America’s Least-Known Best-Selling Author : Orange County’s Dean R. Koontz May Not Be a Household Name, But His Horror Tales Sell 6 Million Copies a Year.

HIS NAME SCREAMS the promise of sweet horror in bookstores from mall to shining mall. He sells 6 mil lion books a year, is said to have about 55 million copies in print and commands advances of $2 million. At the age of 44, he has published more than 50 books, methodically pounding out one crowd-pleasing fantasy after another from a windowless office deep in the suburban vastness of Orange County. In 1989, his novel “Midnight,” a tale of demonic possession set in a Carmel-like seaside town, reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Yet Dean R. Koontz remains a literary specter, perhaps America’s least-known best-selling novelist. The “Master of Menace,” as his publishers have touted him, is a fear-monger who happens to be afraid of public exposure--but seems to hold out the possibility that he might outlast F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Since his books hit the big numbers a few years ago, Koontz has repeatedly declined invitations to show his face on television, and he also has refused his publisher’s exhortations to crisscross the continent on a sales-goosing author tour. “Every writer I’ve seen who becomes a celebrity, the work deteriorates,” Koontz says. “If you’re on television a bunch, you’ve lost it.” Which doesn’t mean Koontz would mind if his work was better known or perhaps taken a bit more seriously by the taste-making book reviews, where horror fiction is often exiled to the back pages.

Koontz doesn’t consider himself a horror writer at all these days, though in 1986 he was president of the Horror Writers of America. His high-tech Gothic adventures set along the California coast--”Watchers,” “Midnight,” “Whispers,” “Phantoms” and his latest, “The Bad Place,” which is being released this month--have brought comparison to that other multimillion-selling creep-show author, Stephen King. But the comparison does not please Koontz, who maintains that there are few similarities between them.

“He did what he did better than anybody had ever done it before, and that’s why he became successful,” Koontz says of his more famous East Coast counterpart. “I don’t do what he does. He writes ghost stories--’Christine,’ ‘The Shining’--and deals a lot with the supernatural. I’ve never written a ghost story.”

Koontz prefers to think of himself as “a novelist of the fantastic who writes in a realistic vein.” His own imaginary demons have ranged from urban serial killers to rural blobs, zombies and time-traveling psychic vampires. “I’ve written many books that have no element of the fantastic in them, but for me right now that element makes it easier to express what the world is like. We’re living in a fantastic world of radical change. How else can you write about what’s going on today?”

Certainly, his books provide an altogether different view of late-20th-Century America than the one created in what he terms with some resentment the “Angst-ridden” fiction that has caught the primary attention of critics and professors for more than 50 years: the existentialist, ironic, apocalyptic prose of writers from Fitzgerald and Hemingway to Mailer and Didion.

Koontz is not big on irony or apocalypse. His skillfully woven, sometimes-elaborate, plots seldom slow down to worry over the intricacies of society. And the books bear a hopeful message: That despite science gone wrong, government power run amok and preternatural evil finding footholds in new technologies, in the end, scores of mutilated bodies later, love conquers all. “I’m an optimist,” Koontz says without apology. In a Koontz book, you know that eventually everything’s going to be all right. It’s as if Walt Disney had taken a brush to the stories of Edgar Allen Poe.

“I think my books have spiritual overtones because I think we’re here for a purpose,” says Koontz, who has been a Protestant, a Roman Catholic and an atheist and now identifies his religious views as agnostic. “I’m not a preacher, but if we’re not here for any reason, then you might as well just pack it all up. That’s why I could never write cynical books or the classic hard-boiled book where it’s all despair and we all die and it’s meaningless.”

His 1987 novel “Watchers,” which seems to be his most popular, hinges on the fallout from a highly classified U.S. government genetic engineering experiment intended to create a godlike species combining the best aspects of dogs and humans. The experiment succeeds in producing a lovable golden retriever who can read, but it also backfires, Frankenstein-like, spawning a pitiful, mongrel monster, The Outsider, who happens to adore the image of Mickey Mouse.

Escaping from a lab in Irvine, the dog and The Outsider, the twin faces of good and evil, race separately toward their Koontzian destinies pursued by government agents while, in the meantime, two disaffected loners, united during the crisis, fuse into an adolescent dream of perfect love. The love story is characteristic of Koontz. “We have a responsibility to stand watch over one another,” the woman tells her partner in a climactic scene. “We are watchers, all of us, watchers, guarding against the darkness. You’ve taught me that we’re all needed, even those who sometimes think we’re worthless, plain and dull. If we love and allow ourselves to be loved. . . . “

Koontz’s new book, “The Bad Place,” hatches another model couple, an upwardly mobile Orange County husband-and-wife detective team who pursue a blood-sucking killer (the offspring of a wicked hermaphrodite) capable of vanishing in a flurry of sparkling dust like the space voyagers on “Star Trek.”

“Bobby and Julie are Adam and Eve seeking the Garden of Eden,” Koontz says about the book’s protagonists. “Everything in it rests on mythical archetypes. And that’s the basic underlying level of almost every book.”

