Author Dean Koontz had read plenty about things like parallel universes, quantum mechanics, and multiverses full of innumerable timelines.
So how excited was he to explore all those fascinating theories in one of his own books?
“It never crossed my mind,” says the best-selling author of more than 100 suspense thrillers. “I never thought I’d write anything about it because my sense was that as intriguing as the concept is, it would inevitably turn into too much of a sci-fi head trip.
“I just never thought that’s where I’d go.”
But “Elsewhere,” the latest from the Newport Beach resident, now takes him there. The story of single dad Jeffy Coltrane and his precocious 11-year-old daughter Amity, the book, which arrives on Tuesday, Oct. 6, tells a story set in Suavidad Beach, a fictionalized version of Laguna Beach, or Laguna Beaches, we should say, given the parallel worlds it explores.
Seven years after his wife Michelle vanished, Jeffy is solo parenting their daughter Amity. That’s when an eccentric genius shows up asking them to keep something safe: a so-called “key to everything” that allows its user to jump across timelines in the multiverse. Black-ops agents would kill to get their hands on it.
Koontz, who will talk about the book during a virtual book event with the Southern California News Group on Tuesday, Oct. 13, says “Elsewhere” came to him through its characters first.
“I was just noodling around, not even doing anything related to work,” he says. “I don’t know how, but this idea came in my head about this father-daughter relationship.
“Sometimes, the story idea that comes to you isn’t a story idea, it’s characters,” Koontz says. “That’s how the Odd Thomas series started. This character came into my head and I had no story to relate to him.”
“You start thinking, ‘Well, this is an intriguing idea for a character, but what’s the story? What is this character fit for?’”
It struck him that a father-daughter pairing was a relationship he’d not done before, and from there he imagined why they might be on their own, left by a wife and mother now presumed dead.
“This is where it all gets mysterious,” Koontz says. “It’s why I love the creative process. That’s when I suddenly thought: Parallel world. What if they had the ability to go into a parallel world where the mother still exists. What if the mother had never married, never had a child, and could be encouraged to fall in love with Jeffy all over?
“There, you start to get a story, and that’s where the multiverse comes in.”
Building worlds
Fueled by a sense of excitement for this new terrain, Koontz says he immediately launched into the work.
“I couldn’t wait to get to the keyboard to start on it,” the 75-year-old writer says. “Doing something you haven’t done before and challenging yourself to do it is what keeps you going at my age. You think, ‘Oh, I haven’t done that,’ so now it’s worth sitting down and trying it.”
Keeping the voices of characters both real and distinct was one part of the work: Both Jeffy and Amity share the role of narrator, depending on the chapter, while scientist Ed Harkenbach, who created the device they use to port between worlds appears in several identities.
“Not being a genius scientist myself it’s a little tricky,” Koontz says, though he soon sensed how to write each Ed with a voice to fit the personality of each Ed of the separate worlds.
Working with parallel timelines required a clear set of rules, Koontz says, though keeping the action in the same coastal city made that task much simpler.
“I wanted to create this little picturesque town, and then all of this wild stuff that happens literally takes place in the same town, just in different versions of it,” he says. “It reduces the chance of being confused.
“And I wanted a story in which they in essence always come home, until the end, where they come to a new home that’s even better than the one they once knew.”
Theories and beliefs
While “Elsewhere” has its shares of Koontzian horrors in its parallel timelines, all the science books he’d read gave “Elsewhere” a sense of authority about such esoteric matters.
Project Everett Highways, the name given the search for alternate paths in the book, is named after Hugh Everett III, the real-life quantum theorist who first proposed the existence of “many worlds.” (Fun fact: the late Everett’s son, Mark Oliver Everett, is the founder of the rock band Eels.)
And Koontz is happy to discuss the possibilities — or probabilities — that such theories might be right.
“The more science you read from the last 30 years the more astonishing life is, the more intricate everything is,” he says. “We think, every 10 years, that we now know mostly how things work. And then we find the layer below the layer that we’ve been thinking was the bottom of all, and that becomes more intricate than one above it.
“That’s what fascinates me about the idea of the multiverse,” Koontz says. “If it’s true, and it would seem to me that quantum mechanics tells you that it has to be true, then what does that do philosophically? How does that impact human philosophy of all kinds?”
On the surface, it would seem to “disprove all religions, it disproves Plato. There’s nothing that it leaves undestroyed,” he says.
But Koontz doesn’t believe it’s that simple, and in “Elsewhere,” he incorporates the view that even if there are many versions of us in different timelines, it’s possible philosophy, religion, belief systems still coexist.
“Really, the multiverse is a design of great mercy because it gives human beings endless chances to correct ourselves,” Koontz says.
Does that mean he believes there are more Dean Koontzes being interviewed in other timelines?
“I like to have some evidence, and a lot of theoretical physics is to some extent totally theoretical,” the Koontz of this timeline says. “What you have to do is take it to some degree on faith. But the other side of it is quantum mechanics in many ways has proved itself.
“I’m basically a believer and I’m an optimist. I’m a person of faith. I believe the world has a purpose and a meaning. And I believe that we’re basically screwed up but struggling to find that meaning.”
Thinking that the multiverse might be real gives him comfort that “if you screwed yourself up in this life or fate intervened that there’s still somewhere else where you have the chance to go forward and make things right and have a happier life,” Koontz says.
“In a sense, the multiverse is just another definition of grace and I find that interesting to think about,” he says. “I don’t rule it out. I just don’t know. Part of me says I’d like to believe this is true. And I have had a few strange things in my life that have happened that tell me things I’ve seen are inexplicable.”
Therein may one day lie another book, he adds.
“I’m going to write about them someday when I no longer care if anybody thinks I’m insane,” Koontz says, and laughs.
Dean Koontz in conversation
When: 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 13
Where: Online
How much: Free
How to watch: Go to http://bit.ly/Koontz10-13 to register for the event
