all time.

Anderson is the author of three hardcover novels based on the X-FILES; all three became international bestsellers, the first of which reached #1 on the London Sunday Times. GROUND ZERO was voted ""Best Science Fiction Novel of 1995"" by the readers of SFX magazine. RUINS hit the New York Times bestseller list, the first X-FILES novel ever to do so, and was voted ""Best Science Fiction Novel of 1996. ""

Anderson's thriller IGNITION, written with DOUG BEASON, has sold to Universal Studios as a major motion picture. Anderson and BEASON'S novels have been nominated for the Nebula Award and the American Physics Society's ""Forum"" award. Their other novels include VIRTUAL DESTRUCTION, FALLOUT, and ILL WIND, which has been optioned by ABC TV for a television movie or miniseries.

Anderson's solo work has garnered wide critical acclaim: CLIMBING OLYMPUS (voted the best paperback SF novel of 1995 by Locus magazine), RESURRECTION, INC. (nominated for the Bram Stoker Award), and his novel BLINDFOLD (1996 preliminary Nebula nominee). Anderson has written numerous bestselling comics, including STAR WARS and PREDATOR titles for Dark Horse, and X-FILES for Topps.

Anderson's research has taken him to the top of Mount Whitney and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, inside the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD complex, into the Andes Mountains and the Amazon River, inside a Minuteman III missile silo and its underground control bunker, onto the deck of the aircraft carrier Nimitz, inside NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, onto the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange, inside a plutonium plant at Los Alamos, and behind the scenes at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and out on an Atlas-E rocket launchpad. He also, occasionally, stays home and writes.

PERSONAL BIO:

Kevin J. Anderson was born March 27, 1962, and raised in small town Oregon, Wisconsin, south of Madison ?an environment that was a cross between a Ray Bradbury short story and a Norman Rockwell painting.

He first knew he wanted to create fiction when he was five years old, before he even knew how to write: he had seen the film of ""War of the Worlds"" on TV and was so moved that he took a notepad the next day and drew pictures of scenes from the film, spread them out on the floor, and told the story out loud (perhaps this is what led him into writing comics nearly three decades later!)

At 8 years old, Kevin wrote his first ""novel"" (three pages long on pink scrap paper) on the typewriter in his father's den ?""The Injection,"" a story about a mad scientist who invents a formula that can bring anything to life ? and when his colleagues scoff, he proceeds to bring a bunch of wax museum monsters and dinosaur skeletons to life so they can go on the rampage.

At the age of 10, he had saved up enough money from mowing lawns and doing odd jobs that he could either buy his own bicycle or his own typewriter. Kevin chose the typewriter ? and has been writing ever since.

He submitted his first short story to a magazine when he was a freshman in high school, and managed to collect 80 rejection slips for various manuscripts before he actually had a story accepted two years later (for a magazine that paid only in copies). When he was a senior, he sold his first story for actual money (a whopping $12.50), but he never slowed down. He sold his first novel, RESURRECTION, INC., by the time he turned 25.

Kevin worked in California for 12 years as a technical writer and editor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the nation's largest research facilities. At the Livermore Lab, he met his wife, Rebecca Moesta, and also his frequent coauthor, Doug Beason.

After he had published ten of his own science fiction novels to wide critical acclaim, he came to the attention of Lucasfilm, and was offered the chance at writing Star Wars novels. Along the way he also collected over 750 rejection slips, and a trophy as ""The Writer With No Future"" because he could produce more rejection slips by weight than any other writer at an entire conference. When asked for advice about how to be a successful writer, he answers quickly: PERSISTENCE!

He is an avid hiker and camper, doing much of his writing with a hand-held tape recorder while on long walks in Death Valley, the redwoods, or the Rocky Mountains. He is also a great fan of fine microbrews."