The submerged myths and page-turning yarns in these weirdly consoling suspense stories appeal both to readers of more challenging fiction and nonfiction, who pick up Koontz as a welcome bedtime respite now and then, and to a subculture of dark-fantasy scholars who nibble on nuances of the ghastly in obscure journals.

His fans include members of the Grateful Dead, who discovered Koontz in an airport book rack and have repeatedly invited him to come to one of their concerts and be introduced from the stage.

Koontz, who has not accepted the invitation, mutters uneasily at mention of the Dead endorsement. “I’d rather not point to any famous people who like my work,” he says. “I like it that the average Joe likes what I do, which is where all important writing is aimed.”

Koontz could not easily be described as an average Joe himself, though he grew up poor in a working-class family in south-central Pennsylvania, on the slopes of Appalachia. More than poor, Koontz grew up scared, and it’s possible to see his quest for literary respect as simply a continuation of his early struggle as an only child to overcome the powerful stigma left by a violent, alcoholic father who terrorized both him and his mother.

“Most of my childhood memories are of him smashing furniture or carrying on one of his rages,” Koontz recalls. “And the humiliation of going out to a barroom and picking him up when he was unconscious. He was always in one sort of trouble or another. He could never hold a job. There were times when I was afraid he was going to kill us.”

Koontz’s fascination in his fiction with genetics and unnatural births may have something to do with his admitted wish to believe that he is not the true son of his father. Because he does not resemble his father physically and because of a mysterious hint dropped by his mother on her deathbed, he now thinks he might be the product of an early artificial-insemination experiment conducted around the time of his birth by doctors from Johns Hopkins University, whom he later learned were working in the region.

In any case, his firsthand acquaintance with horror at home was to become a basis for Koontz’s life work, although it wasn’t until years later that he came to see the connection. Phyllis Grann, Putnam’s current chief executive officer, who brought Koontz to the publishing house in 1977, once asked him, “Aren’t all your books about remaking families?”

He thought it over and had to agree. Despite the deadly events, shape-changing phantasms and time warps, Koontz believes, “My books are about people who find themselves through family and friends.”

As a boy, he fled the terrible shadows of his father into the magical realms where books took him--particularly the outer realms of science fiction. Once he began writing his own stories in high school and college, he tried to imitate what he was reading: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon.

One such story, written for a creative writing class at Shippensburg State College in the mid-1960s, won Koontz his first important recognition: a prize in an Atlantic Monthly magazine competition.

He met his wife, Gerda, in high school in Bedford (pop. 3,300), Pa., and they married in 1966, the year Koontz graduated from college. He went to work in the federal poverty program in Appalachia, then taught high school English for two years in Harrisburg before turning full time to fiction in 1969. Initially Gerda supported him with earnings from an office job, but it wasn’t long until Koontz sold his first science-fiction novel, “Star Quest,” to Ace Books for the princely sum of $1,000. In those days, he turned out as many as five 60,000-word science-fiction paperback originals in a year. His book, “The Demon Seed,” about the wife of a scientist who is impregnated by a computer bent on taking over the world, was sold to Hollywood and made into a 1977 MGM movie starring Julie Christie.

In 1975, growing weary of the cold winters and puckered minds of Harrisburg, the Koontzes turned their sights westward, heading first to Las Vegas for a year, then, on the recommendation of a friend, moving to Orange, at the base of the Irvine foothills. “It was a lucky choice,--almost an accident, really,” says Koontz. He now counts himself part of a loose community of Orange County suspense writers that includes Kem Nunn, T. Jefferson Parker, Gregory Benford, Maxine O’Callaghan and Robert Ray. “ More and more, this is where you see the future happening. Orange County is getting to be an immensely creative center for all the new entrepreneurial activity in business and science going on in this country. There’s no shortage of things to write about.”

The Koontzes live on a quiet cul-de-sac, in a light and roomy two-level luxury tract house with a Tudor facade, Chinese area rugs, peach-colored stone floors, gold-leaf bathroom fixtures and shelves of leather-bound editions of the classics. There is a slightly incongruous locked wrought-iron gate fencing in the front porch--”I’m very security-conscious,” Koontz says.

At first glance, Koontz does not look like a conjurer of horrific suspense; then, on second thought, he looks just right. He has a slender build and a soft, pasty complexion with black mustache, a mirthless mouth and dark, slightly glazed eyes. The muscles in his face move about as often as an ice cap.

To keep fit and get his brain in better working order, he lifts weights or pedals a reclining exercise bicycle for an hour or so upon rising, then takes his breakfast bowl of cereal to the word processor and dives directly into one of his fantastic worlds, usually not coming out for lunch and working right through until 7 at night or later. “Toward the end of a book, I’ve been known to sit there for 12, 14 hours a day to get it finished.”

He listens to music as he writes--big band, rock ‘n’ roll and classical. “It’s one or another of those things that I work to, depending on what I’m doing and which fits best.”

