The Dean of Evil : Best-Selling Author Koontz Once Again Sets His Demonic Doings in Orange County Best-Selling Author Koontz Once Again Sets His Demonic Doings in Orange County

The window of the dimly lit waterfront cocktail lounge looks out on the sailboats and motor yachts, those “hundreds of millions of dollars of ego gratification” crowding the private docks along the harbor.

It’s a picture-postcard view of the good life, Newport Beach-style. But there’s evil afoot.

This is, after all, a scene from Dean R. Koontz’s new suspense thriller, and the man in black sipping rum and Coke at the window table is not there to enjoy the view:

“He had no tolerance for prettiness, for postcard scenes of harmonious composition. . . . With its plush chairs and low amber lighting, the lounge was too soft for a killer like him. It dulled his killing instincts.”

The man in black, who wears sunglasses even at night, is a demonic force who lives in the “borderland” between the living and the dead, and on this night he’s searching for another victim to add to his collection of bodies kept hidden deep in the bowels of an abandoned amusement park east of San Juan Capistrano.

Koontz, the bestselling Master of Menace, is in top form in “Hideaway” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons; $22.95), the latest in a string of novels he has set in his own back yard: Orange County.

Over the past decade, Orange County has provided the setting for dozens of novels, the majority of them mysteries--from T. Jefferson Parker’s “Laguna Heat” to Joseph Wambaugh’s “The Golden Orange.”

But even the county’s suburban mean streets take on new meaning in the hands of the man People magazine dubbed the Titan of Terror.

* In “Watchers,” a creature designed for use on the battlefield escapes from a genetic engineering lab and runs amok in Irvine Park, savagely killing nearly all the animals in the petting zoo.

* In “The Bad Place,” a psychotic villain whose behavior mimics that of a vampire feasts upon an Irvine family and then attempts to cover up his bizarre crime by burning their house to the ground.

* And now in “Hideaway,” Koontz has created another chilling suspense tale, one that explores the sources of evil and the nature of good.

As the novel opens, Laguna Beach antique dealer Hatch Harrison drowns during a storm-battered car accident that also nearly kills his artist wife Lindsey. But Harrison is surgically “reanimated” after being dead for a record 80 minutes. Mysteriously muttering, “Something’s out there,” when he awakens, he soon discovers that he now has a psychic link with an evil force.

It’s in the abandoned amusement park where Vassago, the satanic man in black, takes his sacrificial victims, that Koontz provides the book’s biggest horrors.

There, in the cavernous, subterranean room that once held the machinery for a fun house hell, Vassago arranges the naked bodies of his victims, displaying them “to their best advantage, as if they were 10 exquisite sculptures by some perverse Michelangelo in a museum of death.”

Disneyland may have provided the inspiration for Koontz’s fictional amusement park, but the author has no intention of ever using the Magic Kingdom in one of his novels.

“I have too much of a sense of respect about it,” says the mild-mannered Koontz. “It’s a special place; I shouldn’t taint it.”

Any other Orange County locale is fair game, however.

For Koontz, whose last three novels (“Cold Fire,” “The Bad Place” and “Midnight”) swept to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list, Orange County provides the ideal setting for his chilling tales of suspense.

“The traditional way to tell a scary story is ‘It’s a dark and stormy night,’ but it’s somehow scarier if it takes place in a sun-drenched landscape,” he said. “There’s so much that will be written that will use the expected background for that kind of story, so to use the unexpected makes it, for me, fresher. It will work better.

“I think what’s interesting to play off of is that Orange County still has substantially lower crime rates than Los Angeles or most of the rest of Southern California. Part of what I’m saying in that book is that no place is invulnerable.

“In our age, evil is very mobile. It can go anywhere.”

Seated in a green leather chair in the combination billiard and “pub room” of his hilltop mansion overlooking Newport Beach, Koontz flashed another grin and took a sip from the glass of Diet Coke that had been served to him by his house manager.

The three-story, 8,500 square-foot home, which he and Gerda, his wife of 25 years, moved into last year after outgrowing their home in a private equestrian community east of Orange, is a fitting abode for an author who commands $2.25-million advances for his books, which are now printed in 22 languages.

The trappings of success indicate just how far the normally publicity-shunning author has come since arriving in Orange County in 1976.

