The Mega-Selling Christian and Conservative Novelist

This has nothing to do with the Left Behind books by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye.

Nor am I referring to writers behind recent surprise hits like Facing the Giantsor Fireproof.

In fact, the individual I mean to talk about isn’t considered part of the Christian subculture at all.

He has sold over 400,000, 000 books.  According to his website, the number is growing by about 17 million a year globally.  He has made a reputation writing about evil, but his most popular character is one of the finest fictional human beings you can imagine.

Who am I talking about?  Who has those kinds of sales figures and yet sets forth a philosophy which embraces the Christian faith, tradition, and a generally conservative philosophical viewpoint?

The answer is Dean Koontz and he’s been dominating the supermarkets, airports, and bookstores for a few decades now.  His career has successfully spanned a book business that was once about names like Crown and B. Dalton and then moved to Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.  He has little need to worry about the transition to ereaders.  He’ll sell just as well there.

Year after year of market success gains freedom for an author to do what he wants.  In the last decade, Koontz has added something to his plotting and characterization.  He has become a more intentional moral teacher.  Koontz’s Odd Thomas novels featuring a character by that name lay open Koontz’s philosophy wide for all to see,  not in the Ayn Rand style where suddenly the main character is giving a big speech, but rather by taking advantage of the opportunities that arise in the natural rhythm of the story.

Odd Thomas (his parents claim they meant to name him “Todd” but never addressed the error on the birth certificate) is a young man who is bright, handsome, and athletic.  He comes from a family with money.  Despite all this, he has lived on his own since he was 16 and works as a fry cook at a local diner.  His wardrobe is limited to a few pairs of t-shirts and blue jeans with a sweater or two for cold weather.  Odd intentionally keeps his life as simple as he can.  His choices are partially the result of a horrific upbringing and also a response to other significant complications in his life.  (I won’t get into those as this is a ZERO spoiler post.)

The character demonstrates Koontz’s worldview.  Odd looks like something out of an Annette Funicello movie (a point he self-deprecatingly makes from time to time).  He is a Catholic (one book centers around events that occur at a monastery where he has gone to get away from the world).  He affirms the value of hard work and achieves excellence at everything he does.  Though his trade is short-order cooking (the fluffiest pancakes, the crispiest hashbrowns), he sometimes dreams about selling shoes or working at a tire store.

Part of the reason he favors these jobs with discrete tasks and highly measurable outcomes is because he has certain gifts which  frequently put him in danger.  Despite his weariness of adventure, danger, and human tragedy, he unfailingly answers the call of duty.  Odd offers his life to save others and though he is fully aware of his own mortality, always considers the lives of innocents more valuable than his own.  Beneath all of this is Odd’s deep understanding of right and wrong.  He understands these concepts as immutable and not merely the products of a particular age.  Odd also believes God has given him his gift for a reason and he must answer for its use.

In the telling of the stories, Koontz makes headway against the relativistic and nihilistic spirit of the age.  He also demonstrates substantial dissent from the liberal consensus on a variety of issues.  If you like strong plots, memorable characters, turning pages irresistibly late into the night, and a philosophy that sustains life instead of undercutting its foundations, Dean Koontz is your man.

The books in the series so far are:

Odd Thomas

Forever Odd

Brother Odd

Odd Hours

Truly, I can scarcely recommend these highly enough in terms of their value as edifying reading for entertainment.  I very rarely re-read books, but I am now on my second reading of the series and am enjoying them all over again.

 

Comments

[Deacon Michael D. Harmon]

I would only add that the Odd Thomas books (Despite the author's explanation for it, Odd is a first name in Scandinavia, by the way) are not the only ones with Christian themes that Koontz has written. Some of them, anyway. His writing style is uneven, he loves deus ex machina endings, and many works -- including the Odd Thomas ones -- contain graphic violence or images of horror. These are not children's books. Evil is always treated as evil, though, and it does not triumph. And I would add that any author who can cast a golden retriever as a literal angel has my approval -- and my dog's. (Isn't that right, Liberty? My golden just nodded her approval.)

[thomas]

"his writing style is uneven" is an understatement, if Wikipedia article on this author is accurate.

[Rob G]

Koontz writes page-turners, pure and simple. Don't go looking for "style" because you won't find any. His books are pretty much straight entertainment. Nothing wrong with that, of course, as long as you're not looking for Dickens or Dostoevsky.

[S. M. Hutchens]

I enjoy Koontz's novels and have read perhaps ten of them. The principal theme of them all, I would say, is the beauty, complexity, and fascination of Goodness--not delivered in overtly "Christian" writing (uggh!), but in the case of the Odd Thomas novels, for example, goodness as practiced by a Christian who quietly lives his faith and is a credit to it. In this regard Koontz reminds me very much of Dickens.