While preoccupied with a book, which generally takes him five to six months to complete, he tries not to leave the house much or see many other people. “If I can spend those long periods and that world becomes my world, I gain a greater empathy with the characters, and the characters are more real to me and I can live in their skins better,” he says.

He allows himself only one regular distraction--a weekly outing to the Holiday School of Dance in Anaheim, where he and Gerda spend their Tuesday evenings moving their feet in time to big-band swing, waltzes and the occasional fox trot. “It’s the only thing I do that for 1 1/2 hours in there, there’s nothing else on my mind,” says the author.

Gerda, who long ago gave up outside work, devotes most of her time to managing her husband’s business affairs: filing, bookkeeping, supervising foreign sales (Koontz has been published in 17 languages), and tending the 2,000 to 3,000 letters a year he receives from readers.

When he’s not writing, Koontz reads, particularly scientific and medical periodicals that stuff his subconscious full of New Age facts. He watches little television.

Over 20 years, Koontz has written in a variety of styles and genres, including Gothic romances. On the advice of early agents, he used pseudonyms for each different genre, publishing under the names K. R. Dwyer and Owen West, among others. Some of these books are now being reissued under his own name.

He published a comic novel, “Hanging On,” in 1973, but it didn’t sell. “You don’t only want to make a living, you want an audience,” he says. “So I shifted to suspense. By that time, I was reading a lot of suspense. I had found John D. MacDonald and loved his stuff. Also James M. Cain.

“My argument has always been that writers who had a shot at lasting are popular writers. The artistes, the people who appeal to academia, never survive. Dickens sold hugely in his time. So did Mark Twain.”

He’s betting that MacDonald will be around long after such current critical darlings as Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and Donald Barthelme are gathering dust in the Library of Congress. And he wonders about F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The body of his work is small, and, like Hemingway, he seems to be slowly drifting out of favor with the university crowd that has kept his flame burning these past few decades,” Koontz wrote a few years ago.

The examples of Dickens and Twain notwithstanding, the likelihood of Koontz’s gaining a wider critical appreciation to go along with all those millions of copies sold was probably not advanced by his publication in 1981 of the book, “How to Write Best-Selling Fiction,” a sort of professional autobiography advocating that young writers above all keep an entrepreneurial eye on the marketplace. His analysis of the publishing business inveighed repeatedly against “the academic-literary crowd” and aired the rarely heard (among writers) arguments that the coming of the behemoth bookstore chains and the gobbling up of the proud old publishing houses by conglomerates were actually healthy developments.

“My own career has benefited from the salesmanship and the business savvy of the new-style publishers,” he wrote accurately, by way of explanation.

Indeed, during one six-month period in 1980-81, by his own reckoning, three different publishers spent a total of $700,000 to promote three of Koontz’s books.

“Midnight,” Koontz’s recent bestseller, sold 300,000 copies in hardback and is likely to hit the 2 million mark in paperback, just in the United States.

When you sell 6 million books a year, as Koontz calculates his current market activity, it means, among other things, that you are rich. In addition to the hardback and paperback sales, Koontz is on Hollywood’s payroll as well these days, with “The Bad Place” being developed for a feature film at Warner Bros. and Lee Rich Productions and “Midnight” being developed at Paramount; four of his early books being made into television movies at Warner Bros. for airing on CBS; a movie version of “Whispers” now being completed by the Canadian company Cinepix, and two other books sold outright to independent producers.

Yet except for the white Mercedes in the driveway, Koontz does not seem to be wearing his money where anyone can see it. The Koontzes, who have no children, don’t travel much. A planned promotional trip to London last year was canceled when he came down at the last minute with a rare stomach disorder attributed to stress.

“I’m a homebody basically,” he says.

All the money and success have not allowed him to fill in the black hole of his childhood. Instead, he has come to see it as a well of inspiration. “Whether we realize it or not,” Koontz has said, “we write about what we are, where we’ve been and what we’re afraid of.”

On her deathbed, his mother said to him, “There’s something I have to tell you about your father.” As Koontz recalls the incident: “Just then he walked into the room, and she said ‘Later, later, it’s important. It could change your whole life.’ And then she died. Talk about a fictional situation! I never knew what she was going to tell me. And that’s essentially the last thing my mother ever said to me.”

Whether she was trying to tell him that his real father was someone else, he would rather just go on hoping.

“I don’t really want to know because what if I go and learn that he’s not? Well, that’s a great relief. But what I fear more is learning that he is (my real father). That would be harder for me to handle. I’d rather not know.”

For a writer who dips so liberally into the pop-psych stew of ideas about learning to love yourself and others, Koontz is loath to heal his own wounds. “Fiction allows you to work through your problems by putting them down on paper,” he says. “And I’d be afraid to destroy the drive I have to do what I do.”

So it is that for Dean R. Koontz, Putnam’s “Master of Menace,” one of the great fears has nothing to do with spooky humanoids or gruesome mutations but the possibility that a minor adjustment in his psyche might slap a lid on the stack of books he is piling upward toward immortality. Fitzgerald may not make it. But if words are being counted in heaven, who can say that this guy Koontz doesn’t stand a chance?