Dean Koontz on His Strange New Supernatural Thriller Innocence

Dean Koontz is the author of countless novels, over a dozen of which have been No. 1 New York Times bestsellers. His newest book, Innocence, is about a strange young man named Addison who makes his home in the sewers, and who must hide his face at all times because just the sight of him drives ordinary people into a murderous rage.

“It was probably the most fun writing experience I’ve ever had,” says Dean Koontz in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I never had a moment in it where I was beating my head against the wall, which is the usual process.”

The story opens with Addison meeting a teenage goth named Gwyneth, who’s being pursued by a vicious killer. Gwyneth and Addison form an unlikely bond, but this is far from the “Beauty and the Beast” love story you might expect. Many readers think of Koontz as a horror writer, but this novel goes in a completely different direction, which prompted Kirkus Reviews to note, “Something different this way comes from Mr. Koontz’s imagination.”

“In a curious way, yes, this is different,” says Koontz. “Even my publisher felt so, and felt it would break out to a greater audience even. But I look at it and say, well, it’s sort of an evolution … I can see a progression that’s led almost inevitably to this.”

Listen to our complete interview with Dean Koontz in Episode 99 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above), in which he discusses his work with the disabled, his love of science fiction, and his ever-growing list of bad Hollywood experiences. Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks John Langan and Grady Hendrix join hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley to discuss subterranean horrors in movies, books, and games.

Dean Koontz on making up books:

“When I was a kid in high school and college I hated research … I just always made up my research. I’d write a paper and I’d cite all these books, but the books didn’t exist. I made up the titles and the authors’ names and everything else … And in the early years [of my career] I couldn’t always find things I wanted so I used to write epigraphs myself and attribute them to The Book of Counted Sorrows, which was a nonexistent book … I stopped doing it when I was getting so many letters from librarians who would say, ‘I spent 22 hours researching to find this book,’ or ‘I spent 80 hours’ … And I thought, ‘Uh oh, I don’t want to alienate librarians.'”

Dean Koontz on poisonous honey:

“If bees were to feed only on oleander and produce honey, the honey would kill you … When I was researching poisons I was fascinated that here was this shrub that in California is grown along the side of the highway in great big hedges, and one flower of it can kill you … Occasionally because people are not aware of its toxicity they chop it up and throw it in a salad to see what it’ll taste like, and it kills them. Or sometimes beekeepers who are amateurs don’t make sure what their bees are feeding on, and will produce poisonous honey. Everything in life is dangerous.”

Grady Hendrix on underground cities:

“Could there be underground cities? Absolutely. We have no idea. I mean, Xibalba, the Yucatan series of caves that was the Mayan hell, no one found that, no one had a clue it was there until the 2000s. I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of the Temples of Damanhur in [Italy] … Basically in the 2000s there was a police raid on this communal living thing in a house, in the middle of a town … They opened a door, and walked down into a series of underground temples and caves, basically a city, that is twenty times the size of Big Ben … So on the one hand we think there’s no such thing as underground cities and countries, on the other hand there’s a lot of underground under there.”

John Langan on wanting fantasy to be real:

“I remember a few years ago when they discovered the ‘hobbits’ in Indonesia and everyone was so excited, and what was funny about it was that some people were looking at it like, ‘This confirms Tolkien!’ And I was like, ‘No!’ … Every fall at SUNY New Paltz we do a symposium on H.P. Lovecraft‘s work … I had a guy come up to me — this young guy, really big, muscular, lots of tattoos, but very soft-spoken — and he said to me, ‘You know, Lovecraft put so much thought into these things. They all kind of link up. Don’t you think maybe he was on to something?’ And I said, ‘No’ … But there is this desire to see these fantastic structures that we love so much.”