Interview re: The City on Patheos.com

July 4, 2014

Dean Koontz’ “The City”: A World Full of Mysterious Promise
We live in an age where we believe that science and technology have made us aware of all that is, but the world is a deeply-layered place, of which we understand only the tiniest part.
By Leo Brunnick, June 30, 2014
Dean Koontz sat down with Leo Brunnick (founder and CEO of Patheos) to talk about his latest novel, The City.
This new release continues Koontz’ tradition of writing stories that are exciting and thrilling and scary, while at the same time full of hope and meaning. The City is a story told through the adult eyes of Jonah Kirk as he relates some things that happened to him and his family when he was a boy. Set in a prototypical American city in the 1960s, The City tells a tale of the evil that is present in the world, but also shows that evil can be offset by the far-greater goodness and love that is also there, even where that good is often quiet and unnoticed, and makes the headlines far less often. Avid readers of Koontz’ work notice the strong spiritual messages and symbolism that permeate his work, and in The City Koontz gives a view of the world, of divinity, and of the power of love that readers will find very moving. Expect to cry a lot when reading this book …

In many of your books, and perhaps increasingly so as your work progresses, you show the presence of the Eternal, of Divinity, in nature, animals, relationships, and moments. How do you express that in a story like The City?

The stories I write—aside from the specifics of the story itself—talk about the operation of grace in our lives, which I see around me all the time. And the older I get, the more I see it. I think as you get older, and if you keep yourself alert and aware of what’s going on around you, you gain some wisdom, and it helps you see that.

With The City I wanted to tell a story that was about all the different types of love that exist, about the reality of evil, and about the magic that cities that comes from the operation of grace in our lives.

The City started as a much smaller book—basically as an e-single to help promote my previous book (Innocence) – with the connection being that this was in the same “universal city.” But as I started telling the story, I became enchanted with the voice of the character, this young piano prodigy Jonah Kirk, and about fifty pages into writing I realized this was going to be a novel. As I wrote, I had one of those experiences that writers can’t call forth on demand, and which certainly don’t happen to me very often—what psychologists call being in a “flow state” where it seems like you’re hardly writing the piece, that you’re more of a conduit for it. It made the experience of writing this book exhilarating from beginning to end.

Read the full interview @ Patheos.com.