Koontz News
Borders bookmark ephemera
February 5, 2011
Found this at a Borders bookstore last night:
Dean re-returns to science ficiton
January 29, 2011
I recently discovered that in March of this year, the Nevermore comic series “Created by Dean Koontz” will be released by Dynamite, the current publishers of Dean’s Frankenstein comics. The interesting bit, is that none of the articles I’ve found online (1,2,3,4,5,6) mention that Nevermore #1 and #2 were previously released in March and June of 2009 respectively, by Dabel Brothers. (As I understand it, Dabel brothers went out of business shortly thereafter.) So the question is, will the first two issues of this “new” series be reprints of the original first two issues or not? Keep an eye out for further details as I find them. (Oh, and don’t miss the fact that there will be four different covers released for issue #1.)
Here are the images that I’ve been able to find online:
One more thing, an online article by Zac Turgeon is based on a “10 page preview” of issue #1. Does anyone know how I can get my hands on a copy of that?
Dean on Blu-ray for better or for worse
January 26, 2011
The film High Tension, often pointed out as a complete rip-off of Intensity, has been released on Blu-ray.
Two new reprints in the next two months
January 25, 2011
A new trade paperback edition of The Door to December will be released by NAL on February 1st. The cover lists that it includes an afterword and considering it doesn’t say “a new afterword” I’m guessing it’s the same one as in the previously released Signet mass market paperback edition.
Then on March 1st, a new paperback of The Voice of the Night will be released with “a new afterword”. At this point I’m assuming it’s in the premium format given the $9.99 cover price and the fact that other recent reprints have been in that format.
Frankenstein updates
January 25, 2011
Just in case you missed it, the premium paperback edition of Frankenstein: Lost Souls was released today. (However, Amazon.com does list it as a mass market paperback.)
And on May 24th we’ll see the release of the fifth book in the series, Frankenstein: The Dead Town. This is being released as a mass market original, completely skipping a trade hardcover release.
Double the Odd
January 15, 2011
It looks like the major book clubs (New Literary Guild, SFCB, &tc.) are releasing an exclusive Dean Koontz title Double the Odd. The amusing part is that none of the sites selling it seem to have a description or a cover image available, just a release date of February 28, 2010. My guess is that it’s a two-in-on edition of In Odd We Trust and Odd Is On Our Side. My copy is on order and I’ll report as soon as I know anything else. If anyone has additional information please leave it in the comments.
What am I working on this week?
January 2, 2011
Here’s the pile of what I’m working on this weekend:
Podcast Interviews
January 2, 2011
Dean’s done an interview for the National Review’s Between the Covers with John J. Miller podcast on What the Night Knows. It seems he also did one back in 2007 regarding the release of Darkest Evening of the Year.
eBook Only
December 19, 2010
Graphically Dean
December 19, 2010
I’m getting caught up today so here’s another post, this time pointing out some graphical recent releases:
Corny? You Bet
December 19, 2010
Did you know that today’s issue of Parade (stuck inside your Sunday paper) features a three-paragraph essay from Dean along with a recipe for The Best Baked Corn? Here’s an excerpt:
One new Koontz book out, two forthcoming, and another new book by me
October 17, 2010
Here’s a new one you might have missed: Pages 97 though 100 of On Gratitude by Todd Aaron Jensen feature new content from Dean on what he’s grateful for.
Last weekend I received an advance reading copy of What the Night Knows courtsey of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program and read it in just three days. I throughly enjoyed it and I bet you will to.
From the looks of things in Amazon.com the fifth book in the Frankenstein series, Frankenstein: Dead Town, will not be coming out in hardcover but in mass market paperback and audio CD editions only. (Though I’m guessing that the paperback will be actually in the larger premium format.)
Lastly, on a non-Dean Koontz note, my latest book Blogging and RSS: A Librarian’s Guide – Second Edition was officially released last week.
Two new online interviews
September 19, 2010
In the past week I’ve found the following two new Interviews with Dean online. One dealing with the new series of Frankenstein comics, and the other with video games.
Newsarama: DEAN KOONTZ Likes Graphic Changes to FRANKENSTEIN Novels
Game Rant:Author Dean Koontz On Storytelling & Gaming
Darkness Under the Sun eBook exclusive
September 13, 2010
Just announced on the Dean Koontz Mailing list:
This Halloween you can enjoy Darkness Under the Sun, an all-new eBook novella from Dean!
The chilling account of a pivotal encounter between innocence and ultimate malice, Darkness Under the Sun is the perfect read for Halloween—or for any haunted night—and reveals a secret, fateful turning point in the career of Alton Turner Blackwood, the killer at the dark heart of the forthcoming novel What the Night Knows.
Darkness Under the Sun, a Random House eBook, will be available everywhere October 25, 2010. You can also preorder it right now!
Learn more about Darkness Under the Sun [on DeanKoontz.com]
You can pre-order it on Amazon.com and BN.com right now.
Get "The Black Pumpkin" for just $12.98
September 6, 2010
For those of you that haven’t already read “The Black Pumpkin” you’ve obviously missed the December 1986 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine and Cemetery Dance’s October Dreams (either from Cemetery Dance or from ROC, all our of print) you can now find a bargain book edition from Fall River Press retitled Halloween Horrors. I found this yesterday at my local Barnes & Noble for the list price of $12.98.
As a bargain book it is listed on the Barned & Noble site, but it’s not available for ordering there. Neither is it listed on Amazon.com since Fall River Press is an imprint of Barnes & Noble.
A previously unknown bit of writing by Dean?
August 28, 2010
Ok, I’m not exactly announcing a new pseudonym here but I’ve never seen this bit of writing by dean mentioned anywhere. The books is Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, Second Edition from St. Martin’s Press published in 1985. This is one of those oversized reference books that are typically only held by rare bookstores and library reference collections. For each author there is a bibliography, brief biography, and a short essay about the author. (In this case the essay is by Ed Gorman.) However, this book differs from others of its type because it contains additional text described thus: “Living authors were invited to add a comment on their work.” And you guessed it, Dean wrote some “comments” on his work. Four paragraphs to be exact. For copyright reasons I won’t be presenting the complete text here but I will leave you with this quote:
“Phantoms, a long novel that attempts to stretch the horror novel to encompass a rational world-view, was published in 1983, and was something of a sidestep in my career, for at this time I do not intend to do any more straight horror novels in the future, although it, too, has sold well.”
I don’t know if the same text appears in the First Edition. I of course will be on the lookout.
UPDATE: I found a copy of the first edition in my local library and Dean is not included in that edition. So, as far as I can tell this content is unique to this book/edition.
What am I working on this weekend?
August 26, 2010
I just realized that between recent third-party amazon purchases and the trip to Seattle and Portland, I’ve got several piles of material to get into the book including one or two things I’m not sure anyone’s ever noticed before. (Maybe more on that later.) So, just to give you an idea, here’s a photo of what I’ll be working on this weekend:
Some great finds and Dean’s earnings
August 23, 2010
I’m back from a much needed three-day vacation in Seattle and Portland and thanks to Powell’s City of Books and Half Price Books (Seattle) I came back with some wonderful finds including an ARC of Your Heart Belongs to Me and some more recent UK trade paperback editions. Most importantly I found a reference to a review of Stephen King’s It that Dean wrote for the San Jose Mercury News many years back that I was previously unaware of. I’ve got someone tracking it down now.
Also, in financial news it looks like Dean is currently #6 of the top ten highest paid authors right now.
Review removal
August 14, 2010
Back when I started this project the Internet wasn’t much of an issue. If you wanted to find book reviews you looked them up in large printed volumes such as The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and other similar tomes. These books didn’t list every book review ever published but they listed all the ones from the “important” publications like The New York Times, Kirkus, and Library Journal. So, way back then, I dutifully looked up every Dean Koontz title one by one and entered them into my manuscript.
By the time Dean got ahold of the first version of the manuscript back in 2001 one of his suggestions to me was to list all the reviews or none of the reviews. I sat on making a decision.
Now that the project is back in full swing I’m finally forced to make that decision and I know that listing every review of everything would be enough of a quest (now with this Internet thing being so much “help”) that to do so would be impossible. So, the reviews have been pulled.
However, I thought that readers might be interested in what was there. So, I’ve created a PDF of the removed reviews such as they are. Download it if you’re interested.
What’s taking so long?
August 9, 2010
When I re-launched this site as a blog this past week I promised a long post explaining what’s been taking so long to get this book of mine published. This is the best explanation I can provide:
The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz started as one of those books-I’ve-read-by-a-particular-author lists, shortly after I discovered and read Lightning back sometime around 1989 or 1990. I was an employee of a Waldenbooks at the time and shared my newly-found love of Dean’s work with my store manager. Realizing that I would appreciate it much more than her she offered to give me her copy of the Land of Enchantment edition of Twilight Eyes. I immediately realized that there was more to reading Dean Koontz than just what was available in my little mall bookstore.
By my senior year of college in 1992 I was providing my bookstore customers with then then newly published Dark Harvest editions of the Leigh Nichols books (Shadowfires is still one of my all-time favorites,) and the still in-print Door to December by Richard Paige. Whenever, a customer said “I’ve read everything he’s ever written” I replied with a sly “no you haven’t” and filled them in. I also continued to work on my list and discovered that if you asked the campus librarians the right questions, they had access to databases that no one else had. (That database is now at www.worldcat.org and is much easier to search now than it was back in early 90s.)
In 1995 I went to graduate school for my Master’s Degree in Library Science (MLS). It seems that those librarians made quite an impression on me just a few years earlier. My final project was not your typical research project. With the help of the Special Collections Department at the University at Albany Library I submitted a descriptive bibliography of, you guessed it, Dean Koontz. (I think I got a B+.)
Late in 1997 I was working as an Internet Trainer for a multi-state regional library network and by 2000 had published my first “real” book. (The previous two were for a now defunct small publisher that wrote training manuals for computer classes in community colleges.) With my new-found writing confidence I approached Richard Chizmar at Cemetery Dance and asked if he’d be interested in publishing my research as a book. “Sure,” he replied “but we should get Dean’s approval and input too.” I was nervous but eventually everyone was on board and my proposal was accepted.
The book was announced and the book was scheduled to be published in the fall of 2001. (I still have the original advertisement hanging on my home office bulletin board.)
I launched a Web site for the book (this was a novel concept at the time) and started blogging updates. (Though it wasn’t called blogging at the time.) You can still read all of those posts if you’d like to. It looks like I accomplished a lot in 2001 and early 2002. A manuscript was “completed” and submitted to Dean for his review. In June of 2002 I received an amazing amount of feedback and comments from Dean and set out to revise the manuscript accordingly. I still had some outstanding questions for Dean and sent him a follow-up letter.
At this point communication between all the involved parties broke down. As you can see I did post something in late 2005 which didn’t bode well for the project. What happened at that point involved additional parties not previously involved and the details are unimportant. I don’t blame anyone in particular. I could have tried harder that I did to re-establish the lines of communication. I was also admittedly bull-headed on some issues. I tried on and off to get everything back on track but in retrospect, not often or hard enough.
Throughout what I now call “the dark years” of this project, I kept updating the manuscript, filling in holes and adding all the newly published material I could find. Every few months someone who pre-ordered the book way back in 2000 would e-mail me and ask for an update. Every time I would reassure them that I still intended on having the book published but I had no more information I could give them. Meanwhile other books took up much of my time. (Number 10 will be out in a few months.)
Then, two weeks ago, I received an e-mail from Brian Freeman, yes that Brian Freeman, at Cemetery Dance. He let me know that he was working on Cemetery Dance’s backlog and wondered if I still wanted them to publish my book. Brian not only wanted to get the project back on track he actually sounded excited about the prospect of this title (which was contracted before he was hired by CD) and wanted to work with me to get all the problems worked out. How soon could I have something ready?
Timing is everything. My most recent book project is done and off to the printer in a matter of weeks. I told him that I think I could have a solid manuscript in a few months; end of the year at the latest. Brian’s got a ton of ideas, and every single bit of feedback he’s given me so far has been spot-on and extremely helpful.
So, the updates will be posted here as often as I can get them typed up. I’ve already been going through the backlog of material sitting in my office and digging up items I’d previously missed. I’ve got to work on some consistency issues with the text, and will be posting an updated “information needed” page within a week or two.
Are there still hurdles? The honest answer is yes. But if I wasn’t confident that this project is firing on all cylinders at this point, I wouldn’t be up much later than usual because I couldn’t sleep until I got this all written down and posted.
As always, all comments are welcome and I look forward to hearing from you.