There is a decidedly apocalyptic side to much of his work, but not the attempt to illustrate a particular biblical eschatology. It is more "general," having to do with what happens when cosmic evil attacks (and often kills) good in a cosmos ultimately governed by Good. The Christian God does not appear as one of Koontz's characters, so to speak. There is no preaching and very little overt religion. But in another sense, he could be said to be, while never seen, the principal character.

As a public librarian, I can attest that Koontz is one of the dozen or so best-selling authors (in the same class as James Patterson, John Sandford, John Grisham, Janet Evanovich, or Nora Roberts) for whom the patrons clamor, and for whose new books the waiting list is huge long before they are even released. He tells a good story, before which monuments of imagination critics who find them indigestible for reasons of delicate taste have eventually to give up and slink back to their cocktail parties.

If one likes one's reading nicely sanitized and overtly Christian, Koontz is not your man. But I know of no popular modern author who makes faith in God and sheer goodness more interesting than he does. As such his message is strongly counter-cultural in a world that makes self-sacrificial love and virtue above all things, boring.

[Hunter Baker]

I don't let my students cite Wikipedia for anything! As far as the style goes, I don't claim to be an expert. All I know is that I have enjoyed the books tremendously.

[S. M. Hutchens]

It just dawned on me that the Bible also has what might be called a deus ex machina ending, two of them in fact: the Noahic flood and the End of the World: The Creator, fed up with wickedness, puts his spade into the teeming corruption and turns it over.

This being the case, the fault of such endings is not in the "mechanism" itself, but in the failure of the drama to show adequately the reason for them. No full Story can rest happily ever after in Ithaca, or in Jerusalem, before the master returns to slaughter the bad guys, and that in a stroke, since they have been at play long enough.

[Bob Srigley]

Having read as many as 10 of his novels, I would affirm everything positive which has been stated. One of his novels, I think INTENSITY, has many references to Dickens and all of them reveal a heart for the little people who are often, like the Beavers and Pevensies of Narnia, or the maid of Nazareth, the very ones instrumental in tripping up the grandiosity of the wicked. Though he writes compellingly of evil, you always know that good will come out in the end (as opposed to Stephen King for instance.)

My favorite, along with the Brother Odds, is LIFE EXPECTANCY. In that book, I think he has drawn a picture of evil more complete in some ways, in that it includes something of evil's tawdriness, ridiculousness, and even stupidity.

I don't know if deus ex machina figures as prominently as some commentators have suggested, but, like Dickens', the stories often resolve in the wicked being overtaken by or falling into a catastrophe of their own making. A bit like Satan hounding Jesus to his death in order to prevent him from assuming the throne of David, the deceiver is deceived, the pawn reaches the King's row and the usurper's world is upended.

[thomas]

"I don't let my students cite Wikipedia for anything!" ok then:
In an article Dean Koontz wrote for ENREGUMEN 8, a fanzine published in 1971, he admits to writing 30 pornographic books to build a "healthy bank account."

[Rob G]

~~in 1971, he admits to writing 30 pornographic books to build a "healthy bank account."~~

That was 40 years ago. My understanding is that it's been relatively recently that he returned to his faith, or began taking it more seriously, or whatever.

[Lars Walker]

Like many authors, Koontz examines the problem of evil. What distinguishes Koontz, in my view, is that he is just as interested (or more) in the problem of good. When he looks at good, he sees a reflection of Something Greater, and (mostly subtly) he points the reader to That.

His more recent books are definitely superior to his early ones.

[Janet Cupo]

I'm really glad to see this post. I've read everything that Koontz has written since 1999 (except some of his Trixie books), and some of his earlier books. I have to agree with Rob if what he means is that the books aren't great literature, however, in his later books, he seems to be striving toward something more than just page-turners. Sometimes I wish that he would write more serious books, but then I think he would lose the opportunity to speak to the people who currently read his books. In fact after reading the 4th Odd Thomas book, I was looking around the internet for comments about it. I wanted to see what his fans thought about it and I saw some negative comments from people wondering what the heck he was trying to do.

As far as writing pornography, his current books are free of the kind of sex that you see in the earlier books and he's started to have some characters that express a deliberate chastity.

Also, in many of his books he has characters who are autistic, or handicapped in some other way--the sort of people that the world throws away--and they aren't just people on the side, but sometimes main characters in the book. He's very pro-life.

AMDG,
Janet C.