After a slow but steadily building career that has included writing under a variety of pen names, Koontz has built a loyal legion of readers who virtually guarantee that each new book will soar to the top of bestseller lists.

Such huge success also means Hollywood has come calling. Seven of his novels have been turned into movies--”only two of which were any good,” he says--and four of his most recent books are awaiting transfer to the screen.

Despite his penchant for setting his novels in Orange County, the Pennsylvania-born Koontz admits that about all he knew about the county when he moved here was that it was home to Disneyland.

He first began using Orange County as a setting because of the amount of research required for each book and, he said, “knowing the geological background saves you a lot of time. Then, as I started writing about it I discovered I had lot to say about it. It was such an interesting background, and I think it’s almost inexhaustible now” as a setting.

Contrary to outsiders’ stereotypical impressions of Orange County as being simply an uninteresting suburban sprawl of shopping malls and tract houses, Koontz finds the county fascinatingly complex.

“One of the big things that’s interesting about Orange County is that the reality is so different than the reputation,” he said. “It has a suburban feel to it still and yet it’s very sophisticated in what’s going on intellectually in terms of high technology and computers and whatnot. It’s much more sophisticated than anyone outside of it gives it credit for.”

Of course, Koontz being Koontz, he is able to find something menacing lurking in even the most benign setting: “I’m sure there’s evil in there,” he acknowledged with a laugh. “It’s the human condition.”

Heart-pounding suspense seems a fitting genre for a man who has described his own childhood as one of “almost unrelenting terror.”

Growing up in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, Koontz sought through reading a respite from a violent, alcoholic father. He began writing science fiction stories in his early teens and won the Atlantic Monthly’s annual college writing competition while majoring in English in college.

After a year working in a federal poverty program in a small Pennsylvania coal mining town and serving a stint as an English teacher, Koontz turned to writing full time at 24 in 1969.

Ironically, he concedes, if he hadn’t experienced such a traumatic childhood he probably wouldn’t be the same writer he is today.

“It’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have been a writer at all,” he said. “I think that kind of thing gives you the drive to communicate.”

Koontz believes that writing his novels, which often feature characters who have had similarly rotten childhoods, has been been “enormously therapeutic.”

“A psychiatrist--the first person who diagnosed my father as being a borderline schizophrenic with tendencies to violence--called me up when (his father) was in the hospital and asked if I would talk about it. As we were talking she said, ‘Well, how about you? How did you come through all this?’ And I said, ‘My work is therapy.’ I’ve come through it well. I mean, I don’t have any great problems with it because I think I’ve had this great ability to work it out on the page. “

Koontz’s dark tales of good and evil emerge from his stylishly appointed and compulsively neat upstairs office, which he keeps moodily dark with the shades drawn and only a desk lamp and indirect lighting over his bookcases for illumination. To further separate himself from the interruptions of the outside world, he usually listens to instrumental music while he writes.

Down the hall, Gerda Koontz has her own office, where she handles the financial end of the business and serves as liaison with foreign literary agents. Working out of yet another office is the executive assistant Koontz hired last year to field dozens of daily phone calls, run errands, and deal with the fan mail--some 5,000 letters a year.

Having an assistant allows Koontz to work largely uninterrupted, spending 10 or more hours a day in front of his computer during the five to six months it typically takes him to complete a book.

Occasionally while writing, even the Master of Menace feels a chill running down his spine.

“I write so slowly in one sense that I rewrite a scene to death before I go onto the next page, and that keeps you at a little bit of a technical distance from it,” he said. “But at the same time, if the scene is working, you’ll suddenly think of something this character is going to do and you’ll think, ‘Oh, God!’ ”

In fact, Koontz said, there was a point while writing about the satanic Vassago in “Hideaway” that he wondered whether the character just too far off the deep end: Would readers simply refuse to believe that there could be someone like this out there?

“I mean, he is so demonical, so maniacal, and yet so self-contained,” said Koontz. “I literally worried about this for two days, and the third day was the Jeffrey Dahmer story back in (Milwaukee) where he was killing people and (allegedly) eating them and storing their heads in his refrigerator, and I said, ‘Nope, there is absolutely nothing you can think of to measure up to some of the bizarreness that’s out there.’